Note 828 — Chapter XIII

Footnote 828:

(return)

Or "matter." A good deal of misapprehension has arisen from confounding the intellectual ὕλη of Aristotle and the Stoics with the gross physical "matter" of the modern physicist. By "matter" we now understand that which is corporeal, tangible, sensible; whereas by ὕλη, Aristotle and the Stoics (who borrowed the term from him) understood that which is incorporeal, intangible, and inapprehensible to sense,--an "unknown something" which must necessarily be

supposed

as the condition of the existence of things. The

formal

cause of Aristotle is "the substance and essence"-- the primary nature of things, on which all their properties depend. The

material

cause is "the matter or subject" through which the primary nature manifests itself. Unfortunately the term "material" misleads the modern thinker. He is in danger of supposing the

hyle

of Aristotle to be something sensible and physical, whereas it is an intellectual principle whose inherence is implied in any physical thing. It is something distinct from

body

, and has none of those properties we are now accustomed to ascribe to matter. Body, corporeity, is the result of the union of "hyle" and "form." Stobaeus thus expounds the doctrine of Aristotle: Form alone, separate from matter (ὕλη) is

incorporeal

; so matter alone, separated from form, is not

body

. But there is need of the joint concurrence of both these--matter and form--to make the substance of body. Every individual substance is thus a totality of matter and form--a σίνολον.

The Stoics taught that God is oneliness (Diogenes Laertius, "Lives of the Philosophers," bk. vii. ch. lxviii.); that he is eternal and immortal (bk. vii. ch. lxxii.); he could not, therefore, be corporeal, for "body infinite, divisible, and perishable" (bk. vii. ch. lxxvii.). "All the parts of the world are perishable, for they change one into another; therefore the world is perishable" (bk. vii. ch. lxx.). The Deity is not, therefore, absolutely identified with the world by the Stoics. He permeates all things, creates and dissolves all things, and is, therefore, more than all things. The world is finite; God is infinite.