Whatever you take, you will find that what you are holding belongs to a higher
category The day you see something you are unable to classify you will get a
shock. If, for example, you discover a small whatsit, and you can’t really say
whether it is animal, vegetable, or mineral—I don’t think you would dare touch
it.
Saying animal, vegetable, and mineral reminds me of that party game
where the victim is sent outside the room, and when he comes in again he
has to guess what everyone else is thinking of. Everyone has agreed to think
of Fluffy, the cat, which at the moment is in the neighbor’s garden. The victim
comes in and begins to guess. The others must only answer “yes” or “no.” If
the victim is a good Aristotelian—and therefore no victim—the game could go
pretty much as follows:
Is it concrete? (Yes!) Mineral? (No!) Is it alive? (Yes!) Vegetable? (No!)
Animal? (Yes!) Is it a bird? (No!) Is it a mammal? (Yes!) Is it the whole
animal? (Yes!) Is it a cat? (Yes!) Is it Fluffy? (Yeah! Laughter. . .)
So Aristotle invented that game. We ought to give Plato the credit for
having invented hide-and-seek. Democritus has already been credited with
having invented Lego.
Aristotle was a meticulous organizer who set out to clarify our concepts.
In fact, he founded the science of Logic. He demonstrated a number of laws
governing conclusions or proofs that were valid. One example will suffice. If I
first establish that “all living creatures are mortal” (first premise), and then
establish that “Hermes is a living creature” (second premise), I can then
elegantly conclude that “Hermes is mortal.”
The example demonstrates that Aristotle’s logic was based on the
correlation of terms, in this case “living creature” and “mortal.” Even though
one has to admit that the above conclusion is 100% valid, we may also add
that it hardly tells us anything new. We already knew that Hermes was
“mortal.” (He is a “dog” and all dogs are “living creatures”—which are “mortal,”
unlike the rock of Mount Everest.) Certainly we knew that, Sophie. But the
relationship between classes of things is not always so obvious. From time to
time it can be necessary to clarify our concepts.
For example: Is it really possible that tiny little baby mice suckle just like
lambs and piglets? Mice certainly do not lay eggs. (When did I last see a
mouse’s egg?) So they give birth to live young—just like pigs and sheep. But
we call animals that bear live young mammals—and mammals are animals
that feed on their mother’s milk. So—we got there. We had the answer inside
us but we had to think it through. We forgot for the moment that mice really do
suckle from their mother. Perhaps it was because we have never seen a baby
mouse being suckled, for the simple reason that mice are rather shy of hu-
mans when they suckle their young.
Nature’s Scale
When Aristotle “clears up” in life, he first of all points out that everything
in the natural world can be divided into two main categories. On the one hand
there are nonliving things, such as stones, drops of water, or clumps of soil.
These things have no potentiality for change. According to Aristotle, nonliving
things can only change through external influence. Only living things have the
potentiality for change.
Aristotle divides “living things” into two different categories. One