Appendix 21. - (271)

The obstacle to discovering the truth of problems are the confused ideas sometimes jumbled up with them. In order to trace accurately the development of the errors made by an author, we need to know where the obscurity and confusion in his ideas are located. Thus on a number of occasions I have noted in Aristotle's arguments passages where he seems not to grasp very clearly and simply the thread of his argument. Let me give an example. The question of the origin of ideas consists entirely in explaining how we can have universal conceptions when all that the senses provide are sensations or particular perceptions. If we can discover how to conceive a single idea, a single universal, the question is resolved.

We need to know that we require a universal from the moment of the first judgment formed in our mind; no judgment can be formed without an idea. The nub of this issue, therefore, consists wholly in the first step our mind takes in its first and simplest judgment. But philosophers who have not realised properly that the problem lay wholly in explaining the first step taken by reason blithely skipped over the initial stages of reason, unaware that the core of the problem lay here, and reached the final stages and arguments when reason establishes scientific principles. They then undertook to explain the formation of these principles, and did so very well. But the only real problem was the first step in the argument which they supposed without any explanation. On occasions, Aristotle falls into this error. He comes up against the nub of the question, but in the wrong place - at the final stages rather than at the first stage.

The passage I quoted from Aristotle shows this clearly. In it, he endeavours to explain the origin of the principles of the sciences and arts as if the difficulty lay in their formation rather than in the formation of the first popular, common ideas from which reasoning moves. This is more obvious in Themistius' paraphrase of the passage from Aristotle. 'The universal,' he says, 'is the work of the mind and is formed by it.' But how is it formed? This is the problem at issue. He replies: 'By induction because it is characteristic of the mind to unite, to gather together and, as Plato says, to put an end to undefined things.' (In passing, let me say that in this passage Aristotle appears to agree with Plato in admitting that it is the proper role of the intellect to determine anything indeterminate which preexisted in the mind. This would confirm my conjectures on Aristotle's acting intellect).

Aristotle, according to Themistius' paraphrase, describes as follows the induction enabling the mind to collect and unite universals from particulars. Note the whole passage:

The whole difficulty of explaining how the mind forms universals is here considered by Aristotle as consisting in the formation of scientific principles which are certainly formed by means of repeated observations over a long period. For example, to establish the universal principle, 'Peruvian bark dispels fever,' it was required 1. that those who worked upon the discovery had already reached the age of reason; 2. that they repeated the experiments over and over again and from them arrived by induction at the general proposition, 'Peruvian bark dispels fever.' Aristotle illustrated his views with an example similar to this taken from medicine.

However, those who accept innate ideas have no quarrel with such an argument; in fact, the whole step taken by Aristotle is out of place. He attempts to explain the formation of scientific principles as though the difficulty lay here. But the real difficulty and whole question does not consist in explaining this kind of scientific universals. It is found in the explanation of the universal itself, even the most apparently ordinary and obvious one. In fact, before we can form the universal proposition, 'Peruvian bark dispels fever', we must already have a number of other universals formed in our mind. All the terms in this proposition without exception express universality. The words Peruvian bark do not, in fact, express any particular fragment of bark, but the species of bark. These words express all possible barks of this species. It is therefore an idea, a universal concept because it refers to a species, not to something subsistent. Similarly, the word fever does not refer to a fever picked up from Sempronius or Caius, but refers to any fever, to the species of illness called fever. At this point, we can see that the question: 'What connection is there between these two universal ideas, Peruvian bark and fever?' is entirely different from 'How can we possess universal ideas of Peruvian bark and fever?' The first is a medical question, which is answered after a great deal of experience and as a result of more or less lengthy induction which gives it some degree of reliability. The second question involves ideas and is intended to explain a non-scientific, but common fact: that of the existence in the human mind of the universal ideas, Peruvian bark and fever. These universal ideas are to be found in the human mind, not after a long period and as a result of long experience and extensive inferences, but as soon as we first begin to use our reason. The infant, as soon as it begins to talk, names fever, bark or in short, substantives which express species of things, not mere subsistences. What we wish to know is how this child moves so rapidly from particular, individual and subsistent things which he perceives by the senses to species, that is, to ideas without which speech is impossible. This is the issue. Aristotle (or Themistius) shuns this question, which aims at explaining the origin of the first universals, and transfers it to the formation of scientific principles which are the final universals and presuppose the formation of the first universals of which they are only a prolongation.

The explanation put forward to our question about the formation of universals is erroneous when it concludes: 'Thus, gradually and imperceptibly, this inference is formed' (from which scientific principles are drawn) 'and its very continuity conceals its beginning and end. As a result many people hold that man's nature possesses inborn information, independent of any study or intellect to produce it and stimulate it. This is untrue.' These words reveal the standard attitude of thinkers who wish to deduce everything from the senses. They resort to affirming that this operation, so slow and imperceptible, cannot be observed and that, consequently, some imagine that universals are innate in us. They try to establish their theory by disseminating obscurity. All ideas are imperceptibly derived from the senses by a process that evades one's gaze. I maintain, however, that this development must be infinite because development from the particular to the universal requires infinite progression - as such it has no bounds. Individuals, however multiplied, can never form or exhaust a species even if they progressed indefinitely.

To explain, therefore, how ideas are derived from sensations, it is necessary to suppose the possibility of actual infinite progression whose ultimate end would be ideas. This end, however, would never be attained; if it were, the progression would come to an end, which belies the assumption, and the ideas would not be produced. In short, between sensations and ideas there is not merely a difference in gradation but in essence; a gradual transition from one to the other is impossible. As I was saying, therefore, Aristotle's argument is unreasonable. He says: 'There are no innate ideas because scientific principles are derived from ideas inductively'. This is rather like saying 'Cut stone is not the work of nature because we build houses with it.'