Page - 1642 - in The Complete Aristotle

div id=“section95” class=“section” title=“3”> 3 We must not fail to notice that sometimes it is not clear whether a name means the composite substance, or the actuality or form, e.g. whether ‘house’ is a sign for the composite thing, ‘a covering consisting of bricks and stones laid thus and thus’, or for the actuality or form, ‘a covering’, and whether a line is ‘twoness in length’ or ‘twoness’, and whether an animal is soul in a body’ or ‘a soul’; for soul is the substance or actuality of some body. ‘Animal’ might even be applied to both, not as something definable by one formula, but as related to a single thing. But this question, while important for another purpose, is of no importance for the inquiry into sensible substance; for the essence certainly attaches to the form and the actuality. For ‘soul’ and ‘to be soul’ are the same, but ‘to be man’ and ‘man’ are not the same, unless even the bare soul is to be called man; and thus on one interpretation the thing is the same as its essence, and on another it is not. If we examine we find that the syllable does not consist of the letters + juxtaposition, nor is the house bricks + juxtaposition. And this is right; for the juxtaposition or mixing does not consist of those things of which it is the juxtaposition or mixing. And the same is true in all other cases; e.g. if the threshold is characterized by its position, the position is not constituted by the threshold, but rather the latter is constituted by the former. Nor is man animal + biped, but there must be something besides these, if these are matter,- something which is neither an element in the whole nor a compound, but is the substance; but this people eliminate, and state only the matter. If, then, this is the cause of the thing’s being, and if the cause of its being is its substance, they will not be stating the substance itself. (This, then, must either be eternal or it must be destructible without being ever in course of being destroyed, and must have come to be without ever being in course of coming to be. But it has been proved and explained elsewhere that no one makes or begets the form, but it is the individual that is made, i.e. the complex of form and matter that is generated. Whether the substances of destructible things can exist apart, is not yet at all clear; except that obviously this is impossible in some cases-in the case of things which cannot exist apart from the individual instances, e.g. house or utensil. Perhaps, indeed, neither these things themselves, nor any of the other things which are not formed by nature, are substances at all; for one might say that the nature in natural objects is the only substance to be found in destructible things.) 1642