dvav does not seem to be used elsewhere by Aristotle as meaning anything other than xaraddvor, but dois in the sense of the term as opposed to the proposition occurs in De /né. 16? 27, 17% 17.
25. dmatnPivar yap mept 7d ti eotw odk eotw GAN’ 7 KaTa cupBEeBn- xés. Alexander and Bz. interpret this as meaning that one cannot be deceived about the ri éort unless by an abuse of the word dédry nescience be called dary. This does not seem a possible meaning for card. cup PBe- Byxos. The words must be interpreted in connexion with |. 32 dAAa 76 ri éote Cyretras rept adray, <i Towadrd. eorw 7 wy. Both statements are ex- tremely difficult, but may be interpreted as follows:—Aristotle has, as we have seen, passed from the antithesis between terms and propositions to that between forms and complexes of form-and-matter. Now in our thought of a form considered as a term in a proposition there is no room for error, since error comes in only when we think two terms to be connected in a certain way. But the form or term, though aovvOerov as compared with the proposition, is (unless it is a swmmum genus) not absolutely incomposite. It contains a genus and a differ- entia, and the attempt may be made to ascertain what they are (76 7/ éore Cynretras wept avrov—about the forms—whether they are such and such or not). Thus, while about the term considered as a simple term there can be no error, there can be error about it incidentally, viz. in view of the fact that it is not merely an element in the complex of the proposition, but also itself a complex of genus and differentia. Or, to put the matter otherwise, if some one says that A is B, we cannot properly attack his thought of A alone or of B alone, but only his thought that B is anattribute of A; but on the other hand if he tries to analyse the A he is thinking about he may say it is an X which is Y, and we may point out that all X’s are Y or that no X’s are Y, or that from other things which he says about A it is clear that the A he is thinking about is not an X which is Y. De An. 430” 16, 17 may be meant similarly to point to the fact that in one aspect rd ddvatperov To «ide is (xara cvpPB_eByxds) Siarperdv, but the reading and the interpretation are very doubtful.
It might be thought that ro ti éore Cyretrou wept airayv, «i Tovadra. éorw %) py should be interpreted in the light of H. 1043” 23-28, where Aristotle refers to the theory of Antisthenes accerding to which one cannot define the r/ éoru but only say wotdv ti éorwv, e.g. one can only say of silver that it is Zketin. So here Aristotle might possibly mean that inquiry about the ‘what’ of simple entities takes the form of
278 Commentary
asking whether they are ‘such-like’ or not. But it is doubtful whether this can be read into Toaiira.
Bz. conjectures that oi« should be added before ei tovadra, and Alexander (600. 34) may have read this. The meaning then would be ‘ but inquiry about the “ what” of simple entities does not take the form of asking whether they are of such and*such a nature or not’. This might be “held to derive some support from Z. To4rP g-It. But it is difficult to see what other form the inquiry into their ‘ what’ could take. Ifan od is to be inserted, it would be better to insert it before fnretrat. But on the whole the traditional text seems to agree with the suggestion conveyed by éAX’ i) kata oupPe_Byxos, and should be kept.
29. 79 dv adré, i.e. the pure form.
od ylyvetar o08é POetpetar, cf. Z, 1033) 17.
32-33. GANA TO Ti eoTL. . . H py, cf 1. 25 n.
33. Aristotle has said (I. 22) that both truth and being (éruth of apprehension, deing of the object of apprehension) have a different meaning in the case of incomposites from that which they have in the case of ‘composites, He has explained the different sense of truth, and now passes to the different sense of being which answers to the different sense of truth (7d etvau ds 75 andes But first (ll. 34, 35) he repeats in brief his account of the mode of being which answers to the other mode of truth. Being, for a composite, means being com- pounded ; not-being, not being compounded. :
34-35. Forev pév...70 8€ ev cf. Pol. 1285> 38—12867 1 ev pe. ey O€.
35-86. ‘ The other, if it is existent, exists so;, if it does not exist so, it does not exist at all.’ I.e.as‘on the subjective side the only alterna- tives here are apprehension and non-apprehension, so on the objective side the only alternatives are being and not-being. We have not now to do with the question whether A is thus, i.e. conjoined with B, or otherwise, but simply with the question whether A is (in which case it can only be A) or is not.
This interpretation is much to be preferred to that of Bz., who deletes the comma after dv in 1. 35 and supposes the transition to incomposites not to occur till 10521 «i d¢ pi ovrws. Christ’s eirep dv ovTws, éorw gives no good sense.
Aristotle’s carelessness of language has made his meaning seem more obscure than it really is. In ll. 22, 23 he distinguishes the two modes of being (sc. of composites and of incomposites) from the corresponding two senses in which apprehension of them may be said to be true or false. He has treated the question of truth in ll. 23-33, and in 33—105 2° 4 he is treating the question of being. But instead of saying ‘the being of the object which answers to the truth of the apprehension’ he says (I. 33) ‘the being in the sense of truth’; and instead of saying that the composite is, if it is compounded, and is not, if it is not compounded, he says (Il. 34, 35) that it is true if it is compounded and false if it is not, and then complicates matters still
further by recurring in 10524 1-4 to the question of the apprehension of incomposites, which has already been treated in 1051» 23-33. It would be easy to argue for a double recension, but Aristotle seems to be often so careless of form that that hypothesis is not necessary.
1052* 1-4. With regard to incomposites there is not error but only nescience, but Aristotle points out that it is not a nescience com- parable to blindness, which necessarily shuts off the blind man from knowledge of a whole set of facts. What would answer to this would be a complete absence of the power of apprehending essences, but what we have to do with here is simply failure to apprehend certain particular essences.
4-11. From the treatment of dovvGera Aristotle now recurs to certain ovv@era, viz. ra. dxivyta, the things which if they ever have an attribute have it always (i.e. those which det ovyxerras Kal ddvvara SiaipeOjvar, 10519). About 7a dovvOera there can be no arary; about those ovv@era which are dxivyra one form of azary is impossible, provided that we realize that they are dxivnta. If we realize that a triangle is axivyrov we cannot err by supposing that it sometimes has and sometimes has not its angles = two right angles. It may, however, be the case that some members of a class of dxivynta have a certain attribute and others have not, so that one might suppose either (wrongly) that no even number is prime, or (rightly) that one (the number two) is prime and the ethers are not. If we are thinking not of a class of dxivyra but of a single dxivyrov even this source of error is removed ; whether we be right or wrong, we shall make our judgement on the understanding that the facts are a/ways so.
Q. dprdua Sé epi va = epi 8 dpiuov eva dpibpd, ‘about a single number’. It is not impossible, however, that eva, twa, tTwd are neuter plural. For éva plural cf. I. 105621, M. 1083225, Phys. 207)»,
IO, o8 yap em tid pev twa 8 od oinoerar. I have restored the emphatic ov from ot of AP yp. E. Cf. L. and S. s. v. od, B.
BOOK | The meaning of unity (ch. 1).
105215. There are four main senses of unity—excluding acciden- tal unity. The ‘one’ is (1) the continuous, especially what is con- tinuous by nature, not by mere contact or colligation, and more especially that whose motion is indivisible and simple.
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22. Unity belongs even more to (2) wholes which have a definite form, especially to natural wholes which have in themselves the cause of their continuity, i.e. which have a motion indivisible in place and time. Thus that which naturally moves with the primary kind of movement, i.e. circular locomotion, is a~single magnitude in the primary sense,
29. Further, those things are one the definition or thought of which is one, i.e. which are indivisible (3) in number (viz. individuals) or (4) in form (i.e. for knowledge)—that which gives substances unity. Thus ‘the one’ means ‘the naturally continuous’, ‘the whole’, ‘the individual’, or ‘the universal’. All of these are one either because their motion is one or because the thought or definition of them is one.
bx, The questions ‘ What sorts of things are said to be one?’ and ‘What is it to be one?’ ‘are different. Each of the things we have named is one, but to be one, while it sometimes means to be one of these things, sometimes means something else which is the more literal meaning, though these others express better the significance of the term.
7. Similarly we must distinguish the questions ‘ What is the ultimate physical element?’ and ‘ What is it to be an element?’
14. To be one is to be indivisible, being essentially a this and separate in place, in form, or in thought, or to be whole and indivisible, but above all to be the first measure of a class, and especially of quantity, from which it has been extended to the other cases.
2o. A measure is that by which quantity is known; this is eithera unit or a number, and a number is known by means of a unit, so that all quantity is known by means of a unit ; hence the unit is the starting- point of number as number.
24. Hence in other cases also that by which a thing is primarily known is a measure, and the measure of everything is a unit—in length, breadth, depth, weight, speed (the last two terms applying to what is light or slow as well as to what is heavy or fast).
gi. In all these cases there is a measure and starting-point which is something one and indivisible in quality or in quantity.
35. An accurate measure is one which cannot be taken from or added to ; hence the measure of number is most accurate, for the unit is in every way indivisible. In other cases, since a large quantity can be added to or taken from without detection, men choose as measure the first thing which cannot be added to or taken from without detection.
1053* 8. Motion is measured by the quickest simple motion (i. e., in
astronomy, the motion of the heavens); similarly the quarter-tone is the measure in music, the letter in speech.
14. Sometimes there are more than one measure, e.g. in music, in speech, in incommensurate magnitudes.
18. The one is the measure in the sense that we learn what the essence of a thing consists of by dividing it either in quantity or in kind, The unit is indivisible either in all respects (like the numerical unit) or to sense (like the foot).
24. The measure is always akin to that which it measures ; e.g. the measure of units is a unit; we must not say that the measure of numbers is a number ; that would be like saying that the measure of units is units, for a number is a plurality of units.
gi. We call knowledge and sensation the measure of things because we become acquainted with things by them, but really they are measured rather than measure. It is as if we learned our height by some one else measuring us. Protagoras says man is measure of all things, meaning ‘the man who knows’ or ‘ the man who perceives’ ; there is nothing remarkable in what he says.
b4. Thus ‘one’, if we define it literally, means a measure, primarily of quantity, secondly of quality ; i.e. what is indivisible in quantity or in quality.