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Metaphysics
By Aristotle
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Metaphysics
By Aristotle
Written 350 B.C.E
Translated by W. D. Ross
Table of Contents
Book I
Part 1
"ALL men by nature desire to know. An indication of this<br>is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness<br>they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.<br>For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do<br>anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason<br>is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light<br>many differences between things.
"By nature animals are born with<br>the faculty of sensation, and from sensation memory is produced in some<br>of them, though not in others. And therefore the former are more intelligent<br>and apt at learning than those which cannot remember; those which are incapable<br>of hearing sounds are intelligent though they cannot be taught, e.g. the<br>bee, and any other race of animals that may be like it; and those which<br>besides memory have this sense of hearing can be taught.
"The animals<br>other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of<br>connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings.<br>Now from memory experience is produced in men; for the several memories<br>of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience.<br>And experience seems pretty much like science and art, but really science<br>and art come to men through experience; for 'experience made art', as Polus<br>says, 'but inexperience luck.' Now art arises when from many notions gained<br>by experience one universal judgement about a class of objects is produced.<br>For to have a judgement that when Callias was ill of this disease this<br>did him good, and similarly in the case of Socrates and in many individual<br>cases, is a matter of experience; but to judge that it has done good to<br>all persons of a certain constitution, marked off in one class, when they<br>were ill of this disease, e.g. to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning<br>with fevers-this is a matter of art.
"With a view to action experience<br>seems in no respect inferior to art, and men of experience succeed even<br>better than those who have theory without experience. (The reason is that<br>experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions<br>and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician<br>does not cure man, except in an incidental way, but Callias or Socrates<br>or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a<br>man. If, then, a man has the theory without the experience, and recognizes<br>the universal but does not know the individual included in this, he will<br>often fail to cure; for it is the individual that is to be cured.) But<br>yet we think that knowledge and understanding belong to art rather than<br>to experience, and we suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience<br>(which implies that Wisdom depends in all cases rather on knowledge); and<br>this because the former know the cause, but the latter do not. For men<br>of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why, while the<br>others know the 'why' and the cause. Hence we think also that the masterworkers<br>in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser<br>than the manual workers, because they know the causes of the things that<br>are done (we think the manual workers are like certain lifeless things<br>which act indeed, but act without knowing what they do, as fire burns,-but<br>while the lifeless things perform each of their functions by a natural<br>tendency, the labourers perform them through habit); thus we view them<br>as being wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory<br>for themselves and knowing the causes. And in general it is a sign of the<br>man who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach,<br>and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for<br>artists can teach, and men of mere experience cannot.
"Again, we<br>do not regard any of the senses as Wisdom; yet surely these give the most<br>authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the 'why'<br>of anything-e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.
"At<br>first he who invented any art whatever that went beyond the common perceptions<br>of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something<br>useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior<br>to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to<br>the necessities of life, others to recreation, the inventors of the latter<br>were naturally always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former,<br>because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. Hence when<br>all such inventions were...