Philosophical

Physics

Vincent Edward Smith
Associate Professor of Philosophy
University of Notre Dame

Harper & Brothers, Publishers New York

PHILOSOPHICAL PHYSICS

Copyright, 1950, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
All rights in this book are reserved.
No part of the book may be reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied
in critical articles and reviews. For information
address Harper &• Brothers
B-B

IWV

.ribwwH Jt

To Virginia, for being zvhat she is

Contents
xiii

Preface
PART ONE

1.

THE SCIENCE OF MOBILE BEING

3

This study explores the motions of matter—Intellectual
insight is used—The order of abstraction is physical—
Philosophical physics does not aim chiefly at quantity
-—Philosophical physics is based on experience—All
knowledge begins with being—Empiriological physics
does not attain being—Empiriological physics does not
attain motion—Philosophical physics does not suppose
the empiriological

2.

MOTION AND ITS PRINCIPLES

39

Motion is given in experience—Motion is not deducible
—Motion is defined by act and potency—Motion is a
mixture of act and potency—Without act and potency,
motion is absurd—Art and nature are opposites—Nat­
ural motion involves matter, form, and privation—Sub­
stance is a nature existing—Substantial changes involve
prime matter—Substantial changes involve substantial
form—Substantial changes prove matter-form dualism—
Atomism and mechanism are inertialisms—Dynamism
reduces matter to the immaterial—Mechanism and dy­
namism are inadequate
3.

MOTION, ITS ORIGINS, AND ITS ENDS

“Whatever is moved is moved by another”—Motor and
the moving thing are in contact—Empiriology tends to
favor evolution—There is a Prime Mover—“Every agent
vii

81

viii

Contents

acts for an end”—Finality implies laws of nature—
Finality explains the order of nature—Chance is ex­
trinsic to nature

4.

MOTION AND THE INFINITE

110

Infinity is a live contemporary issue—Principled by the
infinite, the world would be homogeneous, potential,
and chaotic—Infinity in matter would forbid its mo­
tions—There is no regression into infinity—Matter is
potentially, not actually, infinite—The mathematical in­
finite is the potential infinite—Actual infinity in matter
is a substitute for form
PART TWO

5.

MOTION AND EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS

139

Empiriological physics is marked by experiment—Empiriological physics is not strict science—Pure empirio­
logical physics tends to subjectivity—Pure empiriological physics leads to nihilism—Empiriological method
implies undefined terms—Philosophical physics knows
motion through being—Empiriological physics is method
only—The empiriological physicist is not a complete
physicist—Empiriological physics is primarily art, not
science—Empiriological physics frees man from nature
—Empiriological physics catalogues for the engineer
6.

MOTION, DUALISM, AND MODERN PHYSICS

Matter discloses a plurality of substances—The atom is
a substance—Modern research argues to hierarchy—
Empiriological physics tends to the logical order—Sub­
atomic units are logically general—The neutron is pow­
erful because potential-—Radioactivity displays nature’s
stabilities—Simpler forms are somehow in compounds—
The law of conservation attests to natures—-The law of
entropy attests to natures—Thermodynamics confirms
matter and form-—Objections to matter-form are inade­
quate—That E = me2 does not refute matter-form

181

Contents
7.

THE MOTOR CAUSE AND THE MODERN MIND

ix
233

A science must be causal—Hume viewed causality as
succession—Hume contradicts reason—Empiriological
physics finds a place for Hume—Kant made causality
an apriorism—A cause is not absolutely extrinsic—A
cause is not absolutely intrinsic—Causes move by con­
tact—Empiriological physics equates cause and effect
—The cause-effect equation fails to explain novelty—
Entropy fails to explain causation—Nature is an inno­
vating principle—Action is different from passion—
Hegel does not lead to true hierarchy—Marxian dyna­
mism is impossible—Emergent evolution denies cause­
effect equality—Dualism harmonizes modern oppositions
8.

PROGRESS AND PURPOSE

258

Finality organizes motion—Finality makes for progress
—God is the goal of nature’s motions—Modern premises
conclude to chance world—Inertialism suggests chance
—Empiriological physics emphasizes the statistical—
Quantum mechanics tends to indeterminism—Thermo­
dynamics is allegedly indeterministic—Randomness is
not a chance—Statistics implies determinism—The
Heisenberg principle implies order—True chance is
real—Empiriology rightly tends toward the chancelike
—The alleged examples of disorder involve order—Na­
ture has a counterpart to randomness—-Entropy would
forbid motion—Nature has a counterpart to entropy—
Control is art, not a science of nature
9.

MATHEMATICS AND THE INFINITE

Number is defined by correspondence—Numbers are
formed from infinite decimals—Cantor defined a transfinite number—-Cantor proposed a hierarchy of transfinites—Russell reduces infinity to a logical hierarchy
—Formalism makes infinity into a rule—Intuitionism
denies hierarchy of infinites—What is actual in mathe­
matical infinity is a rule

288

x

10.

Contents
place: the measure of motion

• 320

Local motion is a fact of experience—-Place is an im­
mobility in the mobile world—Relativity does not refute
Aristotle’s philosophy-—Place is the term of local move­
ment—A vacuum is impossible—The universe as a
whole is of finite extent—The universe as a whole is not
in place—Space is largely a mathematical entity—Kant
was right, in empiriological physics—Relativity proposes
a non-Euclidian space—The extension of the world is
Euclidian

11.

time: the measure of motion

363

Time measures the order of motion—The'now is unitive
and divisive—Time is not mathematically defined—
Time is not formed from indivisibles—Time is not a
substance or a cause—Time is an “accident” of motion
—Time is a dynamic measure—Sun time is a convenient
standard—Time is cyclical—Relativity denies time’s
unity—Time is one—Time is directional—There is no
eternal return—Time is not a dimension—Time is not
a mental form—Realism unites quantum and relativity
insights—Existentialism makes capital of time—Existen­
tialism is inadequate

12.

motion and quantity

Quantity is an admitted reality—The science of quan­
tity abstracts from motion—Philosophical physics studies
quantity through motion—By quantity mobile being is
distended—Quantity is neither a cause nor a substance
—Quantity may be discrete or continuous—Matter is
not infinitely divided—Matter is nowhere indivisible—
Potency and act explain the continuum—Zeno’s argu­
ments are fallacious—Motion requires a continuous tra­
jectory—Continuity does not imply homogeneity—
Mathematical and physical division differ—Substances
need minimum quantities—Quantity is close to sub­
stance—Matter operates through quantity—Quantity

401

Contents

xi

solves questions about substance—The Bohr theory
harmonizes with philosophy—Measure numbers the
continuum—Matter is impenetrable—Quantity yields
a predicamental unity

13.

alteration: the motion of quality

435

Alteration is motion in quality—Quality is a proximate
form—Quality is fourfold—Experimentally, color and
sound are mechanical—Quality cannot be wholly iner­
tial—The determinate is always formal—Quality is for­
mal—Quality is not substance—Quality requires quan­
tity—Alteration tends to substantial change—Intension
and remission are alterations—Condensation and rare­
faction are alterations—Alterations are continuous—The
Bohr theory supports Aristotle—Realism is dualistic
INDEX

463

Preface
The philosophical science of nature, aware that it is not just
critical in aim but enriched by its own original insights into
matter’s make-up, finds it very hard today to reach its readers.
On the one hand, there are those who are totally unschooled
in modern physics, and for them the philosophy of nature must
be carved down to the bones of a few generalities that truly
seem a skeleton in the living world of experimental flesh. There
are others whom modern physics has dosed with a mass of tech­
nical data apparently at variance with the great teachings of
great minds in the past; such readers would often insist that
philosophy stands or falls in their laboratories and that, if it
stands at all, it must certainly brave their stubborn experimental
fact. Between these two extremes are those who have a smatter­
ing of both modern physics and genuine philosophy, and their
degrees of knowledge in both fields differ from group to group
and from person to person.
To many of these appetites and interests on the part of the
modern reader, these pages hope to appeal. This is a highly
technical age, and one of the crucial problems which it urges
is the value of modern methods in the study of our world. It is
an age when physics and philosophy are no longer calling each
other names; they are not even speaking to each other. It is an
age when educators and psychologists, statesmen, and even jour­
nalists, are pleading for integration. If a truly inquiring mind
is to integrate itself, neither worshiping modern physics as a god
nor dismissing it as an evil, it must certainly confront experi­
mental reality with philosophical realism somewhere in its career.
xiii

xiv

Preface

This book is directed in general toward the lay reader, who
has at least an introduction to philosophy but who has not yet
graduated to metaphysics. The author has also kept in mind
that in the age of experiment the reader will bring to the book
an interest in modern physics and some slight knowledge of both
its general direction and its major conclusions regarding matter.
For lower division students, or in short courses, or in the case
of the ordinary layman unversed in modern physics, the book
cannot be covered in full. Part One is slanted at this group. It
spreads out the broad principles of the philosophical science of
nature, with a minimum of reference to experimental technical­
ity. Part Two covers the same ground as Part One at a more
advanced level and ranges into a discussion of subjects not com­
pressible into the elementary sections. Part Two is inclined to­
ward readers with a moderate background in physics and a
nimbler knowledge of philosophy than the readers envisioned
by Part One. Part Two is designed especially for those who
feel that there is a cleavage between modern experimental fact
and genuine philosophical principle. It has been necessary to dip
a little deeply into the problems of both fields to show that this
apparent conflict is only a paper war.
The selection and organization of topics in each Part were
dictated by practical matters, such as the length of Part One,
which is geared for quick coverage, and the wish to reserve ade­
quate spatial facilities for such items as place and time where
the storm of modern ideas has broken with unusual thunder. In
the discussions of Part Two not paralleled in Part One there is
ample elementary material, especially at the beginnings of chap­
ters, to be read hastily by anyone who wishes. Part Two might
lend itself to study groups.
Despite the stunted character of Part One, it is complete to
the extent that it covers the four-ply causality in nature, with a
chapter on the ever timely subject of infinity.
This book outlines the philosophical science of nature, and in
the proper sense, only what pertains to motion is at home inside
it. However, to meet objections and also at times to round out a

Preface

xv

given discussion by steering it to the level where it is properly
settled, the author has not hesitated to cross academic barriers,
especially into mathematics which is in the second order of
abstraction and into the metaphysics of knowledge which is in
the third.
Throughout the whole discussion, it should be clear that there
is no quarrel with modern physics in its proper place but only
when modern physics transgresses on the territory of philosophy
and becomes what is called scientism. To reject physics, in its
place, would be nonsense. To take a stand against physics would
be to spurn not only the great advantages which the experimen­
tal methods have brought in the way of mechanical convenience
but also to repudiate a vast field of data which the philosopher
can interpret for the enrichment of his own aims to know the
what and the why of things.
Because the book is for beginners, the usual academic aspect
has been minimized, and references are supplied only where
opinions cited are not too well known from standard works or
where the opinions have some other weight, unusually critical.
The readers envisioned throughout this venture will not be so
interested in details as in the broader works listed at the ends of
the chapters.
The author is profoundly indebted to his wife, not only for
her careful and critical reading of the material but for her warm
and deep and abiding inspiration.
He wishes to thank Dr. Pierre Conway, of Providence Col­
lege, and Professor Yves R. Simon, of the University of Chicago,
for their expert and helpful criticisms of the manuscript. Nat­
urally, they do not subscribe to all the ideas in this book, but
they are greatly responsible for supplementing and clarifying
much of the ensuing development. There is a debt also to the
author’s former students who lighted up truths through their
questions and discussions.
V. E. S.
March, 1950

PART ONE

1
The Science of Mobile Being
THIS STUDY EXPLORES THE MOTIONS OF MATTER

What is matter made of, what moves it, and why does it move as
it does? In answering these questions, philosophical physics is
born.
The mysteries of matter have always tormented the spirit of
man, and from the earliest of times, he has attempted to crack
open the secrets with the tools of his philosophy. Sometimes he
has decided that matter is only a mosaic of atoms, a magical inter­
play of number, or an indeterminate stuff kneaded into present
form by agencies beyond itself. Amazed at the apparent fertility
of things, he has at other times judged matter to be only motion,
some philosophers declaring this rhythm to be only that of a ma­
chine, others clinging to a principle of life and even of spirit in
the bosom of what we usually call inanimate nature. Still other
thinkers have identified the universe with God, or described God
in such a way that matter becomes only an illusion, with no ex­
istence at all.
The twentieth century is by no means an exception to this
general interest in the factors making matter what it is and charg­
ing it with the force of its operations. Perhaps at no time has the
concern about such things been as heated and as hardy as it is
now. The tales brought back by modem physics from its expedi­
tions into the make-up of matter have shaken the convictions of
western man that his older intellectual approach was scientific
and safe. The atom has become an everyday word, even a polit­
ical personality. The taming of matter has been so striking in the
3

4

Philosophical Physics

laboratory that the method of modern physics has been invited
to turn its tremendous power on nearly every other phase of hu­
man endeavor. The science of the age has made this the Age of
Science, and men are asking their physics to be a spokesman on
the material world, without bothering too much to learn its ori­
gin, its authority, and its ultimate destination. In a day when the
so-called scientific method for solving problems has become al­
most a goal, if not the badge, for being educated or enlightened,
it becomes of the utmost importance to scan again through the
recesses of matter to check what man has learned about the uni­
verse and how modern physics squares with that experience of
matter that it apparently sets out to explain for men.
This is a highly useful study. It is important to reflect upon
the material universe at any time, but today there is the added
question of appreciating the self-styled scientific picture of the
world which has won the plaudits of modem man and confiscated
his philosophy. The decisions on the nature of matter and on the
present-day physics which studies it are not mere classroom exer­
cises. According to the answers, man can appreciate the world in
which he lives, evaluate his modern physics, orient his intellec­
tual life, assess the values that are at large in today’s civilization,
reconsider the ends of education, think, judge, and act in that
realism which all rational creatures struggle to develop. The sui­
cide or survival of society depends greatly on the verdict put by
modern man upon his “sciences” which own such moral and
physical power in today’s world.
Does modern experiment yield the ultimate science humanly
possible about the universe? Is measurement the only way of
knowing matter? Does the spirit of Galileo and Newton, of Ein­
stein and Planck, form the only intellectual turnpike that can
speed man onward in his questions of the universe, its nature, its
origins, its destinies, and its laws? Truly philosophical scientists
reject so narrow a stand. To them indeed the title of science be­
longed centuries before the modem method of experiment
usurped it, and if science is certain and causal knowledge, this

The Science of Mobile Being

5

philosophical depth of inquiry into nature still enjoys a loftier
scientific eminence than the more modern disciplines.
In an original sense, the word physics meant the philosophy of
nature, a scientific or causal study of mobile being. It can still be
termed philosophical physics. Likewise, with no apologies at all,
it can still be defined as the science of nature.
To alight upon an appropriate name for modem physics is em­
barrassing. And new words should be coined only after those in
ordinary usage are unable to express the ideas in question. Mod­
ern physics might, of course, be called empirical physics, but
philosophy, originating in experience, can also claim to be em­
pirical. Another suggestion, and a fitting one indeed, would be
experimental physics; for the primary and principal aspect of
modern physics is experiment. The mathematical and theoretical
aspects of such physics register experimental results, but the most
important aim of theory is to suggest, organize, and especially to
predict experiment. The whole superstructure of physical theo­
ries is thus subordinated to experimental tests, and so experi­
mental physics would be a felicitous phrase to mark off the phys­
ics, so prominent today, from the older philosophical physics
whose aim was knowledge and whose origin was not experiment
but experience. However, the name “experimental physics” does
not fully accent physical theory. Oftentimes, theoretical physics
is clashed against experimental physics as almost coordinate parts
of the same study.
More forceful and more complete is Jacques Maritain’s expres­
sion empiriological. To term modern physics empiriological phys­
ics does justice to its experimental character (emperna) as well
as to its theory (its logos). Philosophical physics can thus be con­
trasted with empiriological physics, without the danger of am­
biguity in the word empirical, and without the weakness of the
term experimental.
A defense of this choice of words will have to await later chap­
ters. Maritain clashes empiriological with ontological knowledge,
and there will be something of this same contrast, though not ex­

6

Philosophical Physics

actly in Maritain’s sense, when the empiriological method is ex­
amined in Chapter 5. Here it might suffice simply to mention
that empiriological physics is a generic term taken to mean what
is usually termed modern physics, the physics of Galileo and
Newton, of Einstein and Planck, of Bohr and Heisenberg and
Schroedinger. Empiriological method will mean in these pages
the so-called “scientific method,” whether applied in physics or
in biology and chemistry and the other modern disciplines. Such
a method, the method of modern physics which is usually taken
as the best example of so-called "scientific method,” begins in ex­
periment, elaborates a theory, and returns to the experimenta]
world to apply the theory in new contexts. Empiriological physics
thus includes theory and experiment, the mathematical tech­
niques of modern physics together with its physical, experimental
interference with reality in the laboratory. The word is new or at
least not generally used, but the physics for which it stands is so
crowded across the modern mind that it needs no introduction.
Writers often say “physics and philosophy,” as though they were
two separate and well-defined fields. The approach of these pages
holds that there is a physics which is philosophical and thus
unites the terms physics and philosophy which are customarily
contrasted. A new name must be found for non-philosophical
physics. The suggested substitute is empiriological.
The immense territory of philosophical physics is often dis­
membered into two sectors—the study of the lifeless which Wolff
called cosmology, and psychology, which is the study of the liv­
ing. Despite the convenience of brevity, the term cosmology is
vague and vaporous. Though still rather young, it has already de­
scended to mean a synthesis of the empiriological disciplines,
with the empiriological method itself mixing the mortar.
Besides that, the study of the lifeless and the study of the liv­
ing are not just coordinate branches of the same science. The
philosophical science of nature studies mobile being. Something
ought to be said in it first of all about motion in general, and then
the various motions of the world ought to be classified. Two of

The Science of Mobile Being

7

the six species of motion—generation, corruption, local move­
ment, alteration, augmentation, and diminution—turn out to in­
volve life, which leads into a discussion of the soul and all that it
entails. This means then that psychology, the tract on the soul, is
a late arrival in the philosophical science of nature, making its
appearance after a study of mobile being in general has been
elaborated. If motion in general were not studied ahead of the six
species, there would be a useless repetition since every study of
the particular types of movement would involve elaborating anew
the philosophy of mobile being in general. It is better to have one
overall treatment of motion first, moving then from the general
to particular, from the common principles of motion to the vari­
ous species.
Such is the plan of the pages that follow, beginning with
Chapter 2. Philosophical physics may be defined as the science,
elaborated by reason alone, of the material, causes, and principles
of mobile being (ens mobile), in what makes it mobile being.
Unfortunately, in the study of the species of motion after the
common issues have been settled, the study of life and of souls
must be omitted because it would lead too far astray. There will
be a general discussion of mobile being and then a study of those
species of motion which are not those of life but are found only
at the level of the inorganic. But before this house can be built,
certain preliminary blueprints must be examined.
INTELLECTUAL INSIGHT IS USED

A character like Hamlet can be appreciated only when the audi­
ence, just as the actor, projects itself into the lines and action of
the play to become another Hamlet in its own right. T. S. Eliot
says that it takes a poet to appreciate poetry. Rousseau wanted to
define experimental physics by teaching it. The foregoing defini­
tion of philosophical physics can be best illuminated when the
reader becomes a philosophical physicist himself. This task can
be made easier by inspecting the way in which the various forms

8

Philosophical Physics

of knowledge are divided and the place, within the hierarchy,
proportioned to the study of nature.
The broadest division of the whole of human knowledge is ar­
ranged according to the threefold division of abstraction.
Abstraction in general is the operation of the mind disengaging
the essence of a sensible thing from that which is non-essential or
only incidental in its make-up.
Suppose that a student is dealing with a bookseller, paying off
a just debt. From such a transaction in which two patches of
color called arms are moving about and two cavities called mouths
are emitting noises, the idea of justice is formed by an observer;
yet nowhere does the concept of justice become visible or tangi­
ble, measurable or picturable, weighed or timed. There are men,
books, and money. There is an exchange of energy in the physical
process. But the idea of justice has been abstracted from these
things, none of which either in their parts or in their sum con­
stitutes justice. The idea of justice has been abstracted from what
is not justice but matter seen and heard. The same exchange of
energy could be achieved in different circumstances, where it
would yield a totally different idea, perhaps that of a holdup.
A modern analysis of the above situation, springing immedi­
ately from John Stuart Mill and reaching its peak in the con­
temporary emphasis on statistics in learned study, would hold
that the general notion of justice is the mere name for a collec­
tion of instances. A vast number of just acts are counted—in the
courts, in social life, in stores, in factories, in homes, and else­
where—and summing up the cases is supposed, on sensist prem­
ises, to yield the idea of justice as a name for the collection. But
there is a similarity detected (abstracted) in the instances exam­
ined; otherwise, we would not know how to collect them into
one class. An abstraction is thus made not after but before the
collection of instances that sensism proposes as a substitute. In­
dividual cases of justice are abstracted as such before they can be
part of the sum that is to replace abstraction. Abstraction cannot
be denied in the conclusion of an argument that must use its

The Science of Mobile Being

9

work as a premise. Hence, the notion of justice is truly the fruit
of abstraction and of insight into essences; it does not contain ref­
erence to material things—like individual men, money, and
books. It is immaterial and dimensionless.
In the picture of a triangle drawn on a blackboard, the mathe­
matician studies the triangle. Studying the properties of his three
lines, he must think away the representation which can be seen,
and attend only to what is represented, which is invisible. Since
lines have length but no thickness, to represent the triangle as it
is involves rubbing the drawing out. To see the lines, they must
have thickness, but to study them the thickness must be thought
away. The whole achievement is another example of abstraction.
The mathematician does not study a triangle that he has drawn
but the triangle that he has abstracted. True enough, he uses the
pictured triangle as a support for his imagination, but from it he
abstracts general relations of a different order from the drawing
which he sees. In a similar way, justice is in a different order
from matter, from the two men in the store who are to the ab­
stracter of justice what a drawing is to the abstracter of the tri­
angle.
These two examples are homely ones. Abstraction is perhaps
even more striking in the domain of empiriological physics which,
according to many of its admirers, has banished the intellect into
exile. The surest proof that the mind is not a captive of space and
time is that it represents these two realities and thus surmounts
them.
Far from a concrete thing that shocks our senses into action,
space is almost a pure relation. It is extension, evacuated of con­
tent by the abstracting mind, purged of all quality, free of all mo­
tion, homogeneous, enlargeable without end. Equipped with the
notion of space, the mind is not localized like an atom, a leaf, a
cow; it can range anywhere in the universe and find itself at
home. Even newly discovered entities, because they are in space,
are not complete strangers to their finders.
Transcendence of time is another of man’s feats, and this can

10

Philosophical Physics

easily be illustrated by our reference to the future. Staring out
toward a world that is not yet real, the mind can get ahead of the
clock by witnessing in a general way what is only possible. Out­
stripping sense knowledge which is always tied to the here and
now, the idea can be formed of the future, in Bergson’s words, as
an infinity of possibility.
The representation of time and space is an index that the in­
tellect operates outside of both. In fact empiriological physics is
becoming more and more abstract, and it is truly a paradox that
the greater the abstraction the stronger runs the current in mod­
ern philosophy to deny that abstraction exists.
THE ORDER OF ABSTRACTION IS PHYSICAL

There are three orders of abstraction, three high-water marks of
the mind in rising from the concrete individuals in the sense
world to their principles and their causes.
The first order is that of so-called physical abstraction, and the
mind is said here to leave aside individual sensible matter but not
common sensible matter. Take the case of a fifty-cent piece. Such
a coin is made of silver, but if a study is to be made of the silver,
an abstraction must be made from the fact that it is an individual
piece of silver, this silver. As this silver, it could not be made the
object for study since every individual is unique, ineffable, in­
capable therefore of being related in a universal statement. And
without the universal, science would not only perish; it could
never even be born.
This silver occupies this space at this time; it is these atoms
which are of this age—in this thermodynamical state. No, the
study of silver requires that the this-ness which all cases of silver
ora in nature be disregarded. The individuality of the silver in
the half dollar cannot be scientifically considered, and yet the
silver is not without its reference to matter. If the this-ness of
the silver were not thought away, there would be no science; if the
matter were completely thought away, there would be no silver.
The answer to the problem is that individual sensible matter is

Ths Science of Mobile Being

11

left aside in the first order of abstraction, but what, for want of a
better term, is called common sensible matter remains. The silver
is no longer considered as this, but it is still considered as silver,
hence as something material, invested with sensible properties.
In the second order of abstraction, the common sensible matter
is relinquished, but not the quantity. This order is that of mathe­
matical abstraction. In the piece of silver, the mind can detect the
meaning of half, of fifty, of circle, of solidity as a tri-dimensional
status. But there is no intrinsic reference to physical matter.
Quantity is not matter but matter’s attribute. Even if the two
are tightly intertwined in nature, quantity can be mentally lifted
from its qualitative home. V2 has never been rationalized, and
V—1 is an imaginary number. Neither of these two quantities
represents an entity that man can put his finger on or even repre­
sent with his imagination. Both numbers, however, are intelligi­
ble. They have been abstracted from matter, the locus of quali­
tative, sensible, moving reality.
It was said that in the first order of abstraction the mind con­
siders sensible matter. In this so-called physical abstraction, the
subject of study exists in matter and is thought of as existing in
matter. In the second and mathematical order, the subject of
study exists in matter but is not thought of as existing in matter.
Intelligence considers it apart from matter, and so quantified be­
ing might be called intelligible matter—matter that is above
change and sense content and is considered as an affair of parts.
Fifty, circle, solidity, and other such mathematical entities ab­
stracted from the coin can be applied to any other metal and any
other matter. Silver implies a kind of matter, but fifty does not,
since it applies to ah kinds. Silver implies certain qualities; circu­
larity does not, since its line of circumference has no thickness
and is only intelligible matter. Silver refers to the senses in the
discovery of its weight, color, and heat; half is something above
sensation and can apply to the data of sight as well as of hearing,
to touch as well as to taste and smell; it implies only parts without
saying what the parts are.

12

Philosophical Physics

In the second order of abstraction, the subject is matter be­
cause it has parts. But it is not sensible. It is only intelligible, be­
cause it does not have the resources to appeal to the senses—there
is no thickness to a line, no color to a number, no sound to an
angle, no taste to a square root, no smell to a logarithm. Intelligi­
ble matter is a fortunate term to characterize quantified being.
The third order of abstraction is that of metaphysics. Here the
mind thinks away the individual matter, the common matter,
and even the intelligible matter or quantity. Being is studied in
so far as it is being, without quality and without quantity as these
two realities occur in the physical and mathematical zones. To
say that the silver is a being is to abstract from its matter and its
quantity; for both the silver and the circle, both matter and the
number fifty are beings. Being is that which is, the deepest and
most universal characteristic of a reality. And it is not just a char­
acteristic. It is a synonym for the reality itself.
In the first order of abstraction, it is said that silver is a being
of sensible matter; in the second it is said that silver is a being of
intelligible matter; in the third, it is said that silver is a being or,
' what is the same thing, that silver is.
Everything that is, is a being. Being’s opposite is nothingness.
When it is said of the silver that it is, without regarding its char­
acter as silver or as quantity, the very depths of the silver’s reality
have been touched. Further than saying the silver is it is impos­
sible to go in the direction of its ultimates. For beyond being lies
nothing; beyond the is there is only the is not. Hence being is
truly ultimate.
At the lower echelons of abstraction, various kinds or determi­
nations of being are considered—sensible being in the first order
and quantified being in the second. But when being as such is at­
tained and studied, no determinations occur in it. For these de­
terminations would also be beings, already included in the thing
that they determine. It is obvious then that being is not only an
ultimate beyond which there is nothing but a universal in the
highest sense, such that no instance of reality can lie outside it.

The Science of Mobile Being

13

In the first order of abstraction, the things studied exist in
matter and are thought of as existing in matter. In the second
order, the subject exists in matter but is not thought of as existing
in matter. In the third order, what is studied neither exists in
matter nor is thought of as existing in matter. Being is deeper and
higher and wider than matter because it applies to all things, and
a thing need not be material, sensibly or intelligibly, in order to
exist, in order to be.1
PHILOSOPHICAL PHYSICS DOES NOT AIM CHIEFLY AT QUANTITY

Knowledge is divided according to the three orders of abstraction.
To the first order belongs philosophical physics. Empiriological
physics, at least for the origin, testing, and use of ideas, makes
contact with this first order. In the second order is mathematics,
while metaphysics is at the core of the third order. What is im­
portant for present purposes is that philosophical and empirio­
logical physics are fellow citizens in the first order of abstraction,
at least when modern physics comes home from its journeys into
mathematics to test the ideas brought back and to gather new
ones for fresh theoretical elaboration.
The first difference between philosophical and empiriological
physics is a matter of method. The one seeks causes and prin­
ciples; the other aims chiefly to measure. The one takes its rise
from full experience; the other uses experiment, considering only
portions of experience and controlling what it considers. These
two differences must be more fully explained, the first in the
present section and the second in the next.
1 For beginner’s purposes, the foregoing exposition is satisfactory
enough because it is general. But it would be a mistake to think that the
three orders of abstraction are symmetrical like three steps in a stairway.
There is a much greater heterogeneity among the three orders than is
sometimes emphasized, since the first involves a total abstraction, the sec­
ond a formal abstraction, and metaphysics a special type which Thomas
Aquinas calls separatio. Cf. In Boethii de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3, ed.
P. Wyser (Fribourg, 1948), pp. 40-41; cf. also L. Geiger, "Abstraction
et séparation d’après Saint Thomas in de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3,” Revue des
sciences philosophiques et théologiques, XXXI (1947), pp. 3-40.

14

Philosophical Physics

The empiriological approach does not keep the difference be­
tween the first and second orders of abstraction as clear-cut as the
philosophical scientist; the reason for this will have to await later
chapters to be more clearly stated. The empiriological spirit at­
tempts to wed the two orders, more or less looking to the first
for material (material object) and to the second for the way in
which the material is studied (formal object). The philosophical
science of nature, realizing that something is lost when we advert
only to the quantity of things, insists that the first order of ab­
straction yields a richness and a meaning that the second cannot
handle. Only when we study things on their own levels do we
study them as they are. A realism insists that the first order of ab­
straction be more fully patrolled before climbing to the second,
and that sensible, mobile matter be examined on its own terms if
a truly inductive approach to experience is to be won.
In general then, empiriological and philosophical physics have
the same material object, mobile being, but each takes a different
slant on it, each has a different interest in it, each has a different
formal object. The philosopher takes mobile being as mobile; the
empiriologist explores it as quantified. This distinction can suffice
as a first approximation, at least until Chapter 5 can attend in
more precise form to the nature of the empiriological method.
But philosophy is not a statement of how things ought to be.
It is primarily a statement of what things are. The plain fact is
that in the present-day study of matter the distinction between
the first and second orders of abstraction has been blurred, and
philosophy must take account of the results to see where they
lead. Has empiriological physics raised motion up to quantity, or
has it drawn quantity down to motion? A positive answer to the
first question is the theme of one philosophy of the empiriological
method called logicalism and popularized by Bertrand Russell,
while a yes to the second question opens the way to another
philosophy of the empiriological method now current in America,
the naturalism of John Dewey.
The implications of the two rival schools cannot be developed

The Science of Mobile Being

15

here without a complex and needless digression. But in general,
it may be said that there is a strong bias in modern thought to
reduce empiriological physics to a mathematical exercise. Such a
view was ushered in by Descartes who identified quantity with
the very substance of material things and thus made it legal for
mathematics, the science of quantity, to pose as the science of
matter. Empiriological physics has retained its Cartesian heir­
loom. It has become so enamored of its mathematical tools that it
tends to neglect the real estate of the world on which they work.
Sir James Jeans echoed rather than created a modem cry when
he held that mathematics can tell us all there is to tell about
reality and that God is the Great Mathematician.
According to logicalism or more precisely logical empiricism,
which proposes to install mathematical logic on the throne from
which metaphysics once presided over the sciences, any state­
ment that cannot be cloaked in a mathematical formula is a
meaningless verbalism. Empiriological physicists caution against
the use of picturable constructs like the billiard-ball atom models
of the last century. For Sir Arthur Eddington empiriological
physics is a science of pointer readings, and Tobias Dantzig says
the same thing in characterizing empiriological disciplines as the
reading and obeying of instruments.
The brute success of empiriological physics with its mathemat­
ical techniques has seemed to justify the scrapping of Kant’s idea
that behind the quantity resides an unknown x, the noumenon.
The empiriological physicist has been able to dispense in practice
with the being behind the quantity, the thing that has inertia,
the substance that supports the properties. And not only has the
typical modern scholar persuaded himself that a science of na­
ture, distinct from empiriology, is outmoded, but that metaphys­
ics, the science of being, has been overthrown also.
Quantity of course is duly studied in philosophical physics, but
it is studied only in the light of motion which is the primary and
principal interest in the first order of abstraction. To begin baldly
and blankly with quantity is to tend toward the second order of

16

Philosophical Physics

abstraction and to invite an a priori philosophy of nature that
does not study matter on its own terms and as it is. As in the
case of Plato, who insisted so much on the mathematical, to make
quantity the core of philosophical physics is to view the world as
merely phenomena; a truly inductive philosophy is replaced by
descending upon the world from the high heaven of an innate
metaphysics rather than having one’s feet on the solid earth of
experience from the very start.
The philosophical science of nature does not study ens quan­
tum or quantity, as its chief stock in trade, and it does not start
out with it. Indeed, it is incorrect to say that its object is corporeal
substance. The fact that changeable or mobile being is a body
must be established in this science rather than assumed. The
starting point for philosophical physics is this changing or mobile
being itself. Moreover, it does not strictly encumber the philo­
sophical physicist to define and defend the reality of this chang­
ing being. This is the concern of the metaphysics of knowledge
which defends the first principles of the lesser sciences.
PHILOSOPHICAL PHYSICS IS BASED ON EXPERIENCE

The philosophical science of nature studies not quantity but mo­
bile being, and whatever conclusions it reaches must be drawn
from motion and what motion implies. This distinction between
the empiriological approach which measures quantity and the
philosophical approach which studies motion is a crucial one.
But there is another and more important aspect to the method of
empiriological physics which makes it different from mathemat­
ics. It is experimental.
Experience and experiment, although etymologically related,
are by no means the same thing. Experience is preëxperimental.
It is a qualitative, warm, and deeply moving contact with reality,
involving the whole man and involving him in a personal way.
Experience is always an intimate thing, so much so that we can
only convey the experience to others by leading them to have a

The Science of Mobile Being

17

kindred experience themselves. In the final analysis, this is the
only way in which knowledge can be communicated.
Everything that happens to us is an experience. There are
mental experiences, emotional experiences, bodily experiences,
artistic experiences, and many others besides. The important part
of the description is that experience has a personal reference and
that we have an intimate association with what it is all about.
But experiment is something different. Man is here not an
actor in a drama, identifying himself with a situation in a per­
sonal way and knowing its individual character for himself. He
is rather a passive spectator. In empiriological physics, he is
called the observer. He is really far outside the parade of events,
watching them file by.
Secondly, experience does not involve the artificial isolation of
facts. We take it as we find it, and we cannot avoid doing so.
Experiment, however, always interferes with what it studies.
Experiment may be defined as a controlled experience.
Thirdly, in experiment there is a reference to certain selected
characters of experience. The chosen realities are in the order of
quantity. Experience, on the other hand, is more qualitative and
inclusive. It does not pick out certain facets of the world and
ignore others. It finds everything somehow meaningful and prof­
itable.
What we call experience is something more profound, signifi­
cant, and convincing than what we call experiment. Experiment
requires a greater superstructure of interpretation from outside
it, while experience carries its own evidence more within itself.
For experiment indeed is but a special form of experience. In
the final analysis, an experiment must always be experienced to
be apprehended, a proposition that cannot be converted. In read­
ing an instrument, the experimentalist sees a number colored on
a dial; he does not see pure number. Logically then, experience
is more important and more ultimate than experiment, and if
experience is unreliable, as is often declared, then experiment is

18

Philosophical Physics

not trustworthy either. If a camera is substituted for the eye, the
eye must still be used to view the picture.
All the data of empiriological physics must eventually be re­
duced to the familiar world for verification. If experiment is a
controlled experience, what is doing the controlling? Basically,
it is the qualitative world which is used to control the quantita­
tive, since the mechanical features of the experimental apparatus
are fashioned in accordance with the sense world of quality which
creates all problems and, in the empiriological zone of knowledge,
is the only signpost for the reading of answers. It is because of the
sense of weight, the feeling of effort in the hand holding a stone
against the pull of gravity, that a scale is made and calibrated.
Without that sense of weight, the principle of the scale would
never have been alighted upon by its inventor and communicated
to others. Time must be understood before the clock becomes
meaningful as a measure. As C. D. Broad says, there is nothing
in a clock which indicates that it is for telling time.
Experience is prior to experiment. Man’s first contact with the
world makes him aware of something more than quantity, and it
is only later that he selects quantity, when he does it at all, from
the experiential whole. There is a quantified something that ex­
perience discloses in its initial stages, and it is this something
rather than its quantity which ought to be given an ampler at­
tention in studying the world. Quantity cannot be equated to
the thing that has quantity, any more than a foot is the same
thing as a piece of silk a foot long. An apple and an orange might
be of equal weight, and if quantity alone matters, they ought to
be called the same fruit. The mathematics of color does not in­
troduce a blind man to a knowledge of what color is. A map of
Mexico is quite different from Mexico itself.
Experience, in spite of modern experiment, is still the best
teacher. In fact, since all knowledge begins in the sense world,
there is a profound way in which experience is the only teacher.
All knowledge, in empiriological as well as philosophical physics,
is eventually ground out of the data of sense perception, and if

The Science of Mobile Being

19

this common sense world is ultimately declared meaningless, as
learned thought often says, the meaninglessness must apply as
well to the world of empiriological physics. Everything is mean­
ingless in such a case.
Eddington, Jeans, Russell, Northrop, and in general the whole
modern temper tend to tear apart the familiar and the empiriolog-'
ical worlds and to label the common sense picture of things as an
untested illusion. But if such thinkers did not use this familiar
world which they call unreliable, they would never have been
able to make their statements.
ALL KNOWLEDGE BEGINS WITH BEING

The primary idea which experience forces man to form, at least
in an implied and unreflected way, is that of being. This raises
a serious problem. If the philosophical physicist studies being,
has he not jumped not only to the second order of abstraction
like empiriological physics but all the way to the third order
which is the territory of metaphysics? Having divided philosophi­
cal and empiriological physics, at least to a general extent, in the
two preceding sections, the philosopher of nature ought also to
be compared with the philosopher of being.
The nature of the being studied in the philosophy of nature
is a matter for dispute among those who still discuss the study
of being. Some of them abandon the philosophy of nature to
empiriological physics. Others take comfort in the third order of
abstraction, making the philosophy of nature a deduction from
metaphysics as Descartes and Wolff proposed. The philosophical
physicist must be defended not only from his enemies among
empiriological minds but also from his friends among the meta­
physicians. The first group denies the philosophical science of
nature, the second sometimes seeks to absorb it.
It would be truer to the spirit of Aristotle and Aquinas and,
more importantly, truer to the demands of reality to regard meta­
physics as a developed philosophy of nature rather than to turn
the philosophy of nature into an applied metaphysics. But neither

20

Philosophical Physics

view is correct. Metaphysics makes a higher and even different
kind of abstraction which is not reached by simply inflating the
first order. Metaphysics is wider than the philosophy of nature
only because it digs deeper into reality, and it can no more be
attained by expanding philosophical physics than a well can be
made deeper simply by enlarging its mouth.
But that does not free metaphysics from building on experi­
ence, and to that extent, it is materially dependent on the philos­
ophy of nature, as Maritain puts it, at least with regard to the
more basic truths which the philosophical science of nature dis­
covers and proves. In the opinion of Aquinas, metaphysics,
though superior in dignity to other branches in philosophy, uses
truths which these lesser lights have searched out.2 Aquinas terms
other branches of philosophy preambles to metaphysics since they
contain truths that metaphysics more fully reveals.3 But are we
not involved in a vicious circle if metaphysics depends on the
other sciences for its preambles and then purports, as the director
of the sciences, to defend the principles of the other branches of
philosophy?
No, such a vicious circle does not set in, for the reason that the
being studied in the philosophy of nature is not exactly the same
thing as the being of metaphysics. Genuine philosophy discerns
two notions of being. The first is the view of the ordinary man
who, even though not formally a metaphysician, has a sponta­
neous conviction that being is. It is this idea which, at least in
implied form, appears in the first concept of the mind, as will be
presently shown. It is vague, confused, unconsciously accepted
not only for itself but in the principles which it immediately ex­
hibits. The other notion of being is that of the metaphysician.
This is a refined, reflex, scientific notion of being, explicitly rec­
ognized as being and rigorously defended as to its reality and its
principles. In these two notions of being, one is simply a refine-

2 In Boethii de Trinitate, q. 2, a. 3, ad 7; q. 3, a. 1, ad 9.
8 Ibid., q. 3, a. 1, ad 2.

The Science of Mobile Being

21

ment of the other. For the average man thinks about the same
world as the profoundest of the metaphysicians. The metaphysi­
cian, however, has a reflex and scientific knowledge of the sub­
ject, probing it deeper and wider by the hard steel of proof.
Like all other thinking, the philosophical science of nature
must begin with the pedestrian notion of being. The very office
of philosophical physics is a cultivation, a clarification, a purging,
and to a great extent a defense of this ordinary man’s notion and
what it entails. After clarifying it in the first order of abstraction,
the philosophical physicist turns the being over to the whiter
light of the metaphysician. Hence, the philosophical science of
nature is not a preamble to metaphysics and metaphysics a pre­
amble to the study of nature. Philosophical physics begins with
the coarse notion of being and refines it. The metaphysician
works with being as such. There is a constant purification and
progression rather than a circular movement. If, in the end, there
be any doubts about the exteriority of this being, as the philoso­
pher of nature and the metaphysician study it, these questions
are settled in that branch of metaphysics which has to do with the
value of knowledge and which, like metaphysics itself, comes
after the philosophy of nature rather than, as in Kant’s plan,
precedes it as a prolegomenon.
But this section, from the very beginning, has assumed that
the first idea drawn from experience is that of being which, in
an implied, vague, and general form, is the starting point for all
intellectual knowledge. This point must now be proved.
Modern thought, of course, does not tend to admit that man’s
first intellectual attainment is the general idea of being. Hegel
held that thinking starts with the individual, and Hume and
Hobbes had the same view, though they drew different conclu­
sions from it. Following Hegel, in the so-called dialectical phi­
losophy, Marxians would likewise argue to the primary datum of
mind as something individual. This is true also in the case of
Mill, James, Dewey, Russell, Carnap, Northrop, and all others
who, following the empiriological method, deny abstraction and

22

Philosophical Physics

set out to reconstruct the world from atomistic units, the true
backdrop of all empiricism in philosophy.
A number of arguments, from both experience and reason,
attest that the general notion of being is formed prior to an in­
tellectual knowledge of what is individual about things. Child
psychology, for one, supports the point. An infant may learn to
identify a dog in his baby language, imitating perhaps the bark
of the animal. At first, he will be found to apply the barking
sound to all subsequent animals either in life or in picture, show­
ing that he did not apprehend what is specific to the dog but
gleaned only a vague, general notion that is later differentiated.
For the same reason, he at first thinks the picture of every woman
to be his mother and of every man his father. Gradually he learns
to identify the distinct and differentiated features of the world
about him. He moves from the general to the particular.
No one remembers his first idea, and fortunately, it is not a
matter for memory to decide. But inspection shows that knowl­
edge always moves from the universal to the particular, and if
this is so, then the most universal of ah ideas must be fashioned
first, at least in implied form. Perfection is always a movement
from potency to act, until a reality is at last in an actual way all
that it is capable of being. A perfect circle is as round as a circle
could be expected to be. A perfect game at bowling means the
highest possible score. A lover says that his love is perfect when
he finds in her nothing that is wanting. Growth in knowledge is
like organic growth, the development of capabilities, a movement
toward the actual possession of all that one is capable of having
in the intellectual area, a movement from the potencies of the
subject to their actualization.
What is universal is potential. It is crude and vague in content
and hence applicable to many things. The universal book, as
universal, exists only in the mind. All the books which actually
exist deal with some special subject and in some special type and
on some special paper. With regard to actual existence, book in

The Science of Mobile Being

23

the genera] sense is only potential. It depends on individual
circumstances to make the book actual, and then it is no longer
a universal book. In this plan, universal and particular are related
as potential and actual. The perfection of knowledge requires the
movement from potency to act, from the universal to the particu­
lar.
A visual spotter of aircraft during the war would see a plane
first as an object in the sky. When it came closer, he would see
it as a plane. A little closer in, he could tell whether it was multi­
engined or not, and later on, he could see what kind of plane it
was. Finally, when closer still, the plane could be identified by its
number, and its individuality could be established. This is an
analogy to the way in which intellectual knowledge always
moves.
All genuine science would be impossible if intellectual knowl­
edge did not go from the universal to the particular. The reversal
of this process involves a movement from the unknown to the
known, just the opposite of how true knowledge ought to march.
Intellectual knowledge cannot move from the unfamiliar to the
familiar. Classification, a phase of every scientific enterprise at
least in its initial stages, requires a knowledge of the general
class in terms of which the particulars are organized. Without
that prior generality in intellectual knowledge, the similarities
which are the threads weaving things into classes become impos­
sible to detect. To declare, for instance, “this is a tree” implies
that we know “tree” in general, recognizing “this” as a particular
instance of it. Setting up a general class from a limited observa­
tion of particulars, skipping from the part to the whole, violates
the principle of causality and forms the central problem in mod­
ern argument by induction. It is as though one were to conclude
that a whole dress is white, simply by observing its fringe of lace.
Adding all the “this-es” cannot generate the concept of tree.
Only what is relevant must be added, otherwise under the aspect
of “this-ness” one could add books, trees, hot-water bottles, elec­

24

Philosophical Physics

trons, and anything else in the universe. The general idea must
be formed before embarking on a statistical summation that is
supposed to yield the idea of a tree.
It need not be argued, at least at this point, whether classifica­
tion is possible. Classification exists, and hence the only conclu­
sion is that the universal is known before the conscious and reflex
intellectual knowledge of the particular. Otherwise, classification
would be impossible, and so would all thought.
This does not mean that there are innate general ideas or a
priori general forms in the human mind but only that, given an
individual in experience, the intellect adverts to its generalities
before sailing after its singular character. The farmer holds that
his horses and cows are animals, because he has perceived some
basic likeness among them. The empiriological physicist classifies
also. He has never had the experience of electrons in a Moscow
laboratory, but he is sure that they have the same properties as the
electrons which turn up in his own experiments.
This whole argument toward the primacy of the general in
human knowledge and, in the limit, toward the idea of being as
the first of man’s intellectual achievements can be put in another
and perhaps even more forceful form. If intellectual knowledge
had to begin by grasping the individual, then it would have to be
radically inductive, and if it is radically inductive, it never begins
with the individual because it could never begin at all. If a socalled individual is given in experience, how can the knower be
sure that it is truly an individual unit? On radically inductive
premises, he cannot. Thus he splits the “individual,” say a mole­
cule, into atoms. But uncertain whether the atom is an individual,
he charges into it with his particle guns and breaks the atom into
neutrons, protons, electrons, and other microscopic entities. Radi­
cally inductive and compelled to begin with the individual, he
cannot logically even accept these subatomic entities as realities
that are ultimate and given. So his process of division goes on and
on ad infinitum. His empiriological physics becomes an eternal
quest after premises, a constant effort to begin. Contemporary

The Science of Mobile Being

25

existentialism, especially in Heidegger and Sartre, has actually
carried through this radical spirit of the analytic method, and it
has ended its voyage by deciding that nothing can be known at
all.
Parenthetically, it might be remarked that radical deduction
would likewise make a beginning of intellectual knowledge im­
possible, and the chapter on mathematics and the infinite, accept­
ing the challenge of inductive and deductive extremisms in modern thought, will show that they deal a death blow not only to
all common sense knowledge but to all scientific inquiry.
The point for the present can rest simply that if radical induc­
tion cannot initiate intellectual knowledge, the individual as such
cannot be known in the primary idea of the mind. It can be
known and recognized as a member of a class only if this class is
known beforehand. Since knowledge moves from the general to
the particular in the intellectual area, the most general idea, at
least in implied form, must be had first, and this idea is that of
being, which cannot be made more general because beyond being
is only the non-being or nothingness.
A final argument might be drawn from the necessity of the
principle of non-contradiction to differentiate one thing from an­
other. Without it, all other intellectual knowledge would perish.
Since it is necessary for all intellectual knowledge, it must there­
fore be primary. In the light of this principle, since it relates
being by contrast with the non-being, differentiating the is from
the is not, being is revealed as the primary datum of all intellec­
tual knowledge.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS DOES NOT ATTAIN BEING

The philosophical science of nature builds on the ordinary man’s
notion of being. The mobile being of philosophical physics is
quite close to the being which is known crudely and confusedly
by common sense. For mobile being is extremely potential also.
Motion, as the next chapter will show, is the actualization of
what is in potency as far as it is in potency. This last specifying

26

Philosophical Physics

clause is of considerable moment. Motion pertains much more to
the potential than to the actual since only the potential can be
moved. Motion thus appears most strikingly in the world of
mineral matter which is almost inert, so much so that by using
the principle of inertia developed by Galileo and by Newton the
empiriological physicist has achieved a remarkable string of suc­
cesses on the inorganic level. The mobile being in the philosoph­
ical science of nature is thus akin to the plain man’s idea. It is a
refined and purified version, like ore that has been smelted into
a shinier metal.
In considering mobile being, the two-termed reality of the
being and its motion must be taken together. The being and the
mobility should not be separated into rival corners or a Kantian
universe of noumenon-phenomenon results. Whatever apparent
separations are made in the following discussion may be justified
for purposes of better exposition, just as for the sake of studying
man the psychologist breaks him down into parts like his senses,
emotions, intellect, and will. But the parts must not be simply
united atomistically after the study is over and then deemed
equivalent to the whole. Philosophical physics studies mobile
being as a unit, thinking it into parts only, paraphrasing Maritain,
to reunite it. But neither the being nor the motion can be fitted
into the canons of empiriological physics. Evidence for this
neglect of both the being and the mobility of mobile being will
be brought forward in this section and the next.
In asking whether empiriological physics attains to being, an
important distinction must be made between the empiriologist as
a man and as an empiriological physicist. The learned minds to­
day who boost their empiriological physics into a philosophical
status not only fall short of the idea of being; they openly re­
nounce their interest in it, denying that it is a meaningful and
valid idea in the first place. They cannot attain to the idea in
empiriological physics, and they do not wish to do so. But as men,
they cannot escape what they often believe they have vanquished.
The ordinary common sense notion of being is not simply

The Science of Mobile Being

27

known to the philosopher and ignored by the empiriological
physicist. It is a prescientific idea, attained by man as man. To
renounce the idea of being, as the empiriological extremist is
often prone to do, is an arbitrary decision, and if he believes that
he has done away successfully with the idea, the only answer is
that he is guilty of make-believe. It is empirically impossible to
avoid the notion of being. The empiriological physicist who de­
nies this notion and the reality for which it stands, must use the
notion and the principles cascading from it in order to accomplish
the denial. Even Bertrand Russell admits that this procedure is
against all logic. It is as though one were to use his voice to in­
form others that he had none.
In this connection, a distinction should be made between em­
piriological physics and what is commonly called scientism. With
genuine empiriological physics genuine philosophical physics can
have no quarrel; truth can never contradict itself, and true philos­
ophy and true empiriological knowledge can become incorporated
for the progress of man, though empiriological physics, as the
sequel will show, is the junior partner in the firm. It is scientism,
where empiriological physics is turned into a philosophical sci­
ence, with which forceful issue must be taken. Empiriological
physics rightly flowers only on the ground of measurement; it
goes to seed as a philosophy. To believe that the empiriological
methods alone have access to the real world is one of the great
fallacies, the great absurdities, the great tragedies of our age.
In the present context, it should be pointed out that since
Kant’s time, scientism has subscribed to the dogma that common
sense tends naturally to illusion. The philosopher defends and
purifies the spontaneous convictions of the plain man in the re­
flex metaphysical analysis which vindicates the value of knowl­
edge. Such pedestrian convictions, the empiriological spirit at­
tempts often to explain away, taking its own approach as the
ultimate one. But the empiriological physicist cannot assume the
task of either proving or disproving the reality of being as known
to the ordinary man. Such a reality cannot help being recognized,

28

Philosophical Physics

and even when it is rejected overtly, it is used to do the rejecting,
surviving its apparent death as the surest proof of what it has of
the timeless.
The empiriological physicist, who takes his work as a traffic
with the ultimate reality knowable to man, ascends to the second
order of abstraction without pausing on the ground floor to see
whether such a leap is justified. This is an a priori and anthro­
pomorphic attitude, neglecting as it does the demands of reality
and imposing on nature an arbitrary human standard that reality
is asked to fit in order to reveal itself.
In climbing to the second order of abstraction, the empiriologi­
cal physicist makes an option to consider nature only as quanti­
fied, and it is enlightening to note the extremes which this view
must eventually bring about if there is nothing knowable out­
side it.
The empiriological physicist, as such, must ignore being. His
view of reality feeds on the notion of inertia, which thins a ma­
terial thing into an indifferent state, depending for its reality
wholly on the transeunt forces acting from outside of it. Such an
inert and indifferent thing, when considered in itself, is really
nothing. Hooke’s law of elasticity says that stress is proportional
to strain, and thus the entire reality of stress is exhausted by the
reality of strain. Empiriologically, it could be said that stress
causes strain or that strain causes stress. Emile Meyerson simply
convoyed empiriological physics to its logical end when he argued
that'it aims at abolishing distinction and at identifying cause and
effect. According to the empiriological method, the action of an
atom is exactly equivalent to its component parts and how they
act, and the subatomic particles in their turn owe what they are
and do entirely to extrinsic forces as well.
Cause and effect tend to be absolutely equivalent in empirio­
logical physics, as Meyerson showed. If irreversibility is argued
by an appeal to entropy (the fact that the universe is running
downhill and that causal action will always tend in this direc­
tion), this is not a valid way of differentiating cause and effect.

The Science of Mobile Being

29

For the law of entropy is abstracted from the very causes and
effects whose order it is supposed to regiment. Hence, according
to strict empiriological physics, the distinction between cause and
effect cannot be made. If it is actually made, the physicist has
gone beyond his empiriological frontier and has ventured to speak
as a man.
The being of the empiriological world, since it is completely
inert, is wholly passive, and there is a second way of showing it
to bolster the foregoing argument from inertia. If real being has
no status of its own but is entirely the sport of outside pressures
and forces, then an infinite dynasty of intermediate causes rules
the world. This means that the world becomes an undifferenti­
ated continuum. Distinction, identity, definiteness—these could
never arise where nothing has anything of its own but is forever
determined by forces and factors outside of it and these in turn
by other forces and factors, without limit. In this impossible
world of infinite division, the whole of matter would thaw into a
Heraclitean flux. Nothing would have the character of being but
only of between-ness.
In such a continuum, being and nothing become the same
things in both reality and the knowing mind. If the principle of
inertia eventually compels the empiriological physicist as such to
regard the universe as a continuum, then, except for preëxperimental and metaexperimental thinking, he does not come to grips
with being whose opposite is nothingness. He does not under­
stand being, in his pure empiriological physics, i.e., understand
it with respect to nothingness, which is to understand being with
respect to its own evidence and its own self. He understands
being in terms of what is outside it, and since outside of being
there is nothing, it is only the idea of being which he has as a
man, apart from his technical method, which keeps his universe
from crumbling into a vacuum. Whatever the empiriological
physicist may be explaining, if he explains at all, it is not the
being of that which is.
7 he empiriological physicist is sometimes met with problems

30

Philosophical Physics

involving discrete data, and from this fact, it might seem as
though he were actually coming, even in his technical work to
something besides the undifferentiated continuum. Quantum
physics, for instance, employs the Heisenberg principle of inde­
terminism which holds that position and velocity have a discrete
relation to each other and cannot be exactly measured at the
same time. This same quantum system involves probability equa­
tions which make it possible to predict the destiny of an aggre­
gate of particles but impossible to state the position and velocity
of individual particles except in terms of probability. For instance,
in the Bohr theory of the atom, which to a great extent still
backgrounds the contemporary empiriological view of matter, an
electron may leap from one orbit to another, emitting radiation
in the process. There is no halfway point in such an event. Either
a complete unit of radiant energy called a quantum is emitted,
or none is emitted at all. But the empiriological physicist cannot
deal with a situation that involves a discrete leap. The individual
particles in such a system are said to be indeterminate. Linable to
understand discreteness because it would involve being as con­
trasted with non-being and as therefore evident in itself, the
empiriological physicist devises wave equations to describe the
total, hence continuous, aggregate, abandoning the individual or
what the philosopher would call being, to the laws of chance.
A genuine realism claims that we know something of the
being of material things from within. Our knowledge is vague
and genera], but it happens to be about the ultimates, being
versus non-being, the nature of cause and effect, the general dif­
ference between matter and spirit, the dignity of man. The phi­
losopher is poor in knowledge, but the man with a real penny in
his pocket is richer than scientism with a million dollars of coun­
terfeit philosophy. In this realistic universe, there is an explana­
tion for distinction and differentiation and a recognition that
distinction is fundamental, in arguments for the continuum and
in arguments for anything. The opposite to being is nothingness,
and only in a universe where being is understood as not-nothing,

The Science of Mobile Being

31

as standing out (ex-sistere) from nothing, do we have a truly
plural world. Where being is conceived in terms of pure passivity
the continuum results; the distinction between being and nonbeing is blurred. Hence the empiriological physicist with a
method that treats matter as wholly passive could never attain to
being through such a method even if he wished.
Unable to cope with the being of mobile being, how does he
stand with respect to mobility or motion?
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS DOES NOT ATTAIN MOTION

Motion is a fact of experience, and to explain its causes and its
principles is the sole office of the philosophical science of nature.
Anyone who denies motion can simply prove it to himself by fol­
lowing the historic footsteps of Diogenes who replied by simply
walking when Zeno argued that motion is impossible.
In the world of living things, there is a perpetual cycle of birth,
growth, and death. In the mineral world, the seasons change,
days come and go, clouds sail through the sky, rain falls and then
evaporates. No one who has put to sea, flown in an aircraft, or
experienced a tropical storm can deny that motion occurs. In his
proofs for the existence of God, Aquinas stated that the first argu­
ment, the one from motion, is the more manifest way of proceed­
ing. In the accelerated tempo of the twentieth century, motion is
so prominent that it has become almost something for its own
sake. The music and dance of our entertainment offer proof of
this. The plant engineer is always looking for faster work on his
assembly lines. Many lives have become aimless, insecure, fear­
ful, in this age of distraction and speed. Our whole civilized
edifice threatens to crumble. From the blast at Bikini to the peck­
ing of a typewriter, motion is everywhere apparent. Philosophers
like Marx and Engels, Santayana and Whitehead, Hegel and
Alexander and Bergson, have regarded motion as the very stuff
of the universe.
But how does the empiriological physicist study motion? To
cite Bergson, whose criticism of the empiriological method is a

32

Philosophical Physics

lasting monument in spite of his counterproposals to replace it,
the modern physicist studies motion by ignoring it. But before
hearing Bergson’s indictment, let the empiriological physicist
offer his own testimony.
The general approach to reality in empiriological physics is
largely lighted up by the mathematical techniques of the calculus,
and various of its leading interpreters, from Henri Poincaré to
Bertrand Russell, have set the aim of empiriological physics as
the description of the world in terms of differential equations.
These brilliant and powerful tools of modern mathematics state
the way of computing the instantaneous rate at which one quan­
tity in an equation changes with respect to another. To explain
this statement, which is the fundamental concept of the calculus
as treated in any sophomore book on the subject, two concepts
are needed, that of a function and that of a limit.
One quantity is said to be a function of another if, when the
second (called the independent variable) takes on a given value,
the first (called the dependent variable) takes on a corresponding
value. For instance, if y = x + 1, y is said to be a function of x
or to depend for its value on the value of x; thus if x is 3, y is
3 + 1; whenever x takes on a different value, so does y. That y
is a function of x is written y — f(x). Pressure, for example, is
a function of temperature, and when a gas is heated, the pressure
increases, diminishing of course when the gas is cooled. The fall
of a body in free space is a function of time (distance = 16t2).
Causality tends to mean mere functionality in empiriological
physics. But a function is by no means the same as causation in
the philosophical science of nature. It is more a mathematical
paraphrase of Hume’s associationism or the method of concomi­
tant variations in John Stuart Mill’s logic. There is no true causal
interplay in functionality; there is only a parallelism between one
quantity and another.
The second concept needed to clarify the calculus and the dif­
ferential equation is the notion of a limit, which is defined as a
quantity which another quantity approaches indefinitely near. A

The Science of Mobile Being

33

polygon, when its sides increase indefinitely in number, ap­
proaches a circle as a limit, y is a limit of x if, when x increases
indefinitely, the difference between y and x gradually becomes
smaller than any assignable value.
In terms of these two concepts, the fundamental feature of the
calculus, so deeply imbedded in empiriological physics, can be
sharpened into focus. If y = f(x), the calculus proposes to meas­
ure how y changes when x varies by very small amounts, positive
or negative. Suppose that f(x) = x2; then y — x2 by a simple
matter of substituting in the preceding sentence. Now let x in­
crease by a very small amount written Ax (delta x) according to
mathematical convention. Then y changes also by a very small
amount, written A y. The calculus measures the ratio of A y to
A x when A x becomes smaller and smaller and tends to zero as a
limit; in this manner, there is measured the instantaneous rate of
change of two increments. In more symbolic terms, this is writ­
ten as:
dx

= lim
x~’° Ax

This expression dy/dx is called the derivative and is defined as
the limit of the ratio A y to A x, as A x tends to zero. Any equation
in which a derivative occurs is called a differential equation.
The apparently simple concept of the derivative is the pave­
ment of the mathematical approach to motion which the empirio­
logical physicist takes when he measures matter. The derivative
or differential equation imparts knowledge of the instantaneous
rate by which one quantity changes with respect to another. But
to study rates is at most to measure change rather than to probe
what it is. Moreover, x and y represent quantities, and Ax/Ay
represents ratios of quantity. But quantity is not motion; change
is not a ratio or relation. In Humean terms, motion is a series of
states, but a series of points is not motion in the real world any
more than streetcar stops are moving trollies.
Bergson saw the modern approach to the moving world as a

34

Philosophical Physics

series of still pictures developed in empiriological darkrooms. He
hammered home the important truth that motion escapes the
mathematical physicist, that mathematical time is only a line,
that time is spatialized in empiriological physics, and that the
general dynamism which ignites our material universe becomes,
for the mathematician and physicist alike, a static juxtaposition
of points. This spatialized time, Bergson went on, is only a phan­
tom of motion, as though corn were studied by examining only
empty husks. Time and motion in empiriological physics are not
mobile, he concluded; they are the immobility of points in geo­
metrical space.
It is the ambition of empiriological physics to begin with quan­
tity and to deduce motion. The natural movement of the mind
is along the opposite lane of traffic. Immobility can be abstracted
from motion, but motion can never be deduced from the immo­
bile. That is why, contrary to Hegel and Marx and Nietzsche
and other historical determinists, history must always be expe­
rienced rather than deduced, and that is why also, creation is
ultimately an act of Divine liberty rather than a necessary ema­
nation. The empiriological ambition to deduce all things would
be at home in Plato’s world; it would be an alien in Aristotle’s.
The picture of a photo finish can determine which horse was
ahead at the end of a race; but without an idea of motion gath­
ered elsewhere, the picture could never inform an observer that
the objects shown were moving as the camera snapped.
It can be seen then that motion eludes the empiriological
physicist and that he cannot claim to be a rival of the philosophi­
cal physicist in the study of the mobile world. The empiriological
method is a mixed assault upon reality. Not that taken in its
proper place it is invalid. But for whatever value it bears as a
means of knowing things, it hoists the matter of the first order of
abstraction to a formal treatment in the second. There is much to
be said for Maritain’s view that, at least in its knowledge char­
acter, empiriological physics is an intermediate science as Aris­
totle used this expression. It is materially physical, formally

The Science of Mobile Being

35

mathematical. It uses the physical world to suggest its theories,
test its deductions, and apply its conclusions in the field of engi­
neering. But in its precise formulation, empiriological physics
tends to stress only the quantified aspects of this physical world,
and it does so with mathematical accents. Why empiriological
physics does not become pure mathematics can be explained by
the fact of its material object which is the mobile world and not
pure quantity. Material and formal objects cannot be torn apart
any more than matter and form, to be studied later, any more
than body and soul. Hence the material object contributes to the
originality of a science which ought not be defined in terms of
form alone.
But the empiriological physicist is forbidden by his method
from grasping mobile being under the prominent and all impor­
tant aspect of its motions. He is unable to penetrate to the being
of mobile being; mobility also gets away from him. The study of
mobile being belongs to the philosophical science of nature.
PHILOSOPHICAL PHYSICS DOES NOT SUPPOSE

THE EMPIRIOLOGICAL

The philosophical science of nature need not cast its moorings on
the data of empiriological physics. Such a procedure would be
fatal to philosophy itself since it would then be as dated as the
empiriological shoreline, shifting from one age to the next. The
empiriological mentality of our time asks philosophy to build on
the foundations of the empiriological method. But if this depend­
ence of philosophical on empiriological physics is acknowledged,
then the philosophical science of nature becomes in the end as
nomadic as the theories of the empiriological domain and just as
shaky in its life expectancy.
The origin of philosophical physics is that prescientific expe­
rience of things which is common to all men and provokes them
to the idea of being and a recognition of motion. The philoso­
pher develops the principles which flow from being and from
motion. The empiriological physicist ignores both. The crucial

36

Philosophical Physics

phase of empiriological physics is thus this prescientific set of no­
tions, especially the idea of being which initiates the career of
every thinking man but is neglected by the methods of the em­
piriological physicist as such.
Empiriological physics begins on the assumption that what­
ever is meaningful is measurable, without being able to measure
this original statement or to find a basis for it anywhere else in
reality. The philosophical physicist has no preconceptions of this
sort. The being of mobile being cannot be measured, for there is
nothing outside of being to serve as a yardstick. Motion in mobile
being also escapes measurement, since only quantity can be
measured.
In experiment, the empiriological physicist does not attain be­
ing. To control it, turning it into something else, would make it
the non-being. Nor does the empiriological physicist attain to
motion by experiment. To the extent that motion is controlled it
is stopped. Both in measurement and in the control which ex­
periment brings into experience, being and mobility evade em­
piriological physics.
It is only to be fully realistic that the philosophical physicist,
rather than rest his principles on the conclusions of the empirio­
logical method, should insist that the riches of experience be ex­
plored at their own level and in their whole reality rather than
subjected to a method where only specialized, abstracted, meas­
urable, and controllable portions of experience are considered. In
this way, the philosopher can make good his claim as a critic of
the empiriological approach, since he has preserved contact with
original experience, entitled thus to measure the empiriological
report with respect to it. This report can be made meaningful
only by asking its relation to that experience which the empirio­
logical physicist controls and thus turns into something else, but
which the philosophical physicist keeps wholly and as it is.
It will be later argued, especially by reflecting on experiment,
that the primary aim of empiriological physics is not knowledge

The Science of Mobile Being

T7

as such. To the extent that we control a thing, we do not know it
objectively, uncontrolled, and as it is. In this later treatment
(Chapter 5), empiriological physics will be shown as an art of
discovery, not a method of proof, reaching its fullness not in
speculative knowledge but in the order of making inhabited by
the engineer.
Apart from this primary aim and as a consequence of it, the
data unearthed by empiriological physics are of great value to the
philosophical science of nature, exhibiting its principles and
priming it for fresh insights. But the data as such are powerless
to further the philosophical science unless seen through their re­
lation to experience, which empiriological physics neglects but
philosophical physics preserves. The data in themselves are not
true scientific knowledge which is always in terms of causes. And
when they are involved in true knowledge, it is because they
have passed over into philosophy where they are related within
the network of the philosophical and experiential whole. Expe­
rience thus retains its primacy in yielding ideas and contributing
to their verification. In a truly realistic philosophy, experimental
data ought to confirm experience and to bolster the philosophy
taking root in it. That these data do so is one of the theses put
forward in the later portions of this book.
Experiment is less convincing than experience which, despite
its malignment by overscrupulous scientism, is a simple thing
that by its very simplicity diminishes the margin of error. Expe­
rience is more self-revealing and self-supporting than experiment.
Pain is an index to a person that he is sick. He is convinced and
needs no further evidence. Experiments must be multiplied and
complicated- they must constantly be revamped in search of new
evidence which is really outside the experiment. Knowledge
tends toward the simple.
No one needs a criterion like an experiment to determine
whether he is conscious. He is conscious, he knows, because he
is conscious of it. No experiment is needed by a farmer to recog­

38

Philosophical Physics

nize that the hay he is pitching requires effort or that his plough
is heavy and hard to lift. Experiments always demand interpreta­
tion. Experience is more self-revealing.
An aboriginal who saw a cyclotron for the first time could
never grasp what it was for. But the meaning of pain could be
taught to him by pinching him, the meaning of knowledge by
simply pointing out an object and asking him to describe his in­
ternal impression, the meaning of being from which all knowl­
edge builds by asking him the difference between being alive
and being dead, between whether a house is or is not on the other
side of the street, between whether the people of his dreams are
real men or creatures of the world of fancy.

Suggested Readings
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, Commentary on the Trinity of Boethius,
Lesson II, Questions 5 and 6.
Maritain, Jacques, Les degrés du savoir (Paris, 1932), chs. 2, 4.

2
Motion and Its Principles
MOTION IS GIVEN IN EXPERIENCE

The most striking feature of the sense world is its motion. Every­
where it is present, and our very search for it often involves an­
other of its myriad manifestations. Something new is constantly
being born into our universe, while old things pass away. The
seasons come and go, and the universe from heaven to earth bears
witness to the changes. The soil is hot one day and moist the
next. Thunder and lightning are but aspects of the movements
of the clouds. Living things are in constant process of being born,
growing, aging, and dying. The wind and the waves, the twin­
kling of the stars and the melting snow of the spring, the river in
the valley and the slow erosion of the eternal hills—all reveal the
perpetual motion astir in nature, and man sets his clocks, and
therefore his life, by the movement of the earth around the sun.
The empiriologist, when he roams behind his measurement to
explore its background by non-metrical means, bears similar wit­
ness to the reality of motion. Chemically speaking, his universe
consists of nearly a half billion different kinds of stuff which he
calls substances and which he envisions as in constant kinetic
molecular motion. What goes on among the molecules is but a
larger sign of a subtler rhythm stirring in nature, that of sub­
atomic particles. In this infinitesimal world, which empiriological
physics attempts to predict by theory and command by experi­
ment, matter and energy have now merged into the same thing,
and energy is power, work, force, tension, movement. In the last
analysis, empiriological physics determines the possibility of
39

40

Philosophical Physics

chemical, atomic, and nuclear reactions by an appeal to the ener­
gies involved and to the directions in which they tend to flow.
Much more than the nineteenth-century emphasis on mass and
quantity, twentieth-century empiriological physics presents evi­
dence of nature as basically a dynamic thing, and such concepts
as field, waves, entropy, surface tension, and electric forces play
a greater role in the empiriological vision than they ever did
before.
But empiriological physics only measures matter without study­
ing its motions and mobilities in truly causal fashion. This is the
business of philosophical physics and can only be settled by tran­
scending measures to the realities that instruments presuppose.
In an age like ours, the first question would not be to define the
reality of motion but to establish the fact that motion is a reality.
Aristotle faced a similar question from the Humes and Kants of
ancient Athens. Yet it is not the office of the philosophy of nature
to deal with this question, Aristotle argued, since it can be treated
only in that part of metaphysics which defends the value of
knowledge. However, Aristotle faced the problem in his Physics
because of its importance for his study of nature, and the twen­
tieth-century realist in like circumstance is invited to pursue a
similar course.
Before embarking on the journey, a distinction might be
drawn between change proper Qmutatio'), which is instanta­
neous, and motion proper (motus~), which is primarily continu­
ous and successive. But in a wide way, the two can be taken as
equivalent, and their technical differences, when they become
important, will be mentioned in the pertinent passages. After all,
it is more important to point up general truths than to squander
space on technical detail.
After a discussion of motion, the next hurdle will be the defi­
nition of motion; then will follow a more precise characterization
of mobile being or nature and the principles of nature; these
principles next will be applied to changes of substance with a de­
fense against other views on substantia] change.

Motion and Its Principles

41

MOTION IS NOT DEDUCIBLE

When Aristotle said that motion is known by induction, he was
calling attention to its character as given in experience. The fact
of motion cannot be proved and moreover needs no proof, if
proof is taken to mean syllogistic inference. It is nonsense to try to
prove motion since there is nothing more obvious in .the sense
world from which motion could be deduced.
All philosophers require a starting point. Some begin arbitrar­
ily, using a precooked notion of the subject matter. A realist takes
reality rawly as he finds it, without preconception or hypothesis.
He begins in experience—the hard, fast, stubborn data which
cannot be contradicted with impunity and which will, if contra­
dicted, attack the philosopher who tries to deny them. That is
why false philosophies continually come and go. To ignore the
obvious is to inhale the lethal germs of skepticism, a state that
would not only render science false but make it impossible.
The realist cannot help beginning with the obvious. To deny
it means to know absolutely nothing in the end. To attempt to
prove the more evident by the less evident is not only invalid as
a reasoning process, but the less evident, which is the premise of
the proof, can only be known and recognized in terms of the more
evident, which is presumably to be established. You cannot prove
that you see something by deducing it from the fact that you
have never seen anything; for you have already seen something
or you would not be asking the question.
The empiriological extremist has the habit of shrugging off the
familiar world as an illusion and enshrining his own technical
world of atoms, quanta, and tensor fields as the only world that is
real. But he has constructed all his concepts by reference to this
familiar world; he expresses his thoughts basically in its language;
he uses the familiar world in order to read his instruments and to
communicate his thoughts. No one can avoid beginning in expe­
rience, and if that is so, more attention ought to be paid to it. If
the empiriological approach is used to explain away experience,

42

Philosophical Physics

it is only in terms of an eventual appeal to that experience itself
that the explanation is thought to be valid.
Motion does not need proof because of its obvious experiential
character. What needs proof is always the obscure and the ques­
tionable, the unseen and the unknown. Motion is so apparent
that to demonstrate its existence is unnecessary. The proof con­
sists in opening our eyes, feeling the moving keys of a typewriter,
taking a ride on a subway. If motion does not force itself upon
us, the only recourse in the proof would be to deduce it from
the non-moving or the static. But the static is less obvious than the
moving, and the senses can detect it only by reference to the
moving which is more obvious. Perhaps the senses best confirm
the verdict of the intellect on the exteriority of the world by an
appeal to the facts of motion. If a thing moves against us or we
move against it, and if we thus feel the interaction between its
reality and our bodies, we are spontaneously sure that it is real
and objective. The static, for example the world of mathematics,
is harder to grasp than the moving; it can be taught to beginners
only by instances from motion, the physical adding and the phys­
ical taking away of apples which a teacher uses as first examples
of addition and subtraction.
MOTION IS DEFINED BY ACT AND POTENCY

The definition of motion is more difficult than its discovery. The
most effective approach to the problem might be to face squarely
the historical dilemma that challenged Aristotle and to rethink
the struggle that his definition arbitrates since both warring par­
ties have today risen anew from their tombs. There were two op­
posing views that urged Aristotle’s genius into action. One was
the doctrine of the Eleatics, led by Parmenides and Zeno. The
other was the view of Heraclitus.
Parmenides and his school declared that motion is impossible,
pointing for proof to the principle of non-contradiction. Their
argument ran thus: Being is, and non-being is not. Between the
two there cannot be a middle term, and since motion would ap­

Motion and Its Principles

43

pear as an intermediate between being and non-being, it turns
out to be an illusion. Nothing can come from being, Parmenides
went on, since being already is and whatever comes from it
would already be in it, incapable of becoming because it already
is. Nothing can come from non-being either: ex nihilo nihil fit.
Zeno’s arguments will be discussed later since they presuppose
an understanding of the problem of the infinite and can best be
deferred until after this problem is formally put into the forum.
Like Zeno’s world, the universe of Parmenides is radically static
and monistic.
Heraclitus, on the other hand, denied the reality of being and
claimed that all is motion. As in the case of Parmenides, some
plausible arguments seem to conspire toward this view. Take the
case of time, so subtly emphasized by Bergson, a modern Hera­
clitus. The past has already been; the future is not yet; and the
present passes. The only real thing in this triad is the present,
and its reality is flowing constantly by. On such evidence, Hera­
clitus declared that motion alone is authentic, motion as symbol­
ized by fire which he took to be the basic texture of matter. No
man can swim in the same stream twice, he is supposed to have
said; Cratylus, his disciple, said that no one can swim there even
once. Heraclitus thus proposes a philosophy of radical dynamism
and pluralism. It stands in polar contrast to the cosmic picture of
Parmenides.
Aristotle was too loyal to experience to allow sophistry to rule
on the real and to validate these extreme views. Despite their ar­
gument, they are out of touch with the rhythm of daily life
which discloses both permanence and change and does not ratify
a view of the world as either wholly fluid or wholly fixed. The
problem is to find a suitable definition of motion that will agree
with this experience which the true science of nature must ex­
plain rather than explain away. Such a definition Aristotle
formed in terms of the twin concepts of potency and act.
Potency and act are so intimately interlaced that they should
be unraveled together. Act, in the broad sense, is synonymous

44

Philosophical Physics

with existence; to be actually something is not to be an imagined
something. Kant pointed out that there is not a cent more in a
dollar truly existing than in a dollar conceived by the mind. But
the dollar existing is an actual dollar. Our wealth is proportioned
to it, to the money we own and not to the riches we imagine.
Potency is the capacity to be actual. It has the meaning of pos­
sibility, an aptitude for existence rather than the existing itself,
a readiness to be influenced by a cause. Shopping downtown, a
person has a real capacity to be at home, and later on in the day,
he will be actually there. The water in the Ohio river has an ap­
titude to be in the rain clouds, and if the evaporating heat of the
sun is turned its way, some of it will actually be in the heavens
by nightfall. The acorn is potentially an oak tree, and the parts
of a car in a Ford storage plant are potentially an automobile. Be­
fore a radioactive substance emits an electron, it must have the
potentiality for so doing, otherwise the emission would be impos­
sible. Potential energy is energy poised and ready for action, like
a lion crouching for a kill.
The difference between potency and act is the gap between a
capacity and the fulfillment of that capacity. Both are real things.
Both refer to existence. The actual is that which is; the potential
is that which can be. To discover their deep meaning has formed
the historical career of genuine philosophy, and their importance,
appearing in full dress at the level of metaphysics, cannot be
printed boldly enough. Because they are so basic, they are elusive
and have given rise to numerous blunders of a far-reaching char­
acter.
Potency is not a simon-pure logical concept, as Northrop sug­
gests nor, as Santayana puts it, a mere name invented to disguise
our ignorance. It is a real thing, though not actualized. If it were
not real, it could never be a source of the actual. The match has
a real capacity for being struck, or the actual striking could not
be real either. The airplane has a real capacity for flying, other­
wise it could never leave the ground. If the potentialities of our
parents were mere figments of an imaginary world, a]] of us are

Motion and Its Principles

45

dream stuff. And if the skeptic declines to believe that atoms
have a real potentiality for destroying civilization, why does he
discuss the problem of atomic energy control?
Before the loam is dug by the farmer, it has a real capacity to
be spaded. The solid coral of a Pacific atoll has no such potencies.
Oxygen has a genuine aptitude for union with hydrogen, silver
does not. The potencies of things, especially in the experimental
disciplines, are in a large measure the way in which we identify
them and divide them off from one another. They are thus real
and objective. Energy, the power to do work, assumes a deeper
meaning when it is remembered that power is a potency. Inertia
is likewise a way of saying potency; and inertia, passivity, the
controllable, are alone enfranchised in the empiriological world,
where potency, far from a purely logical or nominal convenience,
is considered in a deep and genuine way to be more real than act.
MOTION IS A MIXTURE OF ACT AND POTENCY

The actual is that which is. The potential is that which has the
capacity to be actual. Through the bifocal lens of these two reali­
ties, philosophical physics can now recognize motion for what it
is. Aristotle says, “The fulfillment of what exists potentially, in
so far as it exists potentially, is motion.”
Dissecting this definition into its parts provides a conclusive
answer to the dilemma of Parmenides versus Heraclitus. Motion
belongs to a thing only so far as it is in potency, for whatever al­
ready has a perfection does not move to acquire it. Motion essen­
tially involves the production of novelty. Thus iron does not tend
to become iron since it is iron already; and a dog does not tend to
become a dog but to satisfy its animal urges.
Motion thus entails the fulfillment or the act of the thing that
is in potency, but this alone is incomplete as a definition of mo­
tion. It must emphatically be added that motion is the act of the
potency only as far as the thing moved is still in potency. Why
this clause must dominate the definition is clear from another ex­
ample. Marble has a potency to be a statue, and oxygen has a

46

Philosophical Physics

tendency to unite with hydrogen. The fulfillments or acts of
these potencies are a statue in one case and water in the other.
But both the statue and the marble are actual beings. Far from
being process, they are more the terms or completions of the mo­
tion. So potency and act are not fitted together to form motion
like the shingles on a roof. Taken simply, they are not enough to
define what motion is.
Motion is the act of being in potency as far as it is in potency.
As Aristotle writes: “The actuality of the buildable as buildable
is the process of building.” Had he simply said “actuality of the
buildable” or “the act of a potency,” he would not have defined a
process but its completion. When the buildable is no longer build­
able but built, it is a house not potentially but actually; a house is
“the actuality of the buildable.” Likewise, when the rusting of
iron is considered as a process, it goes on only so long as the iron
is oxidizable, as opposed to being actually oxidized, and when the
iron is worn away by the process so that the capacity for oxidiza­
tion ceases, the motion likewise comes to an end.
Motion is not act, and it is not potency. It is really a mixture
of the two. What is in motion is partly in act and partly in po­
tency, and this twofold character which it owns will lead to some
tremendous consequences in developing the philosophical science
of mobile being. As far as the moving thing has made progress
toward its term, it is in act: as far as this process is not complete,
the moving thing is in potency. Before a house is finished, it is in
various stages of being partially built. But the stages are not mo­
tion, any more than motion is simply the sum of its positions. As
far as the house is being built, there is a gradual character to the
process. The house does not leap out of a void. And if a traveler,
leaving New York, could arrive in London instantaneously, he
would in some way have to be in New York and London at the
same time since an instant, like a point, has no before and after
within it. Motion in the proper sense is a continuous process, and
empiriological physics acknowledges this fact by the stress which
it leans on time factors. The house that is in process of building,

Motion and Its Principles

47

the ocean-goer en route to London, and any other thing that is
moved has to take a longer road than the instant provides. As far
as such moving things have advanced to their terminal point,
they bespeak that reference which motions make to act, but as
far as this point has not yet been fully attained, the reality of po­
tency still asserts itself. Potency is a kind of drag that the moving
thing must overcome. Whatever progress the thing makes toward
act records the various stages of its success. Potency thus shows
itself as a separating and plural factor in matter, an element of
division and discord.
Motion is midway between potency and act. A thing in motion
is neither potential, lacking all entitlement to being, nor is it ac­
tual, possessed of its ends and not inclined to a movement that
would acquire them. That a man works for a living does not
mean that he has nothing on which to live; he may not be rich,
but he need not for this reason be in utter poverty. The failure
to do justice to that midpoint between the capitalist and prole­
tarian extremes is one of the fallacies of dialectical materialism.
When the astronomer plots the position which a star will occupy
five minutes hence on the cross hairs of his telescope, he does not
use the purely potential as his datum; what is actual in the pres­
ent position of the star is an index of what the star will be doing
in the future. The astronomer must consider both the potential
and the actual. Motion is their go-between.
WITHOUT ACT AND POTENCY, MOTION IS ABSURD

Ripened by the sunlight of potency and act, the philosophical
science of nature may now weather the Heraclitean-Eleatic di­
chotomy. Parmenides emphasized only the actual, failing to see
that being can also be potential. Heraclitus completely overlooked
the actual, making for a universe of indeterminism and pure po­
tentiality.
The truth runs squarely on the center lane. Parmenides said
that nothing comes from being, and if being is simply actual, he
is right. But something can and does develop out of being as far

48

Philosophical Physics

as it is potential. Motion comes From potency, not From act.
Within limits, Heraclitus was also right. A constant state oF
change besets things as Far as they are potential. But motion like­
wise involves the actual, and what is in act, to the extent that it
is in act, does not change. IF there is no actual character to mo­
tion, no being that moves, then movement becomes the move­
ment oF nothing and would be rendered just as impossible on
Heraclitean principles as in the philosophy oF Zeno.
Parmenides and Heraclitus were by no means the last oF their
breed, and it is a timely task to reflect anew on their truths and
on their errors. Heraclitus stalks through recent thought in men
like Bergson, Santayana, Spencer, Hegel, Whitehead, dialectical
materialists, the existentialists, and the whole chorus oF natural­
ism From Alexander to John Dewey. The reduction oF reality to
static categories and algebraic Forms is the general tendency oF
empiriological physics and oF its interpreters like Russell and
Carnap, who dilute their final account oF reality into logical and
even linguistic Forms. Potency and act are at the heart oF the hier­
archy in our universe and in the realistic report oF it by genuine
philosophy. Such a hierarchy is not admitted into philosophies oF
pure motion or in the approaches, more typical oF the empirio­
logical temper, which are dominated by the equality sign and by
the equivalence oF action and reaction. Potency cannot be added
to potency, attaining act as a sum. Act is on a higher level, in­
vested with a degree oF being that potency cannot claim.
Empiriological physics, it was said, seeks to measure the real
by quantitative techniques, but quantity is not the equivalent oF
motion. It is on a different rung in the ladder oF abstraction where
motion is absent and only the static remains. How then does em­
piriological physics define motion? Poincaré depicted it in terms
oF a differential equation oF the second order—-a mathematical
account. The empiriological physicist generally views motion in
terms oF a series oF positions, encouraged by Hume’s verdict that
causality is simply a succession oF states. But a series, a sequence,
positions—these are not motion. Motion is not positions but be­

Motion and Its Principles

49

tween them, and a series is a disconnected thing, like pearls on a
necklace. Such a mathematical embrace of matter neglects the
dynamic heart that throbs in motion, and this is the reason why
strict empiriological physics suggests the staticism of Parmenides,
who began with a principle that was preconceived instead of tak­
ing experience in the raw. In the theory of relativity, where in
driving our car, for example, it could be said that the street is
moving relative to us or we are moving relative to the street, mo­
tion becomes a matter of relations, and it is impossible to say ab­
solutely whether anything is moving at all. In this connection,
the empiriological physicist sometimes forgets that he is only
measuring reality and that it is dogmatism in its densest form to
equate the metrical with the existent.
ART AND NATURE ARE OPPOSITES

The philosophical science of nature is interested primarily in nat­
ural motions, and in this light it is of paramount importance to
decide what nature and the natural are all about. Nature is often
taken in a wide sense to include the whole mineral, plant, and
animal universe, and the term “Mother Nature” is but the poet’s
testimony to this usage of the word. But nature is not taken in
such a setting here. Individual things also have claim to the title
of nature, and common speech bears out this fact by referring to
the nature of man, the nature of a dog, the nature of iron, water,
a pear tree, the nature of the intellect and will and emotions. For
a long time, the empirical disciplines went by the name of natu­
ral history. It is this second usage of the term as applied to indi­
vidual things, that is important here.
Like so many other things, the meaning of nature can be best
illumined by playing it against its opposite. That opposite is art.
To forge anew the distinction between nature and art is perhaps
the central problem of the twentieth-century philosophical sci­
ence of nature. What do we mean by saying that art imitates na­
ture? Where does art part company with nature?
Velasquez painted a famous picture of King Philip of Spain

50

Philosophical Physics

upon a horse. Philip and the horse were living beings in a given
time and place, but what is the relation between the originals
and the representation on dead canvas? The painting never was
Philip himself, but only a picture of him. Philip was a man, en­
dowed with a life-giving principle that we call a soul and inte­
grated as a result into a unity and self-possession that we define
as personality. He had something from within himself, an ability
to think about his own being and to determine his own actions.
He was thus not entirely the algebraic sum of forces acting on
him from the outside. If this were true, if his being were deter­
mined completely from without, it would be nothing in itself,
and being nothing, he would certainly never have existed, let
alone rule a kingdom, command an army, and attract an artist.
Much of this analysis could also apply to the horse if animal soul
is substituted for human soul. For even though devoid of thought
and of freedom, the horse is likewise not completely determined
by outside forces. In that case, the horse would be nothing in it­
self and hence nothing at all. Philip and the horse have this in
common that they have something from within themselves.
But what about the picture by Velasquez? Analysis discloses it
to lack the inwardness that marks its subject matter. In its status
as a picture, it is nothing but the mechanical arrangement of a
series of pigmented solids on canvas. The chemist would an­
nounce that the colored surface is an aggregate of molecules
bound together by mechanical forces. If sand could be colored
and the various grains patiently juxtaposed on a table top to rep­
resent a man and a horse, a similar effect could be produced. A
picture is but a mosaic on a microscopic scale.
What is important in the analysis is that the picture does not
own the organic unity and wholeness of the original beings.
There are no interior bonds between the molecules of the pig­
mented surface as there are between the parts of a living body.
The picture qua picture has nothing from within itself. It owes
whatever reality it owns as a picture to forces acting on it from
the outside, coercing the parts into their proper position. A being

Motion and Its Principles

51

like Philip or the horse is not fashioned by the painter. A series
of beings is merely juxtaposed. Having no unity from within it­
self as a picture, the picture derives its unity from what is extrin­
sic to it. It is easy to see how truly Aquinas spoke when he said of
a golden vase that it is truer to call it gold than to call it a vase.
At this point, it might sound premature to say that the parts
are outside the picture too. Later discussion will beam a stronger
light on this, and it need here simply be noted that the parts are
not combined like the soul and body of man, where there is mu­
tual compénétration. Since the parts of the picture are separated
from each other, they are obviously outside each other, so that
the picture cannot be called a whole, a unity, a being in the
proper sense; therefore the parts lie outside the reality of the pic­
ture, just as the furniture of a room does not form the walls but
stands exterior to them. In general, nature is inferiority, and art
is exteriority.
But what about the beholder of the picture? How does he re­
late it to nature?
It should be remarked simply that the artist, by carefully order­
ing his medium from the outside, creates the impression of real­
ity for the man and his horse; and the more perfect he is an artist
the more perfectly he can represent his subject matter with pig­
ment. He depends on the beholders to cooperate with him, using
their insights into what a man is and what a horse is in order to
appreciate the painting that the art has provided. Without an
idea of man derived beforehand from nature, the spectator could
never get such an idea from the picture. The art could never por­
tray alone what it means to see, feel, taste, touch, think, will, and
experience emotions. Without an idea of life, the horse would re­
main a dead patch on dead canvas, unassociated with any mean­
ingful thing beyond itelf.
A person congenitally blind can never get a remote idea of
what color is, even when skilled in the mathematics of spectros­
copy. To be appreciated, art must be related to the original, to
life and nature as understood from within. Servicemen on Ta­

52

Philosophical Physics

rawa, after the island was taken and made so peaceful that even
movies could be shown, used to wonder about the attitudes of the
natives in a labor battalion who were allowed to see the films. For
example, what did they think, in their tropical background, when
they saw pictures of falling snowflakes? It turned out that in
American mess halls they had seen machines produce a chipped
and frosty type of ice which they linked to the falling snow in
the picture. How otherwise would they even have known what
snow is?
No matter how well a dog is acquainted with its master, it can
never recognize his picture.
What the spectator does in viewing the Philip of art is to bring
to the appreciation his own idea of man derived from elsewhere.
The full unity of the picture, by contrast to the sheerly mechani­
cal union of juxtaposed parts on canvas, thus comes to art from
the logical order. As in the making, so in the appreciation of it,
the principle of unity and being comes from the outside. John
Dewey says as much when he writes that “with the perceiver, as
with the artist, there must be an ordering of the elements of the
whole that is in form, although not in details, the same as the
process of organization the creator of the work consciously expe­
rienced.”1
Art, for both the creator and the beholder, has its principle
outside itself. Philip and the horse had such a principle from
within.
But if this is good reasoning, how can art be anything at all in
view of a prior verdict that what is completely and inertially de­
termined from the outside is nothing? The answer involves the
apparent paradox that art is never pure art. It is simply a rear­
rangement of nature. Logic is never pure logic and purely formal;
and the real picture is not an ontological zero, deriving every­
thing from the painter who made it and from the beholder when
it is appreciated. Pure art would be pure nothing in itself since
1 Art as Experience (New York, 1934), p. 54.

Motion and Its Principles

53

its total reality would be owed to the agent producing it; it would
be entirely outside itself and hence something contradictory. Art
for art’s sake is a principle of subjectivism. The artist must draw
upon nature for his materials; it is from nature too that he derives
his ideas. The artist simply replants in nature ideas that he has
plucked from it, and it is in this sense that Aquinas realistically
explains the principle that art is an imitation of nature.
But an imitation is, after all, an imitation. An imitation flower
is an artificial flower. Art cannot be a perfect imitation of nature
because the artist must use nature as his medium, and such a me­
dium limits the purity of the art, while at the same time guaran­
teeing, through the natural parts that comprise it, that the work
will wear claim to being. Composed of natural parts, a work of
art is supported from becoming a pure nothing emerging from
pure subjectivity. Its objectivity is from nature. Its “subjectivity”
is from art.
This brings out the fact that nature has a wider ambit of mean­
ing than its use to describe man, a horse, or any other animal.
Every plant has a nature charged by its vegetative soul. Elements
and compounds all have natures, as Chapter 6 will display. Iron,
copper, water, salt, sugar, kerosene—all are invested with dis­
tinctive natures. They all have something from within. Each has
a certain electromagnetic character, a definite specific gravity, a
melting point of its own, and especially in the case of the kero­
sene, a fixed point of combustibility. Each tastes differently and
acts differently. When each is exposed to sunlight, it selects cer­
tain wavelengths of the incident radiation and reflects others.
Thus copper absorbs all the sunlight except the wavelengths in
and near the yellow band of the spectrum; it has a brownishyellow color. If the empiriological physicist insists that the cop­
per has nothing from within but, measure for measure, simply
gives back what is put into it in obedience to the fact that action
and reaction are equivalent, the consideration of his arguments
must be postponed to the discussions of efficient causalty. Here
it is enough to point out, with promise of later proof, that the ele-

54

Philosophical Physics

ments and compounds of our universe have natures that make
each an original thing, acting and reacting in styles determined
not entirely from without but also from a selective principle that
can be only within.
Just as nature stretches not only to life but to the mineral
world, so art, as used in the foregoing example, was employed in
a narrower sense than it actually can boast. Art is not only fine
art, like music, sculpture, painting, and literature. It can be a lib­
eral art like logic, which aims at correctly organizing thought. It
can above all be a mechanical art, the entire area of human pro­
duction. Carpentry is an art, so is shoemaking and all the other
trades. Farming, driving a car, running a lathe, hitting a golf
ball, mining coal, cooking, sewing—all of these are arts. In all of
them man imposes something on nature; man determines nature
from without, casting it according to the image and likeness of
his own thought. Art, in general, may thus be defined as the pro­
duction of any exterior work by the mind and will of man.
A simple analysis could show that all the arts have in common
with the case of the picture that they organize nature from out­
side it; their principle is extrinsic. All the arts are limited by na­
ture which yields their ideas and by nature again which affords
them a medium to shape. Like any other pure art, a perfect ma­
chine, say a device for perpetual motion, would be a nonentity
entirely since its whole reality would be exterior to it, leaving it
a perfect zero in itself. Thus while nature limits the artist, it also
sponsors his aims by providing whatever stability, permanence,
and objectivity his work possesses. Marble is the natural part of
a statue, and iron, of a stove. The statue of Venus de Milo has
survived passing time not because of art but because of the sta­
bility of its natural parts. In this light are Augustine’s profound
words to be understood that a pure picture (pure art) of a horse
would be a false horse; and a tragic drama becomes a false play if
it is a true tragedy.
Aquinas neatly boils down the exteriority which art implies by

Motion and Its Principles

55

his insight that art exists for man, who is outside of it. Man is its
end and purpose. Its principle is not in nature but in man. The
same statements could be made about the machine which is sim­
ply a work of art in the mechanical order.
But how is nature itself to be defined? Inspecting the word
reveals that it comes from the same stem as “nativity” and there­
fore has the meaning of birth or being born. Physis, the Greek
work for nature and the parent of our word physics, means
broadly the same thing. If a corsage of gardenias is buried in the
springtime, a plant will sprout up surely enough, and it will later
bear gardenias. But they will not be in the form of a corsage. Art,
as in the artifact of the corsage, has no tendency to reproduce it­
self. Nature has the meaning of the innate, and what is natural
has tendencies of its own and from within itself, impulses that
are not all imposed on it inertially from without. Art has no tend­
encies as art; it lacks a final cause in the outer order. The garde­
nias have tendencies; the corsage as such does not.
In a more formal sense, Aristotle defines nature as “a source
and cause of motion and of rest in that to which it belongs pri­
marily in virtue of itself and not in virtue of a concomitant attri­
bute.” By calling nature a source and a cause, Aristotle simply
portrays the fact that the action of a thing is not due entirely to
outside forces but that the mineral, the plant, the animal, man—
the subject responding to such outer factors—-contributes some­
thing of its own to whatever results; the nature in question has
tendencies of its own and is not indefinitely pliable to outer
agents that would mold it. Such a thought, that nature is an
identity with itself and not with what is wholly outside, is under­
scored by insisting that nature is primarily in the thing that has
it; it is there by virtue of its own power, it is not an accident.
Hence nature is not ingrafted into a preëxisting subject by forces
acting from without; it is not like champagne held in a container
not itself, by a cork exterior to both. It would be more correct to
say that it is the subject. Far from being an attribute, it is imme­

56

Philosophical Physics

diately itself and, so to say, in itself. It has an interior, original,
independent, and ultimate character that does not inhere in a
preceding subject or derive from a higher transeunt cause.
Nature is a principle of action and of rest. It is a source of ac­
tion and of stoppage, of movement and of repose. As long as the
sun beats down on the copper wire, the brownish-yellow color
will be reflected. But after dusk, the reflections will cease. It is
the same copper that has reflected the color and ceased the re­
flecting. The reflections are not due to one force in the copper
and the absence of them to another. In such a case, there would
be two beings to the copper rather than one. The same thing that
is in motion can, at a different time, be at rest, and the principle
in the two states must be unitary. Copper in a natural state and
copper at white heat in a blast furnace is the same copper. How
empiriological physics confirms this view will be apparent in the
sequel (Chapter 6).
Chance should likewise be clashed against the notions of art
and of nature. But this subject has many implications in the sci­
ence of today and will be discussed separately in connection with
final causality.
This contrast between art and nature, apparently so long, is
really too brief to emphasize its importance. It is not simply
dragged from the mortuaries of medieval thought. Perhaps in no
age has the distinction between art and nature been more timely
than in the mechanical epoch of contemporary man. Empirio­
logical physics, for instance, discloses its affinity with art by its
profound attachment to the principle of inertia which states that
a thing is entirely determined from the outside. This is precisely
how a realist defines art as art, and hence when the empiriologi­
cal physicist reports on matter, it is in the light of art rather than
of nature that his words must be weighed. His inertialism
prompts him to view the world as a mechanism or a work of art
to be understood entirely in terms of parts; he is authorized by his
method to explore a thing only in terms of other things constrain­
ing it from the outside. He aims to control the world, imposing

Motion and Its Principles

57

his command upon it exactly as other artists marshal their media.
As every artist must study the laws of his medium, so the theo­
retical part of empiriological physics is concerned to know the
medium in order to get more out of it, “to get results” as prag­
matism says, to build bigger and better bridges and power plants
and radar ranges and atomic devices for peace or war.
Empiriological physics does not envision nature as having a
principle within itself. Art is what nature becomes, in the limit,
for the empiriological method when it is taken purely. The
philosophical science of nature, on the other hand, is interested
in nature primarily to know rather than to bring it under control.
What nature has from within man must obey rather than com­
mand. Just as there is no pure art, so there is no pure empiriolog­
ical physics in practice, and it is because of this mixed character
which the empiriological approach takes on in the concrete that
it provides a rich mine of data for the philosopher to refine. Mak­
ing the distinction between art and knowledge in the purest
sense empowers the philosopher to explain the difference be­
tween his own approach to reality and the one used so brilliantly
by the empiriological physicist. Empiriological physics views na­
ture as art; philosophical physics views it as nature and therefore
as it is. The one seeks primarily to control, the other to acquire
speculative knowledge.
flow this character of empiriological physics seeped into west­
ern thought appears in the historical origins of the so-called scien­
tific movement. It got up steam at the time of the Renaissance, in
Europe. But when the leading spirits of the Renaissance, revert­
ing to the Greek world, were shouting “back to nature!”, it was to
ancient art rather than to nature that they eventually went. The
older account of nature, with its inner tendencies and its fixed
objective laws, slowly withered into a fossil, and nature, con­
sidered as art, came to replace it as a living attitude. Nature grew
to be studied more and more by interfering with it rather than by
taking it as it is, until at last Heisenberg called attention to this
fact of interference as the trick that makes empiriological physics

58

Philosophical Physics

to be experimental; he put the interference principle at the very
base of empiriological physics in its dissection of matter.
Empiriological and philosophical physics are like two hunters
in the forestry of nature. The first can bag its game only by kill­
ing it; the philosophical science of nature seeks to capture its prey
alive.
NATURAL MOTION INVOLVES MATTER, FORM, AND PRIVATION

The philosophical physicist is concerned with the motions of na­
ture, and the concept of nature as a source of motion is simply
a synonym for the more precise term changing being (ens mo­
bile') which the philosophical science of nature has for its only
interest. Since any branch of philosophy must aim to discover
principles, the question may now be asked as to the principles of
natural motion, just as the law of inertia is the principle of motion
in art.
A principle is that from which anything flows in any manner
whatsoever. Principles must be ultimate, mutually exclusive if
there is more than one, and potential in what follows from them.
A principle may be a cause, as neutrons moving with the proper
speed produce fission in the uranium nucleus; or it may not be a
cause, as a point is the principle of a line.
The concept of a principle since Kant’s time has been stripped
of its ontal status and is today viewed more as a regulative idea.
Philosophies, like logical empiricism, want to reduce empiriolog­
ical physics ultimately to a body of rules for verification, and
theories, viewed as tools for predicting laboratory results, have
tended to become only rules for multiplying experiments and
guiding the experimenter. In this sense, the empiriological physi­
cist speaks of the principles of least action, of least time, and even
the principle of gravitation. Principles at best mean laws for the
empiriological physicist, and a law is simply a generalization of
inductive results rather than, like a truly scientific principle, an
account of origins, terminations, and the processes transpiring in
between. A law is always expressed in equational form, and in

Motion and Its Principles

59

this static dress it is not suited to clothe the real mobility of mo­
tion.
A principle of motion corresponds to the facts or factors re­
sponsible for its origin and especially for its end result. The an­
alysis of motion unveils three such ultimates in the thing moved.
First, motion involves the arrival of something new in the uni­
verse, and this emergence of novelty cannot be sufficiently
stressed since it marks a point where the mind must abandon em­
piriological physics with its apparatus of equations, and call on
philosophical physics for an answer. A billiard ball wins a new
position by being rolled to the other side of the table. Oxygen
gains a new status in being when it is united with hydrogen. All
change involves this element of novelty, and without it, as John
of St. Thomas emphasizes, there is simply no change or motion
at all.
Secondly, there must be a subject which changes. For if there
is nothing that has changed, quite obviously no change has taken
place. Without a subject, as without the novel element, motion is
not only unexplained, it is impossible. A billiard ball to be rolled
across the table must be a billiard ball; it must be something.
Oxygen, if it is to be transformed into water by union with hydro­
gen, cannot be a non-existing thing.
The third principle of motion is the subject’s original lack of
this new perfection which the element of novelty represents. Ob­
viously the billiard ball must not be in the new position to which
the motion is to displace it, and oxygen cannot be made to unite
with hydrogen if it is already combined with it. If the ball is al­
ready in its new position and the oxygen is already united with
hydrogen, no motion occurs. And hence, for this negative reason,
the factor of lack or, more technically, privation, must be reck­
oned among the principles of motion. A principle has to do with
origins, and privation is necessary if motion is to originate.
The subject of motion Aristotle labeled matter, and the perfec­
tion which the motion begets is called form. Because of the jum­
bled meaning of these words in a tongue like English where the

60

Philosophical Physics

spirit and style of expression are no longer set by the classic
temper and where old words have shed their old meanings, it is
important to pause upon the definition of matter and form, as
Aristotle depicted them. Matter is not simply what is massive and
weighty. Form is not the same as shape, and above all it is not
the misty, almost mystical thing that its opponents accuse it of
being. Form is simply the term of motion, and when this term has
been admitted, it is all that the philosophical physicist means by
form. Matter is that out of which anything is produced in the
motions of nature. Matter is the raw stuff of process, whether the
motion be the compounding of elements, the digestion of food,
the manufacture of shoes, the splitting of an atom, or the carving
of a woodcut. After all these processes have run their course,
something remains of the original subject, but something has also
been changed. When the various motions of nature have been
completed, there is something new in the universe, but there is
also something that has persisted. This new factor, consorting
with the original raw material and corresponding to something
novel in the matter’s being, is called form.
Form is not to be confused with shape or figure, despite the
first impulse to treat it thus. Even though, as in the case of the
woodcut, it may have this meaning, there are other cases where
much more has been changed than the sheer geometry of the sub­
ject. Digested food, for example, becomes part of us; it forsakes
its character of sugar, tomato, water, and becomes assimilated into
our own being. Sodium and chlorine when united become a new
entity which we know as salt, and in the fission of atoms, it is
well known that the elements are transformed.
There is nothing mystical, supernatural, a priori, or dogmatic
about this matter-form dualism. It was not dreamed up by an un­
enlightened Greek, who let the dummy world of logic dominate
his cosmology or simply softened up the Platonic myths without
destroying their mythical character. Experience and abstraction,
motion and being, all of them team together to form the realism
of Aristotle’s report on change. Admitting it is only to agree that

Motion and Its Principles

61

motion requires the emergence of something new and a subject,
from which the emergent comes, which originally lacked the new
reality.
Privation is likewise the prey of misunderstanding as a prin­
ciple of motion. Whereas matter and form are essentially in­
volved in change, privation is only accidentally implied. It is not
a positive reality, and the negative cannot be part of the essence
of anything. So motion involves privation only in an accidental
way. It simply happens that the subject does not have the form
which the motion will beget; another being of the same type,
say another billiard ball, might have it. If in the absolute and es­
sential sense the subject could not have this form, motion would
be impossible because the term of the motion itself would be ab­
solutely and essentially excluded from the realm of the subject’s
possibilities. The marble must have been deprived of the figure
of David, or Michelangelo would not have carved his statue. It
would have been given. But the marble, while lacking the chis­
eled figure, had the possibility of being chiseled, and this, for
anyone wishing to go into the technicality of the problem, is
why the principle is called privation rather than negation.
Privation is not simply nothingness. It is a denial or a lack,
within a determinate subject, hence not simply a negation. It is
matter regarded from the viewpoint of what it lacks. But matter
is never without privation. When it has one form it is deprived
of another since its limits are such that it can enjoy only one form
at a time. This is why matter is restless and changing and why
the mind must graduate into metaphysics for the truest satisfac­
tions of philosophy. The contracted character of matter which
forbids it to own more than one form at a time must be taken into
account in philosophical physics. That is why privation, even
though an accidental thing, must be counted among the prin­
ciples of motion.
Form and matter, each in its own way, are often called nature
since they are intrinsic to the thing moved. But nature can also
mean their composition, and this was the sense of the word in

62

Philosophical Physics

the preceding section. Form especially is worthy to be called na­
ture since it determines the matter to be this or that, an interior
and original thing, as the ensuing sections will show.
SUBSTANCE IS A NATURE EXISTING

So much can be said about matter and form in the general sense.
There are various degrees and various kinds of changes in the
world of nature, and it might naturally be suspected from this
that matter and form appear in different kinds and degrees. Such
is actually the case.
There are four kinds of being which display motion and there­
fore recommend themselves to the philosophical physicist. These
are substance, place, quantity, and quality. Substance, as chem­
ical changes show, may be generated or destroyed; place may be
changed by what is called local movement; quantity is augmented
or diminished in the realm of life where things grow larger or
smaller; quality may be altered as water which has different sonic
properties in a solid and a liquid state. Of these six species of mo­
tion—generation and destruction, local movement, augmenta­
tion and diminution, and alteration—only substantial changes
will be treated for the present, with local and qualitative motions
to be explored later and quantitative changes left to that part of
the philosophy of nature which opens the door to psychology.
Naturally the first question is, what is substance and what is
its relation to nature which has been set up as the only stock in
trade of the philosophical physicist. As in the whole of the philo­
sophical science of nature, motion is the frame for the definition,
and substance is not considered, as in metaphysics, by the light
of being. Substance is contrasted with accidents or attributes. Sil­
ver is a substance; its accidents are its color, its specific gravity, its
melting point, its electropositive character, and its magnetic
properties. Water, radium, sulfuric acid, a cow, a man, a neutron
—all are substances. Substance corresponds to the question, what
the being is, and an accident is what the being has. An accident
has thus been called ens entis—the being of a being.

Motion and Its Principles

63

Treated in the climate of philosophical physics as the being of
a thing, substance seems at first sight confusingly like the cause
and source of motion and of rest that Aristotle called nature. The
difference between the two is that nature is a universal com­
munity of a given kind (often called second substance), whereas
substance proper (first substance) is the individually existing
thing within the kind. Thus, all iron has the same nature, but
it does not all have the same substance. Each atom of iron is dif­
ferent from every other atom and does not inhere in a common
all-pervasive nature that would lead to a monism in the world of
iron. In the strict sense of the term, an individual atom like an in­
dividual man has a nature; it is a substance. Similarly of the other
examples mentioned above. Substance for present purposes may
be taken as a nature existing, a nature that is no longer universal
but invested with all the requisites to be an independent existing
thing. It is being concretely existing.2
Substantial changes involve the generation of a new substance,
the change from non-being to being, and the destruction or cor­
ruption of the old substance, the change from being to non-being.
It is from its changes, substantial and accidental, that substance
is known to the philosophical physicist in his strict limits, and
to explain such changes Aristotle saw the necessity of matter­
form. This dualism- in the substantial order is emphatically not a
doctrine to explain bodily essence but to explain substantial
change. Philosophical physics is not a philosophy of essence but a
philosophy of nature, which is essence viewed as a principle of
operation.
Are there substantial changes in the world? Experience an
swers with an unqualified yes. Certainly there is a much greater
change in silver when it unites with chlorine than when it is cut
and stamped in the mint to become a ten-cent piece. Wood
changes much more when it burns than when it is carved into a
3 What makes a substance individual (so-called signate matter) is be­
ing omitted from the discussions in this book and is usually treated in
psychology in connection with the problem of personality.

64

Philosophical Physics

leg for a table. An atom changes much more when it is split than
when it is heated. And the evidence is very obvious that an ap­
ple changes much more by being digested in man than by its
variations of color in the autumnal sun. Clearly there is a differ­
ence among the various changes. In some of them, only acci­
dental properties are modified, while in others the identity of the
original entity is lost, and a new being can be recognized. A sub­
stantial change is a change of substance, and a substance is not
the attribute of the being which is transformed but the very being
itself. This is the best definition which the science of nature can
give of substance, and its fuller elaboration has been adjourned
until now because the philosophical physicist can only work it
out from the changes that matter goes through.
The empiriological temper would not admit the existence of
substantial changes, choosing rather to nail down all the motions
in the cosmos in terms of quantity and local displacement. Parts
are simply rearranged into new configurations. The universe be­
comes a game of Chinese checkers.
In Chapter 6, it will be seen that Aristotelian dualism is re­
quired and mechanism is refuted by the contemporary achieve­
ments of empiriological physics. It may simply be stated here that
the changes in accidents which occur in growth, local motion, and
alteration are not in the same class with generation and corrup­
tion. Substantial changes show not only variations from the out­
side working inward toward the interiority of the changing being
but the reversal of this direction. An accident is directed from the
outer to the inner structure of the being and of its motions,
whereas substance is just the opposite. Accidents and substances
thus cannot be reduced to the same principle, and if a change re­
sults in a new intrinsic principle of operation, a new nature, then
the original substance has been substantially changed. Chemical
changes in the living and the lifeless and nuclear transformations
in nature and in the laboratory—all of these are substantial
changes. The new substances have different principles of motion
from the old ones. They are new beings.

Motion and Its Principles

65

SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES INVOLVE PRIME MATTER

The form and the matter of substantial changes are called sub­
stantial form and prime matter respectively; there are also acci­
dental forms and second matter, which are involved in accidental
changes.
The general discussion of the principles of motion will under­
write the conclusion that matter, as the subject, is the principle
of potency, and form, the term of movement, is the principle of
act. What makes prime matter different from second matter is
that it is not only potency but pure potency.
Why do Aristotle, Aquinas, Augustine, Bonaventure, and
nearly all of the later scholastics agree to the matter-form report
of substantial changei First, because substantial changes occur;
and secondly, nothing can come from nothing.
To account for the second truth, prime matter is required in
its role as the first subject of change. If prime matter were not a
reality abiding through the change and appearing in both the
old and the new beings, substantial change would be a matter of
annihilating the old substance and creating the new. But this se­
quence of annihilation and creation cannot be accepted. If it ac­
tually occurred in nature, it would be impossible to explain the
dispositions which a substance possesses to be changed into this
other determinate something rather than that. Oxygen and hydro­
gen have an affinity for each other, and zinc combines with sul­
fur, though not with gold. These dispositions and determinations,
poised for action in one direction rather than another, would lack
a sufficient reason and be self-contradictory if the ingredient sub­
stances of a new being had to be annihilated and the new sub­
stance created out of nothing.
Something in the original has an influx into the production of
what is new. Otherwise, new substances would be only the suc­
cessors of the old, not their effects’. Hume’s definition of causality
as mere sequence would carry the day in philosophy, and the uni­
verse of modern mathematics would replace the changing phys­

66

Philosophical Physics

ical world studied in the first order of abstraction. Peano, trans­
lating Hume into mathematics, attempted to elaborate a theory of
number in which one number is related to the next lower one in
terms of the unique relation “successor of.” But if substantial
change is not a case of annihilation and creation, then prime mat­
ter must be admitted as an abiding substrate.
Aristotle defined prime matter in two ways. In a positive sense,
he called it “the primary substratum of each thing from which it
comes to be without qualification, and which persists in the re­
sult.” It is the first subject of change, and from it there results not
a substance-accident union but the constitution of the substance
itself which is then ready to receive qualification or accident. It is
not an outside cause, separated from its effect; it persists in the ef­
fect, since it is that out of which the effect is made.
In a negative way, Aristotle described prime matter “as that
which in itself is neither a particular thing nor of a certain quan­
tity nor assigned to any other of the categories by which being is
determined.” It is not a particular thing since it has no actuality;
it is not a quantity since quantity is an accident and can only in­
here in a particular thing; it is not a category since a category is a
determinate something and prime matter is indeterminate—de­
termined by the form which is united with it.
Prime matter is an elusive reality to grasp since there is nothing
like it that could act as its substitute in a full definition. Though
every analogy limps, to suggest prime matter is to ask an analogy
to limp rather far. The best way to exemplify its nature is to take
an instance from the accidental order.
A handful of putty can be shaped into any number of geo­
metrical figures. It can be rolled into a ball, it can be squared
neatly into a cube, molded into a cylinder, an oblong, a model
airplane, the figure of an animal. A hole can be worked into it
until it resembles a doughnut, or it can be squeezed into irregular
form to plug up a hole that worms have eaten into a tree. The
same marble that Michelangelo used for his Moses might have

Motion and Its Principles

67

been used to sculpture any one of the billions of human beings,
animals, and plants which, in various sizes and shapes, have ap­
peared or will appear on this globe.
The putty and the marble may be likened, but likened only,
to prime matter, and their various configurations to substantial
form. Nothing could be more fatal to the matter-form account,
however, than to lift these analogies from the window cases of
example designed to lead the mind to abstract the substantial
principles. Matter in the cases of the putty and of the marble is
second matter (composed of prime matter and substantia] form),
and the form is an accidental one, far removed from the form that
goes to make up a substance. Prime matter cannot be imagined;
and like all potencies, it can only be understood from its actuali­
zation accomplished by form.
Prime matter must be pure potency in order to explain the dif­
ference of being which substantial changes produce, differences
from the core out and not merely in the accidental order. Gen­
eration is the change from non-being to being, and corruption is
the reverse. If prime matter were not pure potency, a substance
would be an aggregate.
Prime matter is incorruptible; it subsists through all changes.
Unable to exist by itself since of itself it bears no actuality, it is
incomplete and indeterminate. But it is not simply nothing. Its
reality is as a potency, pure potency,—potentially any material
thing that is but none of them by itself. Prime matter is in the
substantial order since it is a constituent of substantial being and
is called its intrinsic cause like form. Like form also, it is an in­
complete substance, and the two incomplete substances together
compose the complete one.
Since prime matter is the fundamental changeless element in
change, it can only have been created. None of the species of
motion which the philosopher of matter explores can account for
its origin. It is not a product of change but a principle. Substances
are generated and corrupted; prime matter is not. This changeless

68

Philosophical Physics

element cannot be produced from a preexisting matrix since there
is nothing more potential than pure potency, from which it could
emerge.
SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES INVOLVE SUBSTANTIAL FORM

Form is the first act of the prime matter. In a substantial change
like the fission of uranium into barium fragments, the change of
iron and oxygen into rust, and the furious fuming and spitting
when potassium is dropped into water to form potassium hydrox­
ide—in all these the identity of the initial being is lost and a new
identity emerges. The prime matter has lost its old form and
gained a new one. In the examples from the accidental order, the
putty and the marble could be cast into an indefinite number of
shapes. One shape differs from another by a principle that is
called its accidental form. In a parallel but only analogous fashion
within the substantial order, one being differs from another by
means of its substantial form.
Substantial form, according to the slant taken on the world in
the physical order of abstraction, is the term of generation. It is
defined by motion not by quantity. In metaphysics, form is con­
sidered as the principle of being which makes a thing what it is;
there it is a broad synonym for essence or quiddity just as the
philosophic science of nature often interchanges the words nature
and form. In a secondary, indirect, and improper sense, the philo­
sophical physicist may consider form not only as the term of gen­
eration but in the light of its origin since substantial change does
not begin absolutely but from a matter here and now invested
with a form that the change will overcome.
The primary meaning, however, is not as the origin of genera­
tion but as the term since the office of form is precisely to inform
matter, terminating it so to speak. Matter is directed to form as
to a final cause which will later be more clearly defined. More­
over, it is only as a term of generation that the philosopher of na­
ture comes to a knowledge of form since both matter and form
are recognized from substantial changes. It is in these senses and

Motion and Its Principles

69

for these reasons that matter is properly defined as the subject of
generation and form as its term. Form is that which makes iron
iron; it makes the elements .and compounds what they are; the
vegetative and animal souls are forms of their respective matters
and the soul of man must likewise be considered as the form of a
matter.
When a form is acquired in a substantial change, it is educed
from the potency of the matter. Similarly, when a form is lost, it
reverts to the potency of the matter to emerge anew whenever ex­
ternal conditions conspire to cause its reappearance. Such a stand
may sound like an appeal to magic rather than to realism in the
light of modern misconceptions of form. Yet it is only in such a
view that the appearance of substantial novelty in our universe
can be accounted for. To resume the analysis of the putty which
must still be kept within the limping body of example, it may be
asked where the spherical form existed while the plastic mass
was actually shaped like a cube. Since a sphere can be rolled the
next minute out of what is not spherical, the putty is capable of
rotundity. The spherical shape comes from such capacities, and
when in turn it disappears, the putty is still really and truly capa­
ble of being rolled anew into a ball. The same principle applies,
divested of its accidental references, in the substantial order.
Otherwise, the novelty involved by changes from being to nonbeing, and vice versa, is impossible.
Augustine held that forms were actually precontained in the
matter in a kind of seminal existence (rationes seminales^)—a
hint, it has been said, of modern morphological evolution. Such
a view where forms are actually present within the matter does
not account for the substantial unity of the composite being, and
it churns substance into an aggregate. A much shallower opinion
of how novelty occurs in the world is found in contemporary
scientism. There, cashing in on the Cartesian currency that all
mutation is but local motion which is now called displacement,
the opinion thrives that novelty results from the simple shifting
of particles, those of atomic and subatomic dimensions and finally

70

Philosophical Physics

pure quantities. Differences become a matter of differently re­
lated points, in a coordinate system of geometry, where the sub­
ject of motion is ultimately quantity alone, ft is as though a
woman could change the kind of her powder by simply shaking
the box.
In a mobile universe principled by pure quantity and its dis­
placement, nothing new could ever result, and hence no motion
could occur and no mobility be detected. In this far-fetched cos­
mos, everything must remain what it is and do nothing but, in an
extremely mysterious fashion, change its position. But novelty is
not explained in being when only quantity and place are al­
lowed to change. If a ton of coal is shoveled into a bin, it is still
coal on arriving at its destiny and it would still be coal if a half
ton were taken away. Local movement and quantity are not
enough to account for any novelty if they and they alone exist.
If newness occurs in experience, something that was present be­
fore has vanished and something new has been gained. In the
homogeneous universe of mere quantity where only position
changes, the same homogeneous something that is in the new
position was there preceding the change by the very premise of
homogeneity, and no change has really occurred. There must be
something more than the displacement of the same by the same if
novelty is real. Act and potency must be involved, form and mat­
ter. Something goes out of existence and something comes into it.
Something goes from act to potency in corruption and from
potency to act in generation.
No actual precontaining of the new can explain novelty nor
explain why the old form has vanished. This is but another way
of stating that the new form must emerge from pure potency
since it is not actually precontained; it must return to pure po­
tency when it gives way through another change. No references
are being made here to the external agents which act upon sub­
stances from the outside and cause the substantial changes to oc­
cur. The whole question is here the intrinsic principling of mo­
tion in substantial changes, where the change is an inward

Motion and Its Principles

71

change, a change of being. The form of the new substance is said
to be educed from the prime matter, and the old form returns to
the bosom of matter's pure potencies. Lest eduction be taken as a
verbalism to cloak a medieval ignorance, it simply states, as
Aquinas remarks, that ‘‘something becomes actual that was pre­
viously potential.” It is tempting to use the contemporary term
emergence as a synonym for eduction, but the shadows of con­
fusion have closed in around this word in the doctrines of “emer­
gent evolution.”
Form and matter must be immediately united, and on this
point, the Thomistic position diverges from that of Suarez who
envisioned the union as occurring through a medium. The me­
dium wedged in between the matter and the form would have to
be actual, if it differed from the matter, and hence would have a
form of its own. But one form cannot be intrinsically united to
another when both preserve their actuality, any more than a car
becomes one with the street by being parked on it. The Suarezian
union of actual forms, the one mediating, the other terminating
the substantial composition, would be only accidental. The result
would not display the intrinsic unity characterizing substances
and changing when they change.
The problem of the plurality of forms was one of the big ques­
tions which beset the middle ages from the controversy between
Abelard and William of Champeaux in the twelfth century to tire
fuff decadence of scholasticism at the time of Ockham. The issue
was alive in Aquinas’ day, and in meeting it, he departed sharply
from the Franciscan scholastics like Bonaventure and Alexander
of Hales and even from his own master, Albert the Great. Only
when matter and form are immediately and intrinsically united
do we have one substance. The doctrine of the plurality of forms
would seek to argue that things like man, the maple tree, the
elements, and the compounds are simply aggregates of many sub­
stances, like a tapestry which is an aggregate of threads. But
substances show, each in its own way, an immediate and an in­
trinsic union, a unity of the parts. How this immediacy of union

72

Philosophical Physics

is possible can only be explained by the fact that matter is pure
potency, and any act that it owns must therefore be united to it
immediately. Between pure potency and any act there is no mid­
dle sround that could mediate their intrinsic union.
Substantial form, like prime matter, is an incomplete sub­
stance; like matter, it is also an intrinsic cause of mobile being. It
is neither generated nor corrupted since these changes occur only
in the composite. Substances are generated and corrupted but not
the principles of change.
Natures do not change; substances do.
Matter and form are concreated; neither can exist without
the other (except in the case of man where the form, being spir­
itual, cannot be educed from a material potency nor return there
when it can no longer exist in the matter).
But if form and matter must be created, how can any change
of substance actually have occurred after the first instant of crea­
tion when a world burst into being? How explain all the subse­
quent motion which the facts of experience verify beyond doubt?
Was this not the ultimate question that prompted Augustine to
posit his “seminal reasons”?
The only possible explanation is the definition of motion in
terms of potency and act. Forms are not generated or corrupted,
but they are brought from a potential to an actual condition and
vice versa. New forms were in the potencies of matter from the
moment of its creation, and they are educed in time into an actual
status.
This is one of the natural mysteries that the mind may con­
tinue to meditate but never exhaust. Potency and prime matter
cannot be imagined or even directly known by intelligence. They
can only be apprehended from act. A curtain will always be
drawn over the direct view of them which would permit a
glimpse of all that matter could achieve. By intelligence—never
by our imagination—we know that prime matter is and we reach
an indirect knowledge of its nature by way of negating what act
is. Therefore, we in a sense overcome our own ignorance by ac­
counting for its reasons.

Motion and Its Principles

73

Widely speaking, no form ever returns to pure potency, in
the sense that the fact of its existence has altered the face of the
actual and left its trail for all time upon the universe of existing
things. Motion is not neutral; all of it makes a difference in the
cosmos. Succeeding chapters will show that all motion is not so
much a return to an origin as a development toward an end. In
this respect, it is much more natural and rewarding not to look
“backward” into matter but “forward” into form.
An emphatic note in connection with substantial change is
its instantaneous character. In this respect, substantial motion
differs from all others and is not properly motion at all. It is bet­
ter called change (mutatio). Because a new being comes into
existence, it cannot be evolved from its privation in gradual steps,
any more than being can come from nothing on a graduated
scale. Substantial change involves an abruptness that other mo­
tions do not require. In originating substantial changes, alteration
and local motion are always necessary, as will be later seen, but
they are more in the manner of dispositive influences. They are
continuous processes, shortening but never bridging the gap be­
tween the old substance and the new. For the rupture is there.
The new substance is not divided from the old by a scale of more
or less but by a change of inner principle. This is another indica­
tion that matter must be pure potency since any act united with
it would make all changes affairs of addition and subtraction,
never permitting that change of inner being which substantial
transformations exhibit.
Finally, the form of a substantial thing is present wholly in the
whole and wholly in every part of it. The whole of an iron atom
is iron, and every part of it is iron. The so-called virtual presence
of elements in compounds and of subatomic particles in atoms
will be discussed in Chapter 6.
SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES PROVE MATTER-FORM DUALISM

The proper and convincing argument for the matter-form dual­
ism is substantial change. Such changes occur, and nothing can
come from nothing. These are the twin principles on which the

74

Philosophical Physics

proof depends. There are, however, some confirmatory evidences
that, if they lack pointedness, may nevertheless carry a certain
expository appeal:
1. Material substances reflect unity and multiplicity. There must
hence be principles of unity and multiplicity within them.
The first corresponds to form, the second to matter. Wood, for
instance, has a certain extension, an extraposition of its cellu­
lose molecules in space. Yet all of the wood is wood. An atom
of helium has quantity, but it is all helium.
2. Material substances display both passivity and activity, and
there must be a corresponding principle for each. Passivity is
ascribed to matter and activity to form. Water has a certain
reality from within which makes it what it is; yet it is also
passive, capable of being drunk, evaporated, frozen, decom­
posed, combined with carbon to form organic compounds.
3. Time and space are often differentiated. Time reflects the
dynamism of things and space the drag that resists change.
Time, runs this argument, has the flavor of form and space of
matter.
4. There is a determination (form) and an indetermination
(matter) in everything. A material thing is something, but it
is always struggling to be something else.
5. There is a principle of limit (matter) and of limitlessness
(form) in corporeal reality. Man is fully man in individuals,
but individuals are multiplied so that any one individual does
not possess the full perfection of the species.
Such arguments are exceedingly suggestive in their own way,
but the way does not lead necessarily to matter-form dualism.
The arguments show, to use a Whiteheadean term, that matter is
bifurcated. But they are not of themselves sufficient to rank with
substantial change in proving the dualism of matter and form.
This doctrine is drawn from motion, not from essence or quan­
tity or even being as the metaphysician studies it. The metaphysi­
cian uses arguments similar to all of the five listed to introduce
his doctrines of potency and act, of essence and existence, of sub­
stance and accident. Unless the arguments are based on the

Motion and Its Principles

75

pivotal issue of substantial change, they do not localize substance
which, from the standpoint of the philosophical science of na­
ture, can be established only by motions.
Thus, in the arguments above, unity and multiplicity, time
and space, passivity and activity, determination and indétermi­
nation, limit and what is limited—all show the bifurcation of
matter, but by themselves, they do not report whether atoms or
molecules are substances or whether these might not be just the
mechanical aggregates of fundamental particles inhabiting a sub­
atomic world. The problem of the continuum (1) involves in the
proper sense more the divisibility in quantity than motions in
substances. All such arguments are, in a realistic view, simply
aspects of the basic argument when they are convincing, and
though often used, it is in the larger context of motion that they
should be taken.
ATOMISM AND MECHANISM ARE INERTIALISMS

The dualism of matter and form, to put it mildly, is not generally
accepted. In its stead, modern philosophy has tended to waver be­
tween mechanism (atomism) on the one hand and dynamism
on the other, attempting by such principles to deal with the prob­
lem of change.
Mechanism and atomism are ancient doctrines, dating back
to pre-Aristotelian philosophies like the views of Anaxagoras,
Anaxam.ander, and Empedocles, and ripening into classic form
with atomists like Democritus and Epicurus. Democritus, for in­
stance, held that everything is made up of tiny individuals called
atoms, differing among themselves in shape and size and forming
our qualitative universe by chance differences of order and po­
sition. In mechanism, atomistic or otherwise, a thing is viewed as
a machine without intrinsic unity and with all its principles, art­
like, outside it.
Descartes’ mechanism takes its rise from his definition of body
in terms of extension and of all corporeal change in terms of local
movement. Prompted by Descartes, Gassendi revived atomism as
a philosophy, and the atomic theory, though developed inde­

76

Philosophical Physics

pendently of earlier philosophical atomism, carried off such great
stakes in chemistry that atomism as a philosophy seemed to
win strong academic support. Clerk Maxwell, Helmholtz, and
Du Bois-Reymond, empiriological scholars of the first magnitude,
were among the leading advocates of mechanism in the nine­
teenth century.
At the turn of the present century, Max Planck originated the
quantum theory which eventually showed that not only matter
but energy as well could be studied as a phenomenon of particles,
which he called quanta. Atomism was migrating from chemistry
to empiriological physics. In the twentieth century, the study of
matter by breaking it up has reached such a kindling point that
the atom itself was finally split in laboratories and even over
cities, and today's empiriological signposts lend credence to the
belief that the subatomic particles are being experimentally di­
vided.
All of the successes of this atomism in both chemistry and em­
piriological physics might seem to sanction the mechanical view
of reality which the empiriologist, by adhering rigidly to meas­
urement, is compelled to adopt. Quantum physics is puzzling in
this respect because it has concluded that exact measurements of
individual particles are hopelessly out of range and that the only
reliable account of nature can be given in terms of aggregates,
where individuals are grouped in a statistical whole. But quantum
mechanics still amounts to an atomism by regarding wholes in
partitive terms. All processes are referred to smaller ones. What
happens in the visible world is only a forest of microscopic trees,
and the microscopic in turn is explainable in terms of the submicroscopic, making matter into a labyrinth where the paths be­
come narrower for man to tread but never run out. The claim of
quantum mechanics to dispense with mechanism because of the
rank it assigns to wholes cannot be made good for another reason.
Like the rest of empiriological physics, it is still mechanistic in
viewing whatever is and whatever moves as entirely the result of
outside forces. As empiriological in temper, it cannot proceed
otherwise.

Motion and Its Principles

77

The hylosystemists incline to shrink philosophical physics to
fit the empiriological world picture, and in this respect hylosystemism is but a philosophical mechanism dressed in scholastic
terminology. This view maintains that empiriological physics
studies corporeal substance and descends to the fundamental con­
stitution of bodies. It forgets the difference between the methods
of the empiriological and philosophical attacks on the universe,
and it overlooks almost wholly that the philosophy of nature is
not primarily concerned with body and its constitution but with
motion and its principles.
Hylosystemists want philosophy to pitch its camp on empirio­
logical terrain, without remembering the prescientific experience
(contrasted with experiment) that is the beginning of all knowl­
edge and that gives the philosopher a positive and critical pres­
tige with respect to the empiriological physicist. If experience is
banned as a source of knowledge, even metaphysics must become
either a continuation of empiriological disciplines or an a priori
dogma like that of Kant or Plato. Hylosystemic mechanism
thrives on the confusion between the philosophy of quantity and
the philosophy of nature, and like the grosser mechanisms it
eventually supplants the view that matter is nature with the
dogma that matter is art.
DYNAMISM REDUCES MATTER TO THE IMMATERIAL

Dynamism differs from atomism by tending to reduce the ma­
terial to the immaterial. Its final report declares that the universe
is made of points, the inextended, motion, energy, field. Hera­
clitus was the greatest of the ancient dynamists, and his thoughts
are countersigned, in many respects, by the twentieth-century
systems of Bergson and of Edouard Le Roy.
Leibniz, reacting to Cartesianism, distilled out a doctrine
known as monadology in which the cosmos is resolved into in­
extended substances called monads, each of which is different
from every other and ah of which are close to living. Boscovich
held that matter is composed of indivisible points, and Kant took
a similar view. Hegel was a thoroughgoing dynamist by his view

78

Philosophical Physics

that the universe is but an idea in pure motion. His philosophy is
usurped by Marx and Lenin, who viewed matter as possessed of
its own contradictions and hence capable of accounting for its
own motion, like an explosive mixture in a cosmic carburetor.
Herbert Spencer, by his doctrine of evolutionism; Samuel
Alexander, by his view of all things as the radical motion in a
space-time matrix; Santayana, impressed only by the fertility of
things and describing matter only in terms of its forward tensions;
Whitehead, for whom all reality is formed of monadic units
called “actual entities” and the world is shot through and
through by a “creative advance into novelty”; emergent evolu­
tionists, like Jan Smuts and Lloyd Morgan who view matter as
essentially spontaneous or emergent—all of these men are dynamists. For whatever is of interest to the philosophical physics,
Dewey and his naturalistic school are likewise dynamists, pre­
senting the universe as a continuum of ongoing tensions where
life is ever “perilous” and “precarious.”
Ostwald in the last century is the classic example of the view
that all is energy, a statement that Einstein was to solemnize in
his theory of relativity a half century later. In this respect, rela­
tivity physics diverges from quantum physics, and one of the
major empiriological struggles of the age is to seek which of these
two systems is fundamental or to try to transcend them both. The
space-time continuum, even in its expression, reflects its variance
with the quantum system where the leading idea is the discrete
energy packet. Whitehead acknowledges his debt to Einstein’s
theory, and Alexander, though apparently independent of both
thinkers, has constructed a system strikingly like that of the rela­
tivity continuum of space-time.
MECHANISM AND DYNAMISM ARE INADEQUATE

Mechanism and dynamism have the general common denomi­
nator that they deny substantial changes, either reducing them
to local motion or calling them an illusion of mind. Experience
refutes both for that reason. Dynamism, in general, has caught a

Motion and Its Principles

79

glimpse of the truth that motion involves the novel, but it cannot
account for the persistency factor in change. Mechanism in gen­
eral sees the abiding ingredient of change, but it cannot explain
the production of the new. As a result, neither accounts for mo­
tion. Change becomes a shifting of position; in some cases as in
that of Leibniz not a reality at all but only an appearance; in other
cases as in those of Hegel and Marx the union not of contrary
principles but of contradictory ones; sometimes the sheer burst,
with no reason, of a material spontaneity called “emergence” or
“creative advance”; in still other cases as in that of Einstein an
affair of relation or relativity. However subtly they may be de­
fended, these views fall by their own weight either because they
are extremisms as philosophies or because they are the children
of empiriological method that cannot survive outside it.
It should be noted that there is no unanimity of opinion among
modern thinkers on the things that count most, the ultimate
reality on which their thinking bears. Mechanism and dynamism
are in polar contrast. Chapter 6 will put forth evidence to show
that such fluctuations should not be a scandal in empiriological
physics but are a fate, natural and normal to the method it em­
ploys. The real scandal of our times is to inflate empiriological
physics into a philosophical science.
Error is more than often a truth gone madly to extremes, and
this is the case with mechanism and dynamism in philosophy.
Mechanism emphasizes the inertial aspect of things and dyna­
mism, matter’s activity. It is a kind, of vindication of the matter­
form dualism that it keeps its feet on the firm ground of experi­
ence and can hold in each hand all of the truths which dynamism
and mechanism propose while avoiding their unfortunate ex­
tremes.
A material substance is bifurcated. The same material sub­
stance is both active and passive, dynamic and inert. Form points
up the truth which dynamism has detected, while the reality of
prime matter can account for the successes of atomism. Modern
philosophy is at the same impasse as Greek thought before Aris­

80

Philosophical Physics

totle’s time which faced the dilemma of Parmenides and Hera­
clitus. Aristotle did not compromise, patching up a soft mechan­
ical union between his opponents. He dug deeper into things
than either of them and found principles of potency and of act
that could unite both. In a kindred dilemma on the modern scene,
the answer to the conflict of atomism and dynamism will only be
found by probing deeper than sensism and scientism are capable
of searching. Beneath the senses and beyond scientism lies the
genuine dualistic answer of a genuine realistic philosophy.

Suggested Pleadings
Aristotle, Physics, Bks. I, II.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bks. VII, VIII.

3
Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends
“whatever is

moved is moved by another”

When man has discovered and defined motion, he is a long way
from closing the book of nature as a finished story. Like a hunter
tracking his game until he finds the lair, the mind presses after
the fact of motion until it yields the secret of its causes. Man is
truly a cause-seeking animal, unable to wonder at the difference
between night and day without asking its reasons. What produces
the lightning and thunder, the swing of the tides, the shooting
of the star, the cry in the forest? What is responsible for the uni­
verse as it now is? Such are the questions that man puts to nature,
confident that nature and not his own fancies will answer them.
Man does not close his dealing with motion when he defines it,
any more than he solves a robbery without asking, Who did it?
Motion is the fulfillment of the potential as far as it is the po­
tential; or, taking the dualism of nature as an account not only of
substantial change but of all movement, motion is the process of
the eduction in matter of a form that the matter hitherto lacked.
But what brought about the actualization of this new form,
changing the material thing from privation to possession? And
why did this change take place? The answer to the first question
is the definition of the efficient or motor cause, and the second
question is settled by defining the final cause. These two causes
are said to be extrinsic, as opposed to matter and form which are
intrinsic causes. They will be treated in order in the present chap­
ter which will be kept more or less introductory in character.
81

82

Philosophical Physics

With an ear toward modern difficulties the two extrinsic causes
of motion will again be a theme in Chapters 7 and 8.
The logic of the mind, as it looks beyond the moving thing and
settles upon the necessity of an efficient or motor cause for all mo­
tion, is a rigorous one. If anything could move itself, the mind
would be relieved of its worry about the mover; but if nothing
can move itself from within then there must be a mover acting
from the outside. The reasoning from a movement to a motor
thus pivots upon the question of whether a moving thing can
move itself. If it cannot, then motion must come from what is
not itself, from a mover outside of it. There are two ways of show­
ing from motion the absolute necessity of an outside mover.
That a form is united to matter by any motion, neither the
form nor the matter can explain. The matter, to repeat, is always
potential, and in the case of prime matter, it is purely potential.
It cannot act to bring about its union with form because it is not
actualized itself until this union has come to pass. Form is also
powerless to account of itself for its dualistic union with matter.
It is the term of the movement in its proper sense, and it would
have to exist at the beginning of the movement to originate the
change. Since motion can come from neither of the components
within the thing moved, it must of necessity be the outcome of
an extrinsic agent.
In an even more basic sense, a proof that a moving thing re­
ceives its motion rather than produces it can be drawn, with a
magnificent simplicity, from the definition of movement as the
fulfillment of the potential as far as it is potential. At the risk of
tautology, motion may be described as the reduction of a thing
from potency to act or as the actualizing, in the dynamic sense, of
a potency. The point is that at the origin of every movement
there is a potency which is a capacity to be actual but not the ac­
tual existence.
Now if a moving thing were self-moved, the potential would
have to be actual while at the same time potential—actual be­
cause it produced the motion and potential because it was being

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

83

moved. Self-motion, involving the potential that was not potential
and the actual that was not actual, would violate the principle of
non-contradiction. If a thing were its own cause, it would have to
exist before it existed to do the causing. If a thing were its own
mover, it would have to be actual before it were being actualized,
arrived at its term before it even started from its origin. A Cali­
fornian could never travel to New York if he had to be there
before he started. Self-motion, like self-causation in general, is
absurd and impossible. Since potency is a form of non-being, self­
motion would turn the non-being into a positive and causal
agency.
This means then that if movement occurs, as it obviously does,
the moving thing must be moved by something outside of it or,
as it is put in more polished form, “Whatever is moved is moved
by another.” In philosophical physics, this is a statement of the
principle of causality, the mover being called the motor cause.
The metaphysician of course must probe the nature of a cause so
that it can be applied to all being, mobile and immobile, material
and immaterial. But the philosophical physicist is unable to get
above the water line of motion. For his purpose, a cause is always
a mover, the agent that brings about the union of matter and
form which neither of the components can explain.
There is a frequent illusion about the mover’s influx into mov­
ing things, an error that is best symbolized in Newton’s metaphor
that the universe is a giant clock wound up in the beginning
by God and then abandoned to unwind by itself. The unschooled
mind of the average man is oftentimes persuaded that a mover
is necessary only to provide an initial impulse, like an archer
shooting the arrow, and that once the motion has started one
need not seek another mover outside of it.
But this view, both in classical, Galilean-Newtonian physics
and in the frequent homespun philosophy of the ordinary man, is
seriously in error. So long as the moving thing has not yet reached
its term, it is still in potency and cannot actualize itself. It cannot
confer a form which it has not yet gained, spending its riches be­

84

Philosophical Physics

fore it earns them. There is no credit in the bank of nature.
Thus, if the line AC represents the trajectory of a moving
thing and the point B divides it into two segments, the movement
is just as inadequate to account for its own coverage of BC, the
last lap of the trajectory, as for its coverage of AB, the first part
of its path which begins with rest. The archer moves the arrow,
and when his motion ceases, the dart is carried forward by con­
cussions in the air and dropped earthward by so-called gravity.
Every moment of its motion requires a mover as much as the ini­
tial moment does. By day or night, in summer and in winter, in
large changes or in little ones, a mover is always required wher­
ever there is motion and for every moment that it endures.
MOTOR AND THE MOVING THING ARE IN CONTACT

Motor causality brings with it a number of subsidiary issues.
Hume reduced causality to sequence in time, and in general,
modern thought has followed his lead by insisting that what the
philosophical science of nature calls an effect simply follows
after the so-called motor, without causal influence between them.
In this caricature of causality, the so-called cause is completely
extrinsic to the effect with no dominion whatsoever over its mo­
tion.
From a slightly different direction comes another stream in
modem thought which likewise puts the cause too exterior to the
effect and even favors action at a distance (actio in distans^. Can
a moving material thing affect another without direct or indirect
contact? Can a body at one point move a body distant from it,
without going through a medium? Ordinary experience would
give a negative answer to these questions, but a dissenting vote
is cast by empiriological physicists like Faraday and Maxwell and
by philosophers like Bolzano and Kant and, to a certain degree,
Leibniz. To a great extent, action at a distance is also favored by
the quantum theory and by statistical physics in general. In
Bohr’s theory of the atom, for instance, there is a jump of elec­
trons from one point to another, without an intervening medium.

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

85

The whole quantum theory from Planck to Heisenberg and
Schroedinger seems to sanction the discontinuity of matter. Em­
piriological physicists likewise single out the so-called spontane­
ous character of radioactivity as an indication that matter does
not move through media but suddenly and as though there were
no motor contacting it.
Yet coming down from Descartes in his spirit though not in
his words, there is also a tendency in modern views to make a
cause too interior to the effect. Though he exaggerated when he
went beyond a criticism of empiriological methods, Meyerson
argued very brilliantly, that the inquiring mind tends to identify
cause and effect. To bring this thought to a point, it might simply
be observed that the empiriological physicist adopts the equa­
tions of mathematics for his language. When he relates cause and
effect by equation, it is clear that in the limit there is no more
reality on one side of the equality sign than on the other. In fact,
the two quantities can be transposed. Empiriological physics in­
habits an equalitarian universe.
Wedged between these opposing extremes which overdraw
the exteriority or the interiority of the motor is a third alternative
which discerns neither distance nor overlapping between a motor
cause and its moved effect, but contact. The truth of this third
report can be tested by refuting the two extremes.
Plume’s opinion topples when compared to experience. There
are simple sequences in nature, as shown by two cars which move
bumper to bumper on the highway because they are moving at
the same speed; and there are causal sequences as when one car
is pushing another, not only following it in time but influencing
it in its motion. The Plumean view, taken in all rigor, does not
account for the difference between these cases, the one a se­
quence, the other a causation.
It is also an easy matter to dismiss the logic that would identify
cause and effect, by turning it loose against the relentless facts
of experience. Such an identity would lead to a static universe,
where difference is at most only an illusion. No true novelty

86

Philosophical Physics

could emerge because there would be nothing in the cause that
did not appear in the effect. Equating the pair means to deny all
differences and to restore Parmenides to the philosophical throne.
Finally, there are several arguments which stand with common
sense against the claims o£ quantum indeterminism that there are
leaps in nature, and against the views of philosophers like Kant
that a motor can move its subject without contacting it.
First of all, action at a distance presumes the existence of a
vacuum, and a vacuum cannot possibly exist (Chapter 10). It is
thus not possible to have that mediumless influence which action
at a distance requires. A second attack in the same direction can
be mustered from the limited character of matter. The forms of
mobile realities are limited. They cannot soar out of their dimen­
sional captivity to act upon what is distant. Man, of course, gets
outside himself, in a way, when he thinks, recognizing other as
other. But lower forms are much more limited in character, be­
ing determined to one place at one time. If a distant thing is
really moved by a motor which is not compelled to pass its causal
influx through an intervening medium, there is really no causal
influx into the thing to be moved, and if it is moved, it would
have to move itself. Belief in action at a distance is based upon a
false notion of what a limit is and how substantial form is re­
stricted to its own matter. Denying contact between motor and
moved, it must reject their causal influx if it is at all logical.
Simply stated, action at a distance would make the motor so
extrinsic to the moved thing that a Humean universe would re­
sult, and it would not be possible to have that intrinsic conjunc­
tion between motor cause and moved effect which any motion re­
quires. Matter is limited and must stay within its bounds. Moved
and mover are not separated, transcending quantity like spirit.
They are together.
EMPIRIOLOGY TENDS TO FAVOR EVOLUTION

The mind cannot linger long on the problem of how matter is
moved without asking what, if anything at all, provides the ini­

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

87

tial motion. Is motion possibly eternal, and if so, does not its
eternity explain it, absolving man from a search after an Un­
moved Mover? The problem of the eternity of matter and of
the creation of the world was one of the critical questions in the
middle ages, dividing the Greco-Arabic Aristotelianism from the
Platonic preferences of the Latin West. How the universe got its
start and how it came to be as it is today is also a favorite theme in
modern thought.
The study of the origins of the universe is called cosmogony,
and an outline of modern directions in this field will make the
realistic solution of the problem, when it is outlined, more sig­
nificant and compelling.
Long before Darwin published his famous views on biological
evolution in The Origin of Species (1859), the idea of prehistor­
ical transformations in the cosmos was abroad. Kant outlined a
so-called Nebular Theory in which he traced the present consti­
tution of the solar system from a pristine nebula of hot gases
which for some reason or other cooled and contracted. At first, aS
in steam that is cooled, the gases became liquefied, and then, like
ice, turned into solids. Laplace, a famous empiriological physicist,
wrote out the details of this process and gave Kant’s theory an
empiriological eminence. For that reason it has become known
historically not as the Kantian but as the Laplacian Nebular The­
ory.
The Laplacian idea worked well enough in describing the gen­
eral motions of the heavens, but there were certain non-uniformities (especially the distribution of angular momentum among
major planets) which indicated to empirical physics that a
primeval nebula could not account for the present universe. Such
facts pointed to an agency outside the solar system as its originator
and led to the so-called Planetesimal Hypothesis of Chamberlin
and Moulton. This theory held that the sun was originally with­
out planets. Then for reasons which were never quite explained
by Chamberlin and Moulton, a colossal star passed very close to
the sun and, by the mutual attraction of gravity, pulled out of it

88

Philosophical Physics

myriad masses of matter that began to rotate about the parent
body. They were fragments of a solar explosion and were called
little planets or planetesimals. As time went on, the theory goes,
gravity began to exert its pulls, and the planetesimals in various
points of space tended to draw together until they formed the
huge solids which constitute our present heavenly bodies.
A third popular account of how the solar system reached its
present form is the Tidal Theory of Jeans and Jeffreys. They
agreed with Chamberlin and Moulton that a giant star swept
close to the sun, which at first had no system of its own, creating
a terrific solar disturbance not in the form of explosive fragments
but in the form of a huge tidal arm. This fiery mass then disinte­
grated with time into the planets, their satellites, and other bodies.
Jeffreys has since decided that there was not only a near collision
between the sun and the tide-raising star but an actual crash.
Finally, in very recent days so much so that at this writing the
chief source is magazine clippings, some American astronomers,
among them George Gamow, have decided that the universe
could have been formed inside an hour from some pristine gases,
making it seem as though a form of the Nebular Theory is about
to be revived.
It is not necessary to decide among all these theories from the
angle of philosophical physics, nor is it simply an evasion of the
question to remark that all of the accounts are questionable and,
so long as man was not on the scene to witness them, will always
so remain.
After the solar system has been accounted for, at least hypo­
thetically, geology begins its story about an evolutionary earth
that went through various stages of fire and ice, floods and erup­
tions, before it reached its present state. Empiriological physics
believes that it can find the date of the earth’s origin from a birth
certificate of radioactive deposits. From a quantity of lead which
is the end product of the uranium series of radioactive elements,
it can be estimated how much uranium was necessary to have
formed the present residue, and, because of the temporal con­

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

89

stants in radioactive decay, how long it took the original uranium
to do the job. Strata of rock formations also indicate to the ge­
ologist that the earth was not always as it now is and that by a
fabulous margin its age exceeds the traditional 6000 to 8000
years.
All of this might well be true, but it has always been theory,
still is theory, and always will be theory in contrast to the certain
truth which the philosophical science of nature attains.
It should also be remarked, just to complete this topic, that the
biologist now comes upon the empiriological scene after the evo­
lution of the mineral cosmos has been made a tenable theory and
proposes that life has also gone through evolutionary stages. It is
biological evolution that has received the most attention in the
twentieth century and has won the most approval from the em­
piriological wing. However, where mineral evolution might be
admitted, though never as an established fact, there are strong
arguments against complete biological evolution—the crossovers
from the mineral to the plant to the animal and to man. But this
is not the proper place to discuss biological evolution which can
be best studied in connection with the psychologist’s definition
of life.
Here, only mineral evolution—the origin of the solar system
and the stages of geological development—can be an issue. And
in solving the issue, it may be observed that although such a cos­
mic evolution may well provide the empiriological physicist with
a backdrop for unifying and classifying his data, it can never en­
joy the dignity of a settled fact or a certain principle, and in all
logic, it must be excluded from the philosophic science of nature
as mere guesswork in however academic a form. For the philoso­
pher, evolution is more of a problem in logic than in philosophical
physics and will always involve the fallacy of affirming the conse­
quent. It is, for example, illogical to proceed like this: A is mortal,
if A is a man; but A is mortal; therefore, A is a man. A might be
any plant or animal which, like man, is mortal and the conclusion
would be: A plant (or animal) is a man. In similar fashion runs

90

Philosophical Physics

the argument for evolution: The data measured in astrophysics
and geophysics can be organized into a system if evolutionism is
true; the data can be organized into such a system; therefore,
evolutionism is true.
THERE IS A PRIME MOVER

Hence, in a study of cosmogony another path must be sought
wherever certainty is to be attained. This rigidly scientific ac­
count is less detailed and from such a standpoint more impov­
erished than the empiriological hypotheses, but, what is most
important about it, it is certain and true. The empiriologist, en­
gaged as he is in the infinite regression, never really attains to
origins and absolutes. He pushes the history of the cosmos to an
early date but cannot push it to its origins. What moved the
nebula in the Laplacian Theory? Or what, in the Planetesimal or
Tidal Theory, accounted for the sun and the star which ap­
proached it? If empiriological physicists answer these questions,
as some of the more recent astrophysicists like Gamow have at­
tempted, they make the causal agent out of some preëxisting ma­
terial and view this material in turn as formed from a still earlier
material, applying the law of inertia, which they exploit in the
laboratory, even when they are chronicling the stars. There is an
infinite regress in the empiriological account of origins and hence
no account of origins at all. Nothing in an infinite series has the
power to originate anything.
How there can be any originality in the empiriological universe
has been a frequent question throughout these pages, and one of
the theses of this chapter is that empiriological method alone can­
not possibly account for novelty. A belief in evolution is incom­
patible with a method that admits not the advancement of one
stage of process over another but only their stark equality. Em­
piriological physics must make its choice: either evolutionism
or equalitarianism. It cannot include both in its strict world view,
for they are as different as the quantity which empiriological
physics studies and the motion which it ignores.

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

91

Unlike empiriological physics which is interested in metrical
structure, philosophical physics is primarily occupied with the
question of what moved matter to its present form. There are two
principles which solve the question, and one of them has already
been established with the other to be copiously confirmed in
later chapters. The first is that whatever is moved is moved by an­
other which this chapter has shown, and the second is that in a
series of movers, subordinated to each other, there cannot be a
regression into infinity. It remains simply to apply these prin­
ciples to the present problem.
Since self-motion is impossible, for the potential not being ac­
tual is not an agent, it can be taken as certain that motion can
occur only where there is an extrinsic motor cause. If this motor
in turn is in potency and cannot be the agent of the motion un­
less it is moved extrinsically, a series of motors is necessary to
account for the motions of experience. But this series cannot be
infinite. So somewhere, there must be an end to the chain of mo­
tors, an Unmoved Mover, free from potency and thus plenary in
act. Without this Mover, nothing could ever move.
It should be pointed out that this terminated series of movers
is not reckoned by going backward through the past and eventu­
ally reaching a Deistic and Newtonian God. One might call this
a horizontal search after a Prime Mover.
The real logic reposes in the fact that here and now, in the
motion of a typewriter or the pelting of the rain, a Prime Mover
is required, exerting His motive power in the very present over
anything that is moved. This is the vertical search for the Un­
moved Mover.
But this proof which ends the series of movers does not end
the questions which it raises. Though to account for present mo­
tion, this Unmoved Mover must be operative here and now and
was operative when any motion occurred in the past, there is still
a question of when motion actually began. Aristotle held to the
eternity of motion, and for that reason until the thirteenth cen­
tury he was rejected by western theologians who preferred to

92

Philosophical Physics

think philosophically in terms of Plato, with his preference for
creation in time. It was Aquinas who really settled this problem.
Though creation in time is known by revelation, it cannot be
established by reason. This can be shown by an examination of
the Prime Mover as well as by a reflection on what He moves.
From all eternity, God had the power of creating the world, and
from all eternity He could have created it. On the part of the se­
ries of moved things, there is none of them as we search back
through the past, which requires that it be the first thing moved
and that no other motion could have preceded it. Hence, the
Prime Mover could have moved matter from all eternity. That
he did not is known not philosophically but theologically, not
by reason but by revelation.
The term creation has entered into this discussion, but it takes
more than the science of nature to discuss it. The philosophical
physicist deals only with motion, the fulfillment of the potential
as potential. But creation involves something infinitely more than
this. It requires no preexisting potency on the part of the ma­
terial object. It is not properly motion or even mutation. It is the
production of something out of nothing (ex nihilo sui et sub­
jecti). The Prime Mover, as the metaphysician clearly proves,
did not have a raw material to actuate. He was not simply a
Mover like river water floating a barge downstream. He was a
Creator. If matter is completely caused, completely contingent,
completely moved, completely unable to explain itself, then
everything in it was produced from an extrinsic agent, and if
everything, absolutely everything about it, was produced, then
it was produced out of nothing.
The imagination balks at all this, and reason has to solve the
question by its own forces. In an age that thinks in terms of
images, man puts them aside only with difficulty. He would like
a picture of the absolute. But the imagination breaks down in
tracing back the history of the cosmos. It wants a preëxisting mat­
ter and a preexisting time as a matrix to picture the fact of crea-

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

93

tion. The intellect states problems and asks the imagination to
answer them. Knowing where to look for an answer is the only
way of finding it.
"every agent acts for an end”

In the philosophical science of nature, three sides of the larger
picture have thus far been framed. Matter and form, intrinsic
causes, are united by an extrinsic mover. But the question arises,
why does the motor cause produce this union of matter and form
rather than that? Why does the rain fall instead of spouting up­
ward toward the sun? Why does the fire transfer heat to a chim­
ney instead of absorbing more heat from the bricks to grow hotter
and hotter while the chimney is cooled? The probing of these
problems swings open the study of the fourth and last of the
causes, that of finality.
Baldly put, finality means purpose or aim. It represents the
telic cause (from the Greek word, telos, for end), and the study
of it is teleology. The final cause is the purpose for which the
agent acts or the goal toward which a nature marches. Philosophi­
cal physics is distinguished by the fact that it alone studies all
four causes. The formal answers the question what; the material,
the question out of what; the efficient, the question, whereby;
and the final, the question, why or wherefore? The principle of
finality, as the philosophical science of nature considers it, means
that everything which moves tends toward a goal, or simply that
motion is not aimless.
To define the meaning of a name and then to ask if reality
owns any counterpart to the term is a part of sound method. The
initial inquiry here is to search out whether there is such a thing
as end, aim, purpose, goal, and true determinism in the move­
ments of nature, and if so, to what extent. The dissenting opin­
ions of various thinkers may then be hailed into court and crossexamined to sort out the true from the false in their reasoning.
Final causality breeds such mighty questions as that of physical

94

Philosophical Physics

law and the order of nature and the element of chance. It involves
a whole host of modern problems that will be faced in Chap­
ter 8.
The classic form of the principle of finality runs: “Every agent
acts for an end.” There are variants like “nature acts for the best”
and “nature does nothing in vain.” But these alternate forms,
though synonymous with the first, will be side-stepped in the
following development.
Every mover tends into a goal, and hence intention is another
way of translating the causality of the end. It is indeed a very
apt expression, since the burden of proving that final causality
is real is to advert to the tendencies or aptitudes in a given nature
and to ask why one is actualized, under given conditions, rather
than another. Final causality does not make the tendencies. They
owe themselves to form. But the end determines which one will
prevail under the circumstances. A nature, when moving, intends
these results rather than those. In the literal sense, it has inten­
tions.
The end is that for the sake of which a moving thing moves,
and the principle of finality can be anchored by showing that
natures will move only if they have fixed ends. The dynamism of
the world is not a pure one because it is not indifferent.
The fact of finality in nature emerges from a sketch of what
motion would become without it. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky,
what begins in a falsehood must end in one; what must always
lead to absurdity is absurd. Now if a moving thing had no end
and if it did not lean to this effect rather than that, there would
be no sufficient reason why one effect should be produced from
its efforts rather than another. If water did not tend to boil at
100 degrees centigrade under ordinary conditions, why does it
always boil at this point? A moving thing that did not slant to
one determined end rather than another would be indeterminate.
Any effect ought to be realized from its movement rather than
this one or that one which actually and—under like conditions—
always occurs.

Motion,.Its Origins, and Its Ends

95

At a tier deeper in the proof, it is obvious that a moving thing
that did not tend to one goal rather than another would be neutral
and inert, hence wholly passive, hence not only unable to act
toward this end rather than that but unable to act at all. What
is totally inert and purely indeterminate is, like prime matter,
not even an actual existent, and the denial that a moving
thing has fixed tendencies, when moving, is a denial that it even
exists.
From still another angle, since a tendency is an aptitude or
inclination, whatever did not tend to anything by its motion
would tend to nothing, and the motion of course would never
even start. There would be not only motion without aim but a
universe without motion.
Still another entrance into the science of finality is the conclu­
sion that if a thing did not tend in some directions rather than
others when it moves, it would tend in all directions at once. Mat­
ter would blow up. A pluralism would result since the tendencies,
bidding for expression, would be infinite in number. If a thing
had an infinity of goals, none of them would ever be attained.
The infinite, the indeterminate, the purely passive, and the to­
tally inert will be shown in Chapter 4 to lead to a chaotic universe
which is certainly not the one that man experiences and that his
thinking ought to explain.
Here, as often, philosophical physics accords with the pedes­
trian view that there is order in the world. This is a cosmos, not
a chaos, and teleology accounts for the order rather than, like
modern methods, ignores it. The order of the universe, witnessed
by the experience of men and used to regulate their lives, is a
kind of inductive proof that finality is something real and that
mechanism, which is the opposite, is not. Even the empiriological
physicist makes an undercover bow before this order as a fact, in
spite of his denial of it as a principle. In a universe of chaos, even
empiriological physics would be sucked into it.
The evidence that finality pulses in nature is not just a projec­
tion of man, comparing purpose in his own life with the workings

96

Philosophical Physics

of the world outside that resemble it. The tests are rooted in
motion and in the prerequisites for motion. Intentions reign not
only in man’s activity but wherever there is motion, and for as
long as the motion endures. It is mechanism that warps reality
and projects man into it. It is mechanism that is anthropomor­
phic.
The proof that a moving thing is purposeful does not hinge on
our ability to discern always what that purpose is. Shallower
views of nature have proposed such arguments as the one that
flies are black in order to be better seen and swatted and even that
God put the earth at the center of the solar system bcause its
rational animals are the center of visible creation. Such anthro­
pomorphisms have done much to discredit the principle of finality
and to encourage the secession of the modern mind from the
whole kingdom of speculative science.
Certainly one of the ends of rain is to water the plant life of
the world. Carbon dioxide from animals is breathed in by plants
which in turn manufacture oxygen for their benefactors. But the
principle of finality is not proved from such observations, though
it may be strongly suggested. It is tested by reason, so that if we
are not always able to discover the purpose of a nature’s motions
we are still entitled to say that they are purposeful.
. A universe directed by end is far different from the static
formalism that empiriological method depicts in its mosaic. The
moving world is dynamic, though never purely so. Heraclitus
was a better student of nature than Parmenides. Because the
potencies of prime matter are pure potencies and, as the unity of
substance shows, possess only one form at a time, the world is
always more in potency than in act. It is a world not merely of
inertia and quantity but of tendency and striving. All moving
things are tense with aptitudes or appetites, and their motions are
made goalward by the fact that some are favored more than others
under given conditions. Natures do not do or seek or realize
everything of their potencies at once.

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

97

FINALITY IMPLIES LAWS OF NATURE

The general decision that a moving thing has aim in its motion
and does not obey the law or rather the lawlessness of chaos is
by no means all that finality means in philosophical physics. The
natures of the world spell out the conclusion that their goalward
march is perfecting and progressive and not a degeneration. This
truth follows because nature is invested with its tendencies and
fulfilled by their actualization. For nature is a cause or principle
of motion and of rest. When moved, it responds not as an inertia
or a pure passivity but with pattern and originality and stubborn­
ness. It tends to move in this way rather than that, depending on
outer conditions, like smoke which tends upward on a still day,
and not sidewise. What is a nature has definite goalward tenden­
cies which express and reveal it when it is moved. Nature is de­
fined by its tendencies. We know it by its motions. To be original
is to have definite tendencies, and nature is an original cause and
source. The fulfillment of these tendencies, with the end deciding
upon the ones which a given impact will actualize, is natural
motion. The advance of such tendencies from their potential
status to their actual ends enables a moving thing really to acquire
what it has a natural bias to seek and to possess.
The nature of a thing is thus fulfilled or perfected by tend­
encies actualized. Its motions fill the vacancies in its house. By
being moved, it grows to a greater fullness of its being. It makes
progress as an individual, and where all the individuals of the
world have fixed ends in motion and fulfill their tendencies, the
universe as a whole makes progress too. Natures do what is good,
what is fitting, for them under the circumstances, and where
every nature acts thus, there is a certain good in the universe as
a whole, which is realized.
A tendency of a moving thing toward a fixed end and not to
a merely indifferent fate is certainly a determination, by contrast
to an indetermined web of inertias. On this basis, the philosophi-

98

Philosophical Physics

cal science of nature is a determinism, where the pure (hence in­
definite) potencies of matter are United or de-terminated by form
and where form in turn is de-terminated in its motions by ends.
Sheer mechanical determinism to be discussed later would make
progress impossible by equating causes and effects. But in the
hierarchical determinism seen by philosophical physics, progress
is not only possible but implied.
Form is educted from matter by the motor cause and returns
there when another cause overcomes it. But the vanquished form
has left its footprints behind it, having, while it existed and
operated, moved other beings, herding them onward to their ful­
fillment. The universe is greater, after a corruption, for the fact
that the form existed even for a twinkling moment. The action of
even a fleeting form has entitled it to what Whitehead called
“objective immortality.” And the motor which triumphed over it
fulfilled its own goalward tendencies in the motion, thus enrich­
ing the universe with something greater than what it removed.
A nature’s penchant toward a fixed end under a given set of
conditions is called a law of the nature. There are laws of nature
in the general sense and in the case of the nature of man, the
natural law. Laws are natural appetites, natural inclinations,
goalward tendencies that natures own and that are broken only
at the price of destroying the natures themselves.
A law expresses the nature which, so to speak, has it; in a gen­
uine sense, since a nature is defined by the tendencies expressed
in given circumstances, a nature and its laws are synonymous. To
follow the laws of iron, combining as it does with say, sulfur,
chlorine, or oxygen is simply to be iron, expressing its natural
tendencies. For man to obey the natural law is merely to be true
to his nature. It is to be fully natural. The laws of any nature can
be amended only by changing the nature they are. Iron obeys
the laws of iron, copper the laws of copper, animals the laws of
animals, and man the law of man.
A nature is necessarily subjected to law because it is not in­
determinate. And it is not indeterminate because it has tenden­

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

99

cies. And because it is finalized, some of these tendencies are
actualized by a given agent rather than others.
The ultimate reason for determinism in the motions of nature
is finality.
FINALITY EXPLAINS THE ORDER OF NATURE

The empiriological mind has been hard put to reconcile its plea
for autonomy with the order or uniformity of nature that meas­
urement alone must leave not only unexplained but, today, un­
perceived. The confusion is almost as serious in vocabulary as in
doctrine. With a faith in Hume’s dogma that causality is ordered
sequence and ordered sequence is causality, the order of nature
is taken today to define causation. So-called disorders in nature
are alleged by scientism to be exceptions to the principle of caus­
ality.
The whole problem is as baffling to empiriological physics as
it is to modern logic. Empiriological physics seeks to generalize
its measured facts. For example, Ohm’s law, saying that current
is equal to voltage divided by resistance, is not regarded as a sin­
gle fact, applied to matter at a given time and given place and not
valid thereafter. It is pumped into a general principle, applying,
in the empiriological view, wherever there is electric current.
Such generalizations of measured data are called laws by the
empiriological physicist. They involve a pivotal problem in logic
concerning the grounds for extending a fact, measured several
times and ideally only once, into a generality. How can it safely
be concluded that Ohm’s law measured in Paris in 1960 will
hold in Tokyo in 1961? The empiriological physicist extrapo­
lates his facts, in the framework of nature’s uniformity which he
cannot explain but uses anyway. This uniformity simply means
that under the same circumstances a moving thing will always
move in the same way.
Empiriological physicists are frank to avow that their chief aim
is to predict fact and that their theories are nothing but tools to
facilitate the forecast. Prediction involves the time element, a

100

Philosophical Physics

foretaste of what tomorrow will bring and a faith that the future
will resemble the past. But how can the empiriological physicist,
whose only business is measurement, patrol the area beyond his
instruments to decide about the future or about order? It is here
that empiriological physics must be rescued by a rational knowl­
edge outside itself or sink into a complete skepticism.
Scientism has preferred to sink. But the fact remains that
philosophical physics provides a backdrop for empirical physics
to reinforce its conclusions. The philosophical science of nature
has not retreated to an instrument panel but kept its feet on the
ground of experience. Empiriological physics can be propped up
if it does not care to sink.
To explain the order of nature requires the sternness of final
causes. In the realism of a truly scientific view, a nature is shown
to have tendencies or determinations to a fixed goal in all of its
motions and in every moment of them. These goalward drives
draw out the nature in the same way whenever external condi­
tions repeat themselves. They reveal what that nature is. It is
ordered, determined, fixed by its end which but incarnates the
sufficient reason for the effect which is realized. Such goalward
determinations, which motions reveal and which define a nature,
draw the nature into almost being a synonym for its laws. To be
tin is to follow the laws of tin, reacting under the same conditions
with a fixed valence, a definite melting point, a specific gravity, a
conductivity of this or that magnitude, a magnetic permeability
of so many units; to be tin is to follow the laws of tin, and to fol­
low the laws of tin is to be tin.
Hence, it can be assured that tin under the same set of circum­
stances will always produce the same effects. If a metal did not
produce them, then it would not be tin that was being tested.
A physical law, as the expression is used, is the same in content
as a law of nature but not in form. A physical law is established
in empiriological physics and states a fact; a law of nature is
studied in philosophy where reasons are discerned for the regu­

Motion, lis Origins, and Its Ends

101

larity of the empirical fact. The difference between "is” and
"ought” dimly emerges in the contrast.
Physical laws are measured by experiment, and experiment,
though controlling reality, is not something unreal. A physical
law is a generalization of measured fact. But to the extent that it
involves fact, such a law is the locus where the empiriological
physicist greets reality and feeds data to the philosophical science
of nature to be interpreted. In a regularity of fact, the empiriologist may discover the fact but will be unable to account for the
regularity. He is thus unqualified to extrapolate his facts.
Without the light of teleology as studied in philosophical
physics, the faith in the future which experimentalism adopts
darkens into a blind faith. Measurement can never measure or­
der. It can never pronounce on the relation of what is measured
to what the future will bring. Measurement is only of fact. In
particular it is only of quantity. It is never of relations as such,
of tendencies, of ends, and of motions.
The problem of nature’s order, together with the need to
examine and express it, looms so vastly on the present-day horizon
that it might profitably be rethought from another angle. There
are four causes in nature, and each of them ought to be sounded
out on the issue of determinism or uniformity.
The formal cause, the form, makes a thing what it is. It is the
principle of operation in the thing, a synonym for its nature.
Now the question to be asked and answered here is whether the
form in material reality requires action in a fixed pattern or
whether the form, while abiding as the same form, can vary its
actions. The answer is decisively against the power of a material
form to remain what it is and vary what it does.
Mineral matter has only one form at a time. Knowledge, for
instance, involves that the knower retain its own form and be­
come the forms of other things; the knower thus has more than
one form, and the motions which follow upon this multiformity
of knowledge are varied accordingly. But in the mineral world,

102

Philosophical Physics

which is of primary interest here, things have one form at one
time and can achieve only the motions flowing from this single­
ness of character, when they move at all. There is a uniformity
(one-formedness) of motion because there is a uniformity of its
principle.
Matter’s limitations are drastic. It is determined to one form ot­
oñe kind of motion, when it moves. Chapter 6 will show more
lucidly that matter does not have the inferiority and immanence
of living things; it is much more inert and transeunt in nature.
If it could vary its activity from within itself, it would have the
self-possession and self-determination of man who is free. But it
lacks this inwardness of man, with his power of reflection and of
self-determination. From within itself, matter therefore cannot
vary its actions, and differences in its motion will turn out to be
not matters of its own choice but differences outside it. The form
of matter, limited and localized as it is, is not a source of variety
but of uniformity.
Resolved from the aspect of motor causes, the same determi­
nism turns up. The motors of the mineral world do not have a
source of variation in themselves but a principle of uniformity
that is drawn out into fixed and finite patterns of action. Minerals
do not pick out the raw materials on which they will turn their
causation nor select their mode of affecting their matter. They
are limited to one form and hence one type of action. If they
varied their motions from within themselves, they would have
more than their own limited form as their principle. They would
be immanent and even intelligent. But like the matter on which
they work, they are actually limited and hence determined by
their oneness of form to a oneness of action, a uniformity of
nature.
It is the final cause which crowns the determinism of the for­
mal and motor causality in nature. Both the form and the motor
in matter are limited to a uniform pattern of action, and the final
cause fixes what pattern it will be. It does not make the tenden­
cies. It is more of a selector. Given that matter has plural possi-

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

103

bilities but, in its limited and localized character, can only exer­
cise one of them, the end determines which one. In one sense, it
converts what is uniform in principle to what is uniform in fact.
For natures, under the same conditions, will always move in the
same way. Destroy that fixity imposed by ends, and the nature
itself must be destroyed. If sodium unites once with chlorine, it
will do it again under like conditions; if it did not, it would not
be sodium. By the intentions of natures we know what they are.
But what about the problem of material causality as an argu­
ment for uniformity? Since matter is pure potency, it takes its
measure from the form which it owns, and does not have the
power to determine either a nature or its motions from within
itself. Prime matter, as such, is the locus of variability in nature,
but it requires the form united to it in order to make the variation
actual. By its own inner resources, prime matter can vary neither
itself nor its form. It is to the form that a mobile being owes its
unity of nature, its uniformity, and matter under the tyranny of
form has no power to deviate from the course which is charted
for the form by the end.
Aristotle said that matter is finalized by form. It follows the
form as the form follows the end; and the motor cause, invested
with its own form and obeying its own end, completes the circuit
of causality in motion which is everywhere ordered and deter­
mined.
With this scientific equipment, the philosophical physicist can
join fact to law or principle and particular cases to general truths.
He can solve the baffling problem of induction.
CHANCE IS EXTRINSIC TO NATURE

But despite this logic, dictated from a view of the various natures
in the cosmos all taken singly, the hard fact remains that there are
abnormal events in the universe. Monstrosities are born into
animal and plant worlds. Instead of the expected rains in the
springtime, there are occasional droughts. Volcanoes, quiescent
for long periods, suddenly erupt. There are tempests and plagues

104

Philosophical Physics

and landslides in nature, and in the human world there are acci­
dents like the collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey. Experience
attests that there is no rigid algebraic determinism in nature but
that the ordered, purposeful movement of the world is apparently
violated at times. Natures move for the sake of ends in the usual
case, but there are aberrations, admittedly rare, when such ends
are not attained. A science that claims to be a realism must take
these variations into account, endeavoring, if it can, to plot their
sources.
By almost a paradox, the study of these rare events is not just
a rare and incidental aspect of philosophical physics but one of
its crucial tasks on the contemporary scene. Empiriological phys­
ics is equalitarian; it refuses to admit a dualism in nature. If it
studies order it cannot account for disorder, and vice versa. It
has to choose its targets, and it has chosen today for disorder,
chance, and chaos at the base of the world as Chapter 8 will
show.
Here, at the introductory level, the general philosophy of
chance will be outlined with the principal objections adjourned
to Chapter 8. Chance is distinguished from fortune. Chance is a
rare and unexpected variation in the sequence of cosmic events,
like a tidal wave or a Florida hurricane. Fortune is a subdivision
of chance. It is chance in human affairs, as in the attendance of
two people at a college convention which leads to friendship and
later to marriage.
The ordinary man thinks of a chance event as something rare,
but he also gives it a teleological slant. It is always favorable or
unfavorable, just as fortune is never indifferent but always good
or bad. This verdict of common sense is extremely realistic.
Things have tendencies to seek what is proper, fitting, propor­
tionate, perfecting for their natures, in short what is good for
them. And a chance event, where a nature’s tendencies do not
realize their normal and natural effect, should be considered in
the light of final causality. A chance occurrence may be defined
as an event which happens beyond the intentions of whatever

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

105

produced it. It belongs to the present discussion as the contrary to
final causality and because it is beyond the intentions of its
agents, it is a sort of contrary to nature. A chance happening,
since it is outside the tendencies of its producers, lacks a final
cause.
But chance does not destroy the determinism in natures. Taken
in themselves, the four causes of natural motion were marshaled
to show that each nature has definite tendencies and operates in
fixed and predictable ways. That thesis still holds. Chance arises
not from natures taken singly but from their compresence in a
universe where existing individuals cannot be altogether reduced
to the rationality of law. More specifically, chance results when
two or more natures, following their own laws and hence moving
according to their native tendencies, cross one another’s paths.
This intersection of two causal series happens obviously when
two friends, who have been separated for years, suddenly meet
in a strange city. It happens when two clouds, where each particle
within them is acting fixedly and finally, draw near enough to
each other to produce lightning. Such a causal congestion takes
place in more complicated form when there are earthquakes,
magnetic storms which disturb compasses at sea, and charges of
static electricity which accumulate on woolen clothing if the tem­
perature and humidity are just right. Natures are determined by
their four-ply causality, but chance arises from outside of them,
that is, from their clash with other agents. Chance is the opposite
to natural movement since it originates, like art, outside the
natural agent. But chance lacks a final cause and is unforeseeable
for this reason. Art does not lack purpose or intention. Its final
cause is in man and it is not foreseeable, to an observer consider­
ing it in advance, because it is a distinctively human product.
It can easily be objected, of course, that chance is merely a mat­
ter of ignorance. Fundamentally this is true. For God, omniscient
and omnipresent, nothing happens by chance. But the question
remains whether man, if he studied the universe long enough,
could eventually arrive at a rationalization of events that now

106

Philosophical Physics

seem chance occurrences? It is true, of course, that chance can
often be explained in retrospect. The weatherman who has pre­
dicted a sunny day only to see his sunlight drowned by torrential
rains can reason back to explain the factors which ran counter to
the weather that he had forecast. Also what was formerly called
chance, like spontaneous generation, has since been shown to be
not chance at all but, for instance, the natural gathering of mag­
gots on decayed meat.
But even with the continued march of knowledge, chance
could never be ruled out of material reality. Man can know the
basic character of natures taken singly, and he can reach a cer­
tain, though general, knowledge of the four causes which their
motions imply. But the conquest of chance involves something
more than a knowledge of law. it involves a knowledge of fact,
a knowledge not only of what a nature must do but also of what
the natures outside of it are actually doing. Fact is as indefinitely
great as the potencies of prime matter are pure. The search after
the ultimates will forever be a disappointing one, if like the
modern empiriological drift it pursues matter in order to map
all actual and possible fact. Atomic physics, for instance, not only
puts off till tomorrow what it can do today. There will always be
a tomorrow in its account of matter since there is always a resi­
due to be divided after today’s divisions of atomic and subatomic
and subsubatomic particles have been achieved. The whole em­
piriological method proceeds thus, leaving a surplus of its sub­
ject that evades its present efforts but that it hopes to reduce in
the future. It is a kind of protest by nature against art.
But if it is agreed that a chance event arises beyond the inten­
tions of an agent which is at least partly responsible for its exist­
ence, it does not lack a causal element altogether. If that were so,
it could never come into being. Obviously to the extent that it is
something it analogates a material and formal element, and it is
also necessary that there be efficient causality to unite the matter
and the form. But the motor cause in the case of a chance event
is an accidental one. In fact there are at least two causes so that

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

107

the true and intrinsic unity of being, which is a nature and a
natural cause, is really missing where there is chance. Two causal
chains, each aiming at a certain end through the natural tenden­
cies of the agents and patients that are involved, cut across one
another and, though not intending the chance event, produce it
accidentally. The event so produced is an accident of nature. It is
a disorder, and lacking the unity, interiority, and order of deter­
mination which are found in a genuine nature, a chance event
lacks being to the extent that it is chance. If it did not affect a
substance, as accident does, it would lack the title to being alto­
gether.
Since chance is lacking in order, unity, and nature, to that
extent of its constitution which is chance, it cannot be a source
and principle of operations. Whatever positive and permanent
results it produces, like the eruption of Vesuvius which buried
the ancient city of Pompeii, are owed not to the chance character
of the event but to the nature which the chance affects. The per­
manent ruins which the tourist sees in Pompeii are ruins because
of chance, but the permanence is derived from nature.
Chance is extraneous to nature; it does not itself have the
intrinsic principle of a nature. Nature is a fullness. Chance is a
privation, the impeding of natural tendencies which are thereby
obstructed from achieving the intrinsic good which the tenden­
cies seek for the nature that bears them in its bosom. Apart from
man, whom it might affect for the better, a truly chance event is
always a degeneration of the mineral nature affected by it, be­
cause the nature is thereby prevented from attaining its intrinsic
goal. Disordered, degenerate, owing itself to extrinsic fact rather
than to intrinsic nature, a chance event does not endure or tend
to reproduce itself, to the extent that it is chance. Monstrosities
die out; nature tends to throttle down its typhoons and prevent
their cyclonic centers from growing to envelope the entire earth
in their devastation; an atom, ionized by collision with another,
seeks immediately to neutralize itself and to return to its natural
state. Arguments that chance produced the universe or propel

108

Philosophical Physics

the animal world along an evolutionary path are the products of
minds too inflexible to note the disorder, degeneracy, and ex­
trinsicness which chance involves. Chance would not tend to
order an original chaos but to make the chaos more chaotic.
Chance is something secondary, presupposing natures that in­
teract to produce it and that are affected by its disordering in­
fluence.
A chance event is unforeseeable and it is rare. But neither of
these characters can define chance. How tall a sapling will grow
is not foreseeable and yet it is not chance, at least not wholly so.
Though a chance event happens infrequently, rarity is not its
essence. Many events are rare, like the completion of the sun’s
orbit around its galactic center, and are not chance. Decay of
some of the radioactive elements’, uranium for instance, is rather
rare, but it is not disordered. On the contrary, it is law-abiding.
A chance event is rare because the natures of the cosmos are
almost inert, and the near inert does not have the power to make
variations a routine. A chance event is rare because it would be
contradictory if the natural tendencies of natures were naturally
and normally frustrated. Such an event is unforeseeable because
only a natural thing is truly predictable, endowed with the stable
and persistent principle called nature which flowers into a per­
sistent and stable course of action.
The natures of the universe are of mutual aid rather than
mutual impediment. Though there is an element of what the
Darwinians call struggle in the cosmos like the destruction of
plant life by animals, there is a higher element of cooperation.
The universe is unitary primarily by its finality and order, and in
the nature of an ordered cosmos, the lower must sacrifice for the
betterment of the higher.
A chance element is rare because natures have final causes
which chance contravenes. But if the finalized tendencies were
not normally fulfilled, there would not be a sufficient reason for
their existence. This would become a universe of privation to the

Motion, Its Origins, and Its Ends

109

extent that it were dominated by chance, and the order which
thought discerns would be left wholly unexplained.
A universe that underneath experience were mere chance
could not produce the regularity which that experience witnesses,
and it is these hard, burning, undeniable facts of experience that
the true scientist ought to face rather than flee. With little diffi­
culty, it can be shown that the unity in the universe arises from
its order, the tendencies of all natures to one ultimate end which
alone explain their cooperation in the balanced aquarium, ter­
rarium, and planetarium that is our cosmos. The universe can be
a universe only by its order, and this means that chance must be
a minority within it. The minority has its voice, but nature over­
rules its resolutions.

Suggested Readings
Meehan, Francis X., Efficient Causality in Aristotle and St. Thomas
(Washington, 1940), passim.
Simon, Yves R., Prévoir et savoir (Montreal, 1944), ch. 1.

Motion and the Infinite
INFINITY IS A LIVE CONTEMPORARY ISSUE

The substances in the world of motion are genuine ultimates.
To range beyond them, dissecting them into parts, would really
be to destroy their originality since the separated parts would then
be substances in their own right. The chicken with its head
chopped off is not the same thing as the chicken alive. Smash an
atom, and its character is likewise changed. To be a mobile sub­
stance, charged with a principle of interiority called a nature, is
to be an indivisible unit, divided only at the cost of a substantial
change.
Dug in against this view of the universe as a manifold of
natures which are undivided and individualized, the empiriologi­
cal mood has worked out a different slant on matter in terms of
its infinity. The new account in general ignores the realism where
a nature is a center of originality. It makes a substance simply an
engine with parts that are ever more finely tooled as they diminish
in size but that never quite dwindle to zero. The empiriological
direction tends to explore a mobile being by dividing it and then
subdividing the components, until at last an infinite series must
be hurdled before any ultimate answer can be reached. Is mobile
reality explained by viewing it as an infinite number of parts? If
infinity rather than the triad of matter-form-privation the genuine
account of motion? Can motion take place if it must plow
through an infinite series? If not, what is the relation of infinity
to matter? Such are the questions that the present chapter must
consider.
no

Motion and the Infinite

111

In the study of the mobile world, there are so many conflicting
and confusing opinions today about the really big things, despite
the apparent concord in the empiriological fraternity, that the
philosophical science of nature instead of taking a straight-line
path to its positive truth is tempted to go to its objective by the
roundabout way to answer objections as it moves along. In this
chapter, an effort will be made to keep the road reasonably
straight. If present discussion does not take the circuitous route,
it will at least attempt a glimpse of the countryside that is being
passed, without the actual detours into its byways. After a prefa­
tory treatment to show the timeliness of discussing infinity and
to provide some definitions and distinctions, this chapter will then
prove that infinity as the actual bedrock of the mobile world
would lead to a chaotic rather than ordered universe. Motion will
then be shown as the opposite to infinity. Next, the famous
maxim that an infinite regression is impossible will be defended.
Though matter is not actually infinite, it is potentially so, and
this must be explained and established. Such a potential infinite,
it will next be shown, is the infinity studied in mathematics. A
concluding section will sketch how the modem notion is an at­
tempt to substitute infinity for form.
The problem of infinity in nature is one of the oldest issues
in western thought. In pre-Aristotelian Greece, for instance,
Anaxagoras analyzed matter into a primeval infinity of similar
parts which were afterwards separated by Mind and shaped into
the various entities of the universe. Democritus explained matter
as an infinity of atoms, alike in quality and forming the distinct
objects of experience by their geometry alone. Plato held to the
existence of the infinite in his separated heaven, and Pythagoras,
for whom material reality was a slide rule of number, brought
infinity down to earth, in the sensible qualities around us. That
motion could not truly occur because it would have to span an
infinite series of points to gain its goal was a favorite argument
of Zeno. Even Aristotle, though he dealt heavy blows against his
predecessors, was baffled by an important issue in regard to the

112

Philosophical Physics

infinity and so was prompted to declare that motion is eternal.
However puzzling was the idea of infinity to the Greek mind,
it is not a problem that the ages have hung among the moth balls.
When Descartes defined matter as mere quantity, he invited
mathematics to replace philosophical physics, and in mapping
this new territorial annexation, the mathematician naturally ap­
plied his time-honored tool of mathematical infinity. In the view
of Leibniz, a mathematician as well as a philosopher, the world
is an infinity of indivisible substances called monads. “Each por­
tion of matter,” he writes in his Monadology, “may be conceived
as like a garden full of plants, and like a pond full of fish. But
every branch of a plant, every member of an animal, and every
drop of the fluids within it, is also such a garden or such a pond.”
Paulsen has a similar analogy of the world in terms of bricks that
are composed of smaller bricks until the bricks finally become so
small that man does not worry about their natures.
Theoretical as well as empirical in interest, Newton sketched
a universe that was purportedly finite, but his law of inertia rules
out the notion of nature in favor of a system where one thing is
moved by another which in turn is moved by another, and so ad
infinitum. Kant honed the whole problem into pointed form
when he argued, in one of his famous antinomies, that reason
could conclude along one channel of thought that matter is infi­
nitely divisible and, by another chain of argument, that it is not.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the controversy on
infinity had migrated almost wholly to mathematics. First Dede­
kind and then Cantor proposed a bedrock for arithmetic in which
numbers are envisioned as an infinite succession of points on a
line. Cantor finally blueprinted a whole algebra of transfinite
numbers in which there is not only one non-finite quantity but a
whole hierarchy of them. The work of Dedekind and Cantor
tends to support the belief that the infinite division in a quantity
of matter is not only possible but actual. Their methods and their
conclusions, their successes and their failures are lively contem­
porary issues that the matter-form dualism must face. With the

Motion and the Infinite

113

exploits of atom smashing in physics, it appears only a question
of time until the nuclear particles themselves will surrender their
inner secrets. Is this division, in the words of P. W. Bridgman,
“essentially infinite”? Is it logical to adopt a philosophy like the
naturalism of Dewey which sees no term in motion but simply
proposes to lead experience “ever onward and outward”? F. H.
Bradley, the British neo-Hegelian, likewise saw no finality in our
knowledge of matter, claiming that thought must take the road
of “indefinite expansion.”
Now there are various ways in which the word infinite is used,
and it is urgent to screen out the senses of the term which are of
commanding interest in the study of nature. It is legitimate to
define the meaning of a word and then to establish that the real­
ity corresponding to it does or does not exist.
Infinite in general means without limit, and it is known by
denying the limits of the finite. McWilliams has compiled a neat
table of the traditional notions of infinity. The first broad divi­
sion includes absolute infinity, which is applied to God as the
plenitude of being, and relative infinity, which is found in crea­
tures. The relative infinite is subdivided into the formally infi­
nite, like the human intellect and will which are directed to all
being, and the materially infinite. The materially infinite in turn
is a broad term which includes such realities as prime matter, un­
terminated (un-finited) by form; second matter as indefinitely
divisible; and number as having no end in the cardinal or ordinal
series. The materially infinite, often called the privative infinite
since it bespeaks privation more than perfection, was defined by
Aristotle as that to which something more can always be added.
Bolzano, using the mathematical rule that if a quantity is sub­
tracted from the infinite the remainder is still infinite, defines the
infinite as a quantity in which the parts are similar to (equal to)
the whole. Bolzano’s definition is the one which has passed into
the toolroom of modern mathematics. Whether or not it is an
improvement on Aristotle’s definition remains to be seen.
The philosophical science of nature is not directly concerned

114

Philosophical Physics

with the absolutely infinite, nor even with the formally infinite.
The study of number and of extension, in the strict sense of
these terms, ranges likewise beyond its ken and in the mathe­
matical, rather than physical, order of abstraction. It is because
number and extent are applied in the world of motion that the
philosopher of nature has a right to debate about them. Here
there are two broad questions that rear up: Is mobile reality
nothing but the fireworks produced by tiny, powderlike grains
that are infinite in number? Is the universe infinite in its exten­
sion? The first of these problems will be handled in this chapter,
with the second being deferred until the discussion of place and
space in Chapter 10.
PRINCIPLED BY THE INFINITE, THE WORLD WOULD BE

HOMOGENEOUS, POTENTIAL, AND CHAOTIC

In general, the empiriological approach to the real has ratified
the natural alliance of its principle of inertia and the infinite se­
ries. The two go hand in hand, since inertia or prime matter is
the materially infinite. Stopping the series, say the series of divi­
sions dusted throughout an atom according to the empiriological
picture, would be tantamount to admitting a reality that, in
Bridgman’s words, is “self-terminating, ” invested from within by
a nature, tense with its own power, determined in its own mo­
tions by this inner source, crowned with its own term. But the
approach only through inertia puts natures, forms, interiority,
self-termination out of bounds. What is terminated, according to
the empiriological spirit, is terminated by something else like the
pressure of a container which keeps a gas from diffusing, with
the containing walls again terminated by forces on the outside,
and thus on and on.
Realism reports that form terminates the potencies of the mat­
ter. When form is overlooked, the only alternative is to view
matter as unterminated or as infinite. Form is the term of genera­
tion, and without it there is no generation at all but simply the
chancing of inert particles from one point to another. Form be-

Motion and the Infinite

115

stows a unity on the composite. Since form is intrinsically united
to the matter and the two make one being, it is proper to say that
the term and what is teminated are the same thing. “Self-termi­
nation’' is indeed a happy word.
Dialectical materialists are more logical than scientism when
they underscore the motion in the world, but denying the reality
of form, they remove the factor which terminates processes and
they cannot logically hope that such processes will terminate in
the Communistic utopia of peace and plenty. Feuerbach, another
leftwing Hegelian and an influence on Marx, was more logical
on dialectical premises when he held that world processes would
simply go on and on, unterminated.
Aristotle has some interesting things to say about infinity in
matter, and it is enlightening to review his principles, garbed in
modern examples, with a concluding study, centered mainly
upon Dedekind and Cantor, reserved to Chapter 9. Such is the
natural procedure of genuine philosophy, working up, as work it
must, from the study of nature to the study of number, from
motion to quantity.
To lead off a long parade of argument, the following is very
apt. If there are several components of a physical body, one can­
not be infinite while the others are finite; the infinite would com­
pletely absorb the finite and make impossible that balance of
structure which the body displays. If a nucleon (proton, neutron,
or meson) is infinite in the actual substructures that comprise it,
how can there be an equation between the nucleus and the elec­
tron—an equation that, translated into more physical terms,
means the stability of an atom? Fire and air were the examples
chosen by Aristotle to illustrate his principle. Supposing fire to
be infinite and air to be finite, one could multiply air a hundred­
fold without giving it a sufficiency to overcome fire and, balanc­
ing it, to form a stable compound. Now if a proton, changing
Aristotle’s example and rethinking his principle, were formed
from an infinite number of subdivisions and an electron were
not, the electron could never unite with the proton in a stable

116

Philosophical Physics

configuration called hydrogen. It could never balance out the in­
finity set over against it. Atoms, elements, compounds, where this
infinitely divided particle was an ingredient, would thus be ho­
mogeneous, consisting of this infinite thing and it alone. Hydro­
gen, oxygen, uranium, tin—all atoms would be formed of pro­
tons only and the world would be homogeneous. Nothing could
stand its ground against the omnivorous proton. The other par­
ticles could be subjected to the same analysis and the same ab­
surdity.
This leads in to the more general thesis that an infinite series
of divisions would abandon matter to an indeterminacy rather
than fashion definite objects which experience reveals. Divide
motion into various intervals and subintervals, and there is
reached eventually a very small element of the trajectory between
the state of original rest and the first stir when the body moves.
But this element, with the inexorable knife of an infinite division
dangling over it must likewise be split, leaving a middle state be­
tween motion and rest, say the state wx between M and R. But
the element of the trajectory between mr and R can also be di­
vided according to the premise of infinite division, yielding a
middle state m2—until, when the process is carried to infinity,
everything becomes middle, neither this nor that, neither motion
nor rest, neither a trajectory nor a non-trajectory.
What happens to motion under the indeterminacy of an infi­
nite regression befalls being also. When being is considered as
divided, it must be equivalent to non-beings that would make it
up. Being and non-being are thus the same thing. The principle
of non-contradiction must make an unconditional surrender if
the infinite division of matter is an actual fact. Matter becomes
neither this nor that, it is neither being nor non-being. It is in­
determinate. It yields a universe of flux where one thing, if there
could be things, softens off into another, where everything is
middling, and where nothing can either be or be distinguishable.
Where permanence is thus outlawed there is, to paraphrase John

Motion and the Infinite

117

Elof Boodin, no mind to say anything nor any world to say any­
thing about.
Probing this point from another angle reveals that a particle
or a universe, infinitely divided, would be chaotic rather than or­
dered. Order, if it is anything, is certainly stability. It is firmness
rather than flux, a differentiation rather than an infinitely mid­
dling state where everything is radically on the march to be ev­
erything else and nothing has any identity of its own. Nothing
has any definite tendencies if everything is unrestrictedly in the
middle state. Blence motion, like being, must be an absolute dis­
order—absolute, it must be emphasized because middling must
be taken in its extremist sense, where it denies all identity, per­
manence, definition, tendency, stability, unity, intrinsicness, na­
ture, and substance.
Quantum physicists, it may be observed here, reach the con­
clusion that the basic law of nature is the law of chance. They
have simply extended, beyond Newton, the scope of the prin­
ciple of inertia which is a principle of infinity, both of which flat­
ten out the world of matter as indeterminate. Relativity mechan­
ics likewise removed the classical mask from the idea of inertia
and, by applying the principle more rigidly, came up with a view
of the universe in terms of a space-time continuum. Whatever
cannot be inertially treated is empiriologically meaningless, and
it is the merit of Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger to have
seen this more clearly than the Newtonians.
It could also be urged that an absolutely indeterminate particle
or universe would be purely potential. It could claim no reality
of its own but would await determination from the outside in or­
der to become a being and be capable of motion. Where every­
thing is sheer potency, nothing could ever move. When we look
at a slow-motion picture of a ballet dance we simply pause longer­
on each frame as it passes the projector. Slowing the machine
down infinitely, which means to stop it, turns the moving picture
into a still shot. Where everything is sheer potency, nothing

118

Philosophical Physics

could ever move, and the still picture, capable of moving, but al­
ways remaining only capable, would forever remain still. More
than that, if the universe is nothing but potency, it, like prime
matter, would have no identity or determination of its own and
could not even correspond to a still picture. Having no actuality
or being, it would be hollowed out to a vacuum.
Potency is the source of plurality in mobile things since it may
or may not be actualized, depending on an agent, and since the
actualization is determined to a great extent by the type of agent
and by the way in which it acts. What is potential can act in this
or that way to a notable degree, conditioned by circumstance.
The potential is hence the plural, the disorganized, the indeter­
minate. The actual is determinate and ordered, a source of unity.
Where all is indeterminate, all is potential or plural; and a
pluralistic, rather than an organized universe, is exactly what
would eventuate from an infinite division in matter. Plurality op­
poses organization. In a pluralistic universe, things would tear
apart from each other rather than hang together, as they obvi­
ously do for instance in an atom and in that larger proportion of
things which makes the universe something unitary. Radical plu­
ralism would subvert the order in motion, impede all science
which is nothing but organized knowledge, and forbid even the
semblance of living organism and social organization.
INFINITY IN MATTER WOULD FORBID ITS MOTIONS

With this background, Aristotle’s analysis of the fate of finite air
combined with infinite fire seems richer. If the proton is infi­
nitely divided, it cannot be steadied with a finite electron to form
the hydrogen atom. There would result not stability but flux.
The proton—plural, potential, and indeterminate—could not be
matched by the finite electron because it has nothing matchable
to an electron. It is indeterminate. It is utter chaos. If the elec­
tron, like the proton, is likewise infinitely divided—and such is
the case in a pluralistic universe-—then chaos is piled on chaos,
indetermination catches greater fire from more indetermination,

Motion and the Infinite

119

when the hydrogen atom is formed. Order can no more result
from adding chaos to chaos than an empty tub can be filled with
water by merely empty buckets. More and more chaos and indé­
termination results, and in such a universe, the higher the scale
of being is mounted—from nucleons, to atoms, to plants, to ani­
mals, to man—the more disorganized things ought to become,
the more passive, plural, indeterminate, potential, and the nearer
to non-being. That this is not the case indicates that the structure
of the universe is not sunk into infinitely divided sand.
The foregoing analysis ought not to be relented. If a neutron,
say, is infinitely divided and if all parts of reality are the indeter­
minacy to which all is alike melted in an infinitely divided uni­
verse, then a single neutron exhausts all the potentialities of mat­
ter, and it would be impossible not only that there be another
particle in the world like the electron or meson, there could not
even be another neutron. Nothing is more potential than abso­
lute potency, and a neutron, infinitely divided and purely inde­
terminate, would appropriate all this potency to itself, making all
other material reality impossible.
If the infinite division of matter is a reality, then all things
should be formed of the indeterminate substructures which a
truly infinite series requires. But this does not account for the
fact of difference in the world, any more than simply multiplying
pure inertias can lead to anything except pure inertia or indiffer­
ence. Differentiation cannot arise from absolute homogeneity any
more than order can arise from disorder or something from noth­
ing. Indeed, there are as many different entities in the world as
there are finitudes, the Uniting, terminating principles that we
call forms.
Philosophical physics is alert most properly to the problem of
motion, and its argument is crowned when it can show that mat­
ter, if it were actually infinite, would forfeit all its motion. As
Chapter 10 will argue, bodies tend to seek their natural places,
and for that reason undergo the change which is called local
movement. Water, seeking its own level as the cliché puts it, is

120

Philosophical Physics

but following the same general law of location as a rocket soaring
into the stratosphere or a stone rolling down the mountain. In a
universe of infinite divisions, where all the parts would be inde­
terminate and hence all alike, a complete state of rest would
reign in the world and all motion would be impossible. A body
at point A would not tend to move to a point B because its like is
already there and cannot be dislodged; B is the natural place of
both bodies and so is A; they have no tendencies to exchange
seats. This argument can be turned in another way. With no de­
termination and difference, hence no inequality between things,
there is no motion. Everything is equal to everything else, and
the body does not tend from A to B because, equivalently, it is
already there since it is radically equal to the body at B. From
still another angle, it could be pointed out that a body would
have to move through an infinity of places to get to B. It could
never make the-grade.
As if to show that an absurd principle must give rise to absurd
conclusions, Aristotle reasons that infinity actualized in matter
would likewise give rise to an utterly dynamic universe where
now rest would be completely outlawed. This is simply another
way of stating that infinite divisions in matter would turn it into
a flux and flow where everything is middling and tends to every­
thing else. Aristotle’s own words about an infinite matter can
stand today : “It will be at home everywhere, then it will not be
moved; or it will be moved everywhere, then it will not come to
rest.” Absolute motion and absolute rest are both at odds with
experience; the fact that both follow alike from a given theory
proves that the theory itself must have been wrong to start with.
The true notion of nature unites the two contrary aspects of mat­
ter by its status as a principle of motion and of rest. Nature’s lan­
guage is not that of split infinitives.
THERE IS NO REGRESSION INTO INFINITY

One of the most important principles of human thought is the
impossibility of an infinite series of directly subordinated movers:

Motion and the Infinite

121

non regreditur in infinitum. This principle can be defended in
the philosophic science of nature where Aristotle himself arrived
at the notion of a Prime Mover. It can also be shown that even
in our own universe, there must be relatively prime movers,
which we call the natures, as opposed to inertias.
A proton is shot out of an atom smasher toward a target nu­
cleus whose make-up it will change. A leaf is blown from one
side of the street to the other in a gust of autumn wind. An infi­
nite series of movers could not account for the rush of the proton
or the flight of the leaf. How could an infinity of subprotons or
an infinity of subdivisions in the cellulose of the leaf swing into
action to accomplish definite tasks? The movements of both the
proton and the leaf are finite processes because they are meas­
ured by a finite time. The finite cannot measure the infinite;
there is no proportion between them. On the hypothesis of an
infinite series of movers, it would take an infinite time for all the
structures inside and outside the proton and the leaf to accom­
plish the simple operation of moving the bodies through the
smallest thinkable fraction of an inch. Somewhere, the parade of
movers, however long, must run out. There must be a prime
mover. The philosophical physicist calls this a nature, and in
natural theology is shown that such natures require a Supreme
Prime Mover, who moves them not inertially but from within,
who does not act transeuntly upon them but creates them, who
does not guide their actions as a painter does his brush but shares
with them His own interiority and Prime Movership making
them His participations rather than His mechanical instruments.
A thing can only move at the time it is moved by something
else; mover and object must act simultaneously and by contact.
But if there is an infinite string of movers, mover and its object
are separated by an infinite time. The first could never move the
second, because powerless to cross the infinite series, it could
never be simultaneous with the object to be moved. The object
moved would thus be moved by nothing since its supposed mover
could never catch up with it across infinity. Moved by nothing,

122

Philosophical Physics

irrelational because it cannot be affected by anything or affect
anything else across infinity, the object moved would thus be­
come completely random, whimsical, and chaotic.
The modern idea of inertia, universally and rigorously applied,
contains a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand since
empiriological method agrees that nothing can move itself, as
Plato said, or be an unmoved mover in the better language of
Aristotle, the random explosion into time and space is, according
to empiriological physics, what movement would have to become
—a blast that nothing can leap infinity to start, stop, or control.
On the other hand, the law of inertia, or the principle of equality
between action and reaction, which is but the law of inertia in
a new costume, requires that any movement be completely con­
trolled by outside forces. This is the basis for what the empirio­
logical physicist calls order. He defines it in terms of predicta­
bility, and yet to achieve predictions he employs a principle that
in its ultimate and universal sense gives rise to a random and un­
predictable universe. Order for empirical physics means deter­
minism, and without it there would be no empirical method; yet
the law of inertia, the basic principle of the method, makes for a
universe wholly undetermined. This contradiction is alive in the
current crisis between classical and quantum physics.
A second ballot of nature against the infinite series of movers
reads like this: If there is no first mover, there can be no motion
at all. Without a first mover, all movers become intermediate, and
the intermediate must be taken in its most literal sense. A can
never move B because there is a radical between-ness between
them, a bottomless interval where every part of it, given the in­
finite series, is as unbridgeable as the whole. A could never get
started to B because their separation is absolute. They are sepa­
rated unqualifiedly because everything, the infinite, is in be­
tween them; they are separated as being and nothing because the
between-ness is radical.
Motion would be impossible in such a setting. Things become
closed in on themselves, separated in the absolute sense from ev­

Motion and the Infinite

123

erything else. Their isolation is infinite, and thus they are irre­
lational. They are withdrawn completely into themselves rather
than capable of moving toward goals outside them. If anything,
they would tend to increase their isolation rather than enter into
outside relations. They would tend to pluralism rather than a
universe. There would be a static shrinkage in things rather than
the motion which resounds through the universe of experience.
This pluralism is the ultimate meaning of the attempt to under­
stand matter only by dividing it. The subdivisions of pure empir­
icism become so infinitely removed from the city of experience
that they cannot commute with it. William James and George
Santayana formally embraced a pluralism, and such must also be
the ultimate meaning of Bertrand Russell who calls his philoso­
phy a logical atomism. It is the logical conclusion of scientism.
Here again, the conclusion of the argument immediately is
that there are prime movers in the universe and ultimately, when
the metaphysician takes over, that there is a Supreme Prime
Mover, guiding creation by premotion rather than by inertia. In
Chapter 7, it will be shown that an inert being, like a scientific
object to use a Whiteheadean term, can be neither a cause nor
an effect at the level of efficient causality. (Inertia and being,
taken purely, are incompatible.) Here the argument simply is
that the infinite is not an actual principle of nature.
A third rejection of the infinite series in matter can be pro­
vided by examining the meaning of an instrumental cause. An
instrument is a medium—a pencil, a hammer, a throttle—by
which the principal cause—a writer, a carpenter, a railroad engi­
neer—produces its effects. An instrument actually transmits the
causal motion to the effect. A tool is transmissive, what the scho­
lastics called a causa vialis. It is undifferentiated precisely as a
tool, to the extent that it is determined by the mover that uses it.
A pencil could write the diameter of the sun, a love letter, or a
Shakespearean play, being more or less indeterminate as an in­
strument and taking its determination as a cause from the prin­
cipal, as opposed to instrumental, agent that applies it.

124

Philosophical Physics

If there is no first mover, everything becomes an instrumental
cause. If all movers are transmissive only, there is no cause or
principle of movement. A mover cannot be just radically trans­
missive; it must be productive and actual. No matter how we
might multiply transmissive realities, we can never come to a
cause or principle of the movement. A thing would move with­
out a cause or without a mover, and the absolute spontaneity of a
chaotic universe again would reign. Everything moved would
have to move itself.
A tool in the ideal case must be undifferentiated and indeter­
minate, completely at the command of the agent which applies
it. Now if all movers are simply and ideally tools of agents which
themselves are instruments instrumentally moved, then reality
becomes completely undifferentiated; everything becomes pure
potency; everything becomes absolutely transmissive, yielding
once more a universe that is a Heraclitean cataract. What is ab­
solutely indeterminate must take its reality completely from the
outside, and thus once more nothing has any reality in itself.
Multiplying transmitters does not account for what is trans­
mitted.
A tool transmits. It is directed to something else. It is for some­
thing else. As the preceding principle yielded a world where
there is a radical between-ness between things, so here there is a
radical for-ness. Everything is wholly for something else. Noth­
ing has any reality in itself, and hence nothing could be. This is
the unchallengeable logic of natural theology when it argues that
if there is no Prime Mover, then there is nothing. In the uni­
verse of instrumentalism pure and simple, everything would
transmit movement rather than receive it since reception itself
would be a form of transmission. Indeed, not a form of transmis­
sion, for everything would be purely transmissive in the instru­
mental universe, and no different forms of transmission could be
real.
The empiriological method tends to understand a thing in
terms of the results which it produces. Theories are validated by
a pragmatic test. Water is understood in terms of what can be

Motion and the Infinite

125

done with it or, if analyzed, what particles it produces. The em­
piriological method thus turns the world into a tool chest of pure
instruments. This conclusion is embraced by Dewey and, in gen­
eral, by the naturalists, even including Alfred North Whitehead
(in his so-called ontological principle). Dewey’s instrumentalism,
as he calls it, is the pivot of his philosophy, repeating over and
over again that things are understood or preferably validated only
in terms of what can be done with them. James’ pragmatism lies
along the same road.
This does not categorically repudiate Dewey and James. In­
deed, it is in the area of tools that their ideas have an outstand­
ingly valid application. In painting a room, building a garage,
doing the wash, why not choose the most expeditious way of get­
ting the job done, evaluating one’s material resources in the light
of instruments? It is to the extension of instrumentalism through
the whole cosmos that the realist must close the door. Carried
into the philosophy of nature, instrumentalism means that every­
thing is outside itself; in itself it is nothing. It is only for . . .
Where everything is radically for .. . motion becomes just as
impossible as where everything is radically between. The uni­
verse thaws away into a pure and undifferentiated for ... a
single and immobile relation. Differentiation is impossible where
all is indeterminate, where all is a tool in the ideal sense. The
pragmatism of James is consistent with his pluralistic premises.
Both imply flux, indetermination, a sheerly potential and even
vacuous universe.
But this is not a purely transmissive world. There is in some
way a jamming of the transmitters. Even in radio engineering, a
transmitter tube transmits only after a frequency-generating oscil­
lator has actuated it.
MATTER IS POTENTIALLY, NOT ACTUALLY, INFINITE

It is obvious that this is not a universe of formless fluff, divided
and moved into infinity. Can it be then irretrievably denied that
matter is infinite?
Finitism, as it is called, would categorically reject the existence

126

Philosophical Physics

of the infinite in the world of motion. Such is the thought of
Renouvier, a nineteenth-century French neo-Kantian; to a cer­
tain extent, it is the gospel of the Marxians who view motion as
terminating (Uniting itself) in their Communist utopia, and to a
great extent it is the teaching or the implication of the existen­
tialists, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre, who are im­
pressed more or less by the radical limits of things and tend to
nihilism.
From certain angles, finitism is suggested in dynamisms like
those of Leibniz and Boscovich and Whitehead, who reduce
matter to structures where division ends and indivisibles appear.
The law of the degradation of energy has a certain flavor of fini­
tism, somewhat at variance with other principles of empiriologi­
cal physics, and Einstein likewise suggests such a view when he
calls the universe “finite but unbounded.”
But finitism in general can no more be sustained than the infinitism which the foregoing pages have rejected. Time becomes
radically finite, as existentialism would attempt to prove. Sec­
ondly, there comes a point in dividing the trajectory of a moving
body when an indivisible element is reached on finitist premises,
and hence motion is seen not as a continuous process but as a
series of leaps from one such indivisible position to another.
Number, on finitist grounds, has an upper and lower limit; for
example, there must eventually be admitted a greatest possible
number, to which no more unities can be added. This would
change such quantities as tt and V2 into rational numbers and
rebuke the mathematician for his proof that the diagonal of a
square is incommensurable with the sides. The mass of the elec­
tron is of the order of 10‘2S gram, and its radius is of the order of
10~13 centimeter. What is to prevent thinning matter out even
further, cutting the electron into particles that are fractions of it­
self? The only reasonable answer is that empiriological physics
has not yet developed guns powerful enough to do the job.
Infinity, it was said, could be taken in a formal or material
sense. While rejecting the view that matter is formally or actu­

Motion and the Infinite

127

ally infinite, it can speedily be shown that it is materially or po­
tentially so. This type of infinity is broadly synonymous with the
indefinite or indeterminate, and, according to the traditional view
which Dedekind and Cantor will later be shown to dispute, the
most obvious example is that of number. Number can always be
increased into larger quantities, and fractions can always be di­
minished into smaller ones. There is no limit to the series at ei­
ther end. This means that any number actually attained is finite,
but it can grow into a greater number with the addition of an­
other unity or shrink into a smaller fraction by division. Properly
speaking, mathematical infinity of the very large is that to which
a new magnitude can always be added, and on the smaller scale,
it is that which can always be further subdivided. Every pace
along this infinite road represents a number, small or large, actu­
ally attained; nowhere is infinity actually reached. There is al­
ways a potency to further addition or further division, and that is
why this infinity is called potential. The potentially or materially
infinite is that to which new additions or new divisions can al­
ways be made.
This position cuts a middle path between the finitist and infinitist extremes, just as matter-form dualism bisected the line di­
viding dynamism and atomism, as shown in Chapter 2. With the
finitist it agrees that matter invested with a nature is actually un­
divided and finited by its form; it agrees that any number actu­
ally attained by counting or dividing is finite. But with the infinitist, it agrees that matter, organized into undivided wholes
called natures, can be divided, is divisible and that any number
can always be augmented so that we never reach a last number.
Aristotle’s realism is able to enfold the truths in both extremes
because it admits a dualism, the bifurcated character of matter.
As far as this dualism implies form as the term of generation, it
is finitist; as far as it admits a purely potential principle out of
which new forms can always be educed, it is infinitist. This is
broadly the difference between act and potency by which motion
is defined.

128

Philosophical Physics

The divisibility of the so-called continuum will be discussed
again in Chapter 12 where the relations of quantity will be more
thoroughly examined. But the continuum provides the classic ex­
ample to illustrate the difference between the potentially infinite
and the actual infinity of matter that was rejected in the fore­
going sections. There, it was shown that matter is not actually
divided into infinity as it stands in nature. But while denying this
actual dividedness to matter, the philosopher of nature must af­
firm its unlimited divisibility. Its dividedness is thus not actual
but potential.
In the case of the electron, for instance, supposing it to be a
formal unity and not several smaller particles mechanically inter­
structured, the 10“28 gram of weight or the 10“u centimeter of di­
ameter can at least be mentally divided, if the empiriological
evidence is not quite clear about electron smashing. The subdivi­
sions can then be subdivided, and so on and on. Nowhere does
the process lead to particles of mass and diameter zero. But this
does not mean, once more, that the electron as it swings through
nature is actually divided into such a series of smaller masses and
extensions. It has a unity, an undividedness due to its form. But
denying dividedness does not thereby preclude divisibility. A
tailor can cut a few yards of cloth from a roll that is thirty yards
long. The original was undivided but divisible, potentially and
not actually divided. Now it is true that it may not be the same
to divide a bolt of silk as it is to divide an electron. As the chapter
on quantity will show, the divided silk is still silk, but the sub­
electron may not be an electron. However, the point here is the
same in both cases: the difference between dividedness and divis­
ibility, between actual and potential division. Matter can always
be further divided without ever tapering down to an indivisible
particle; time can always be dissected without ever coming to an
indivisible moment; motion’s trajectories can always be pulver­
ized without reaching an indivisible element, as Aristotle argued
against Zeno and as Bergson argued against scientism.
The potentially infinite is either that of unlimited addition in

Motion and the Infinite.

129

terms of the very large or of unlimited division in terms of the
very small. Of the two, the second is more fundamental in the
world of motion, despite the physical picture which is sometimes
drawn from modern Cantonan mathematics. The fuller implica­
tions of this point would form a chapter by itself and will be
treated again in Chapter 10. Here, speaking from the viewpoint
of a mathematics which follows the grain of the human mind and
should be examined in its own order of abstraction rather than in
the philosophical science of nature, it is sufficient to point out
that division is both logically and ontologically prior to addition.
The first act of the mind is “analytic,” contrasting being with
nothingness. Ontologically, the parts at least by nature if not in
time are prior to their configuration that we call a universe. Di­
visibility is more fundamental in matter than additivity. Without
exploring this point further in a parenthesis too long to justify it
for the present context, it can simply be pointed out that only by
dividing matter did the empiriological physicist conclude that it
could be lumped together into a spectrum of ninety-two (?) ele­
ments. Atom building became a reality after atom smashing, just
as arithmetic—despite again the protests of the Cantorians—is
prior to geometry.
THE MATHEMATICAL INFINITE IS THE POTENTIAL INFINITE

Infinity in modern mathematics is a complicated subject, and
Chapter 9 will attempt to view some of its larger lines. The mat­
ter of the mathematician, number and extension, is potentially
infinite, and it is quite consistent that he choose as a pivot of his
technical universe the model of the continuum. This is exactly
what a purely potential universe becomes, as Aristotle urged long
centuries ago against Heraclitus.
Briefly put, the mathematician draws a line of any length, pro­
vided it is continuous, and argues that the whole number system
is analogous to it. The numbers correspond to points on a linear
continuum, and there are as many numbers as there are points.
Passing over the problem of whether points are potentially or ac­

130

Philosophical Physics

tually on a line, it may be asked, what is solved by analogating
the number system to the linear continuum? To such a fund of
potency, the modern number theory applies rules which it has
disengaged for certain sequences. It can, for instance, give a rule
for deriving all rational fractions and even for deriving the ra­
tional plus ordinary irrationals like V2, V3, ^7, . . . v'n. . . .
It can likewise give rules to show that there are higher irrationals
like Jr and e, the base of natural logarithms, which cannot be de­
rived in an ordered sequence like the series of rational numbers.
If the continuum is indeterminate and potential, which is the
only objective reality owned by mathematical infinity, modern
mathematics has developed a set of rules for drawing determina­
tion out of the potency and thus determining what before was
actually indeterminate and only determinable.
Now although objectively the number system remains what it
was in Aristotle’s sciences, namely, the potentially infinite that a
continuum forms, the rules discerned by modern mathematics
give the impression of dominating the series which they govern
and hence terminating them. This is the reason why Cantorians
speak of orders of infinity, as though infinity admits of differ­
ences, and the whole discussion backfires into the orbit of logic,
where Russell, for instance, is willing to take it up. What is dif­
ferent about the various types of infinity is not something objec­
tive but the rules for determining the indeterminate and deter­
minable, in other words the various methods of actualizing, short
of exhaustion, what is potentially infinite. According to one rule,
the set of rational numbers is developed; another method delivers
the rationals and the ordinary irrationals, which are called alge­
braic numbers. A third set of rules shows that the whole spectrum
of real numbers, including tt and e, cannot be determined into an
orchestrated sequence.
But such procedures do not mean that the rationals, the irra­
tionals, or the reals are actually infinite. What is actual is the rule
which is abstracted from the sequence of numbers, like the Aris­
totelian rule that the series of whole numbers is indefinitely ex­

Motion and the Infinite

131

tended by adding unity to the number preceding. These rules,
actually the products of abstraction discerning the nature of num­
ber, are turned into logical valves by the modern mathematician,
applying them to his continuum to get whatever he wants from it
according to the rule he is using. It is not for the philosophical
science of nature to dispute about such rules, except to point out
that they are abstracted from the actual and applied throughout
the range of possible being, just as the form of rationality is ap­
plied to all possible men. What is of interest here is simply that
the reality objectively enjoyed by the mathematical infinite is
that of the continuum which is the materially or potentially infi­
nite. What is actual is the rule, and what is infinite about
the rule is simply its logical implications which do not concern
the philosophical science of motion whose sole interest is how the
matter stands in nature. Empiriological method tends to view its
subject matter as controllable, and this is the case no less in math­
ematics, as far as it has felt the influence of this method, than in
empiriological physics.
ACTUAL INFINITY IN MATTER IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR FORM

Contemporary scientism has jettisoned the traditional notion of
form, as a term, and it is consistent, if contrary to experience, to
conclude that the infinity which Aristotle ascribed to prime mat­
ter should graduate from this potential state into the all-embrac­
ing fact of the universe. The indeterminate, continuous, chaotic,
potential, and plural picture of the world is the conclusion of
inertia which scientism takes as the nickname for matter and
which, in traditional thought, corresponds to the potential sub­
strate in things, the lowest form of being.
Scientism has made matter’s actual infinity into a shadowy
substitute for the Aristotelian notion of unity, nature, relation,
number, and order.
Nature is that intrinsic stability in a physical thing which de­
termines how it will act when acted upon. Numbers have na­
tures in an analogous sense. Aristotle called them species and

132

Philosophical Physics

said they were varied by the addition or substraction of unity.
Between the species of number in the Aristotelian account, there
is a gap, an abrupt break that makes 1 forever different from 2 in
the mathematical order. Modern mathematics has attempted to
pack this interval with the infinite series. But the infinite, it was
seen earlier, is purely potential, and absolute material infinity, it
was also said, would leave the world a vacuum, having nothing
in itself. This non-being is the same thing as the gap in the Aris­
totelian number scheme, the rupture between 1 and 2 or be­
tween any other such quantities. The modern view is to take the
intervening infinity as something real and actual rather than to
acknowledge it simply as an aid to the imagination in crossing
the bridge between being and non-being which intelligence
alone can span.
The modern notion of infinity is likewise a ghost to haunt the
fact of unity which it attempts to replace. Once we abandon the
notion that there are wholes in nature or in number, we are
forced to the conclusion that what is commonly called a unity is
nothing but an infinite sum. A sum can never be a whole, any
more than Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. But
when this sum is made infinite, the mathematician has the im­
pression of restoring the broken unity to number and the empirio­
logical physicist to nature. Aristotle admitted that a unity in na­
ture was infinite in potentiality. When, as in the empiriological
method, potency is made the only aspect of things, it is clear why
unity and infinity have become synonymous. But a sum of poten­
tialities can no more be the understudy of act and unity than the
sum of fractions in the foregoing example on number can yield
a break (as that between 1 and 2) by simply becoming more
solid.
Aquinas was especially emphatic in discussions of mental rela­
tions. Such relations do not add to a thing nor subtract from it,
and yet they are relations, like that for example, implied by hu­
man knowledge, cognizing a thing without altering it. Now in
connection with measure or number, mental relations play a ma­

Motion and the Infinite

133

jor role. For example, a standard like unity or an inch or a pound
is measured with respect to itself by a mental relation and then
everything else is measured with respect to it. Otherwise, we
would search into infinity for a standard. But once the fact of the
so-called mental relation is abandoned, a pluralistic universe re­
sults. When a thing is set in relation to mind it must change on
pluralistic premises, and the change to be known must in turn be
altered. Thus the infinite series is opened. Unity known with re­
spect to itself, number known with relation to itself, circumvent
the infinite series. Making all relations to be real involves it.
. The philosophical doctrine of order is likewise replaced by the
more contemporary view that matter is actually divided and that
there is no limit to the divisions. In Chapter 3 it was shown that
things have fixed tendencies, and if they did not, that disorder
and chaos would result, the flux and flow of the infinite series
which the non-telic views of modern philosophy suggest. Once
teleology was abandoned in the study of nature, as it has been
from the days of Bacon and Descartes, it was logical to seek for
the order of the universe within the individual realities, and
since form was likewise ruled out by the leaders of the empirio­
logical movement, the only place left to search for the secrets of
the universe was the indeterminacy of the matter. But order can­
not be explained by its reduction to the indeterminate, any more
than a railroad track could be laid on the watery surface of Lake
Michigan. The sum of disorders is more disorder not less.
Empiriological data tend to suggest and to illustrate philosoph­
ical ideas. They do not constitute the ultimate in knowledge.
Understanding empiriological physics as a source of analogies to
express and to deepen philosophical truth, the four fundamental
theorems on infinity may be set down from mathematics to show
that material, potential, mathematical infinity is the indetermi­
nate which is indefinitely determinable.
As a prologue to these illustrations, it should be remarked that
an expression like lim c/v = co simply means that if c, a conÎI—*0
stant, is divided by v, a variable, then as v tends to decrease and to

134

Philosophical Physics

approximate zero the fraction c/v tends to infinity. A second
introductory remark is that although the mathematician consid­
ers addition and multiplication to be the two fundamental opera­
tions of his science today, the fundamental operations are, more
basically, addition and subtraction. The mathematician thinks of
subtraction as a form of addition; it becomes algebraic addition in
which a negative quantity is added to a positive one. But for the
philosopher, on the other hand, addition and subtraction differ
as the positive and the negative. The non-being is not added to
being. The non-being is being, negated. Multiplication is a form
of multiple addition. For instance, 1X2 = 6 answers the ques­
tion how many times must one add 3 to itself in order to get 6.
Division is multiple subtraction. For example 12/4 = 3 answers
the question, how many times must 4 be subtracted from 12 to
get 0?
With the preface of these remarks, four fundamental theorems
involving infinity may now be stated:
1. 1™ c/v = oo. This means, in qualitative language that when
a constant is divided by a variable and the variable tends to
become zero the result tends to infinity. This equation an­
swers the following questions and states the following ana­
logues to physical truth: How many times can one subtract 0
from a constant? An indefinite number of times. A thing is
what it is. Zero is absolutely nothing. A thing is purely poten­
tial so far as the subtraction of zeros from it is concerned.
2. h^cv = co. How many times can you add act to absolute
indetermination? There is no limit to the potentialities of mat­
ter. It is pure potency and can receive an indefinite number of
forms.
3. J™ v/c — oo. How many times can one subtract act from
indetermination? How many times can form be evolved
from matter? Flow long can the number series extend? Again,
an indeterminate.
4. J™ c/v = 0. How many times can all the indeterminates be

Motion and the Infinite

135

taken from a number? How many times can all the potencies,
all pluralities be removed from matter? None.
Such examples tend to illustrate the traditional notion of ma­
terial infinity. They establish that the practical working mathe­
matician tends to analogate the principles of philosophical phys­
ics with regard to what the infinite is in matter and how it relates
to the more general laws of being and form. From one aspect, it
can be seen how the mathematician can use formulae involving
infinity and use them indeed on the real world.
Empiriological physics, by considering nature according to the
laws of inertia and by arriving at the notion of matter as purely
potential, tends away from form and in the direction of prime
matter. It is natural then that it should arrive at a picture of
things as infinite and as indeterminate. This is exactly what Aris­
totle said about prime matter. Aquinas adopted Plato's term when
he called prime matter a kind of chaos. The indeterminate is a
common term applied from the Greeks onward to the material
principle in nature.
But prime matter is not the sole constituent in mobile reality.
It requires the complement of form, without which reality floats
away into the unchartable seas of the continuum. Empiriological
physics, when it speaks of the indeterminate and the infinite, is
hitting upon something real in nature, but the philosophical ac­
count of form must be added in order to portray the reality fully
and to portray it as it is.
Modern mathematics has disengaged rules for determining
successive members of various series from the number contin­
uum. But the actuality of the rule does not apply to the infinity
of the series. Moreover, mathematical rules must be qualified
when applied to nature, which is more than mere quantity and
extension and hence more than merely mathematical. Objec­
tively, the infinity of mathematics remains what Aristotle said of
it, the indeterminate or the continuous. Modern mathematics has
simply unearthed rules for carrying out the determination. Any
actuality ascribed to this infinity is that of a rule. In the physical

136

Philosophical Physics

and mathematical order, infinity still remains the potential or de­
terminable.
The indeterminate cannot exist. If it alone obtained, the prin­
ciple of non-contradiction would perish. The indeterminate can­
not account for motion because it is chaotic, whereas motion is
ordered. It would leave a purely potential universe where motion
would be impossible, and hence it cannot provide a philosoph­
ical science of motion at all. Motion is not explained by denying
its existence any more than a fire department by putting out the
fire thereby accounts for its origin.

Suggested Readings

Aristotle, Physics, Bk. Ill, chs. 4-8.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa contra gentiles, Bk. 1, ch. 13.
McWilliams, J., Physics and Philosophy (Washington, 1945), pp. 8,
135.

PART TWO

5
Motion and Empinological
Physics
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS IS MARKED BY EXPERIMENT

The physics so prominent today may be called, in Maritain’s
term, empiriological, and its definition forms a problem that rivals
in both importance and interest the actual study of mobile being
in the philosophical science of nature. Scientism, by its addiction
to the empiriological method, gives an original touch to the mod­
ern mind, and it is largely the seeds of that method which have
matured into the mechanical age.
Dewey has promoted the empiriological method into the rank
of a philosophy. Lenin claimed it as the basis of his dialectical
materialism. Logical empiricism has proposed in general that
whatever cannot be known by the method of empiriological
physics is not knowable or even worth knowing. Positivism,
which is the empiriological spirit let loose into philosophy, is in
one form or another the dominant academic mood of the day, at
least in America where the empirical test is so often taken as the
last tribunal of truth.
It should not be surprising that empiriological physics has not
been properly evaluated, at least to the satisfaction of realists.
Philosophy spent nearly a thousand years in western Europe get­
ting itself defined. The empiriological disciplines are more com­
plicated than philosophy, more changeable and precarious, less
reflective and more avoidable, and of themselves they do not
tend to train minds that can dominate technical discoveries and
139

140

Philosophical Physics

trace them to the larger truths which philosophical physics de­
fines and defends. This complicated character of empiriological
physics ought to show, of itself, how little it traffics in ultimate is­
sues, and how little qualified a man becomes, by the mere study
of empiriological physics, to relate his work to the simple and cer­
tain truths that initiate his thinking as a man.
Science, in its traditional sense and in the only sense that can
avert a complete skepticism, means a certain knowledge in terms
of causes. Does the empiriological method fit the rigor of these
requirements? If it does, a vast region of the philosophical science
of nature would have to be rethought and reworked. If it does
not, a vaster region of the modern atmosphere must be cleared.
Empiriological physics holds today the Promethean power to con­
trol the future of our civilization, but the idea of what the em­
piriological method is can control the physics which espouses it.
This is not the time nor the place to plot the history of em­
piriological physics. By whatever way its engines started turning
in the Renaissance, it was moving with full speed ahead at the
time of Galileo and arrived on the high seas with Newton. What
distinguished Galileo is the thing that still distinguishes empirio­
logical physics. He experimented, deliberately controlling his sub­
jects of study, and he gave a mathematical form to his results so
that they could be extended through a wide range of possible ex­
periments.
The original work of Galileo was actually much more subtle.
He formally stated the law of inertia, which holds changes of mo­
tion in direction and magnitude, to be entirely the fruit of out­
side forces. This view of things is more vividly put in his socalled parallelogram law, which means, when carried out, that
the motion of a body is the algebraic sum of outer forces in their
various quantities and directions.
Galileo’s two laws are almost a definition of experiment, and it
is in the character of experiment, much more than in the mathe­
matical language of the Galilean approach, that the philosopher
is likely to discover what empiriological physics is. It is in experi-

Motion and Empiriological Physics

141

ment, more than in mathematics, that the empiriological physi­
cist makes contact with reality. It is here that terrain is provided
for comparing his report with that of philosophical physics, as
sketched in the preceding chapters. It is here that reality itself sits
in judgment on both versions of what it is. Much more insight
can be gained by examining the experimental basement of em­
piriological physics than by attending to its mathematical over­
head.
Empiriological physics must interfere with a phenomenon in
order to understand it, and, in its purity, it can grasp only what
it can control. Such a view of the empiriological method has been
in bright focus among John Dewey and his school of naturalism.
Dewey applauds the “aggressive attitude toward nature.”1 In
naturalism the empiriological method swallows the whole of
philosophy, and the purpose of philosophy is to bring man’s cul­
tural and moral life under the same empirical and “active con­
trol” that the empiriological physicist clamps on matter. The same
instrumental function of the empiriological disciplines thrives in
Communism, where they are tools to further the dialectical
process.
Galileo’s two laws, which on the surface of things look like
pure theory, are thus the basis of experiment. Only what is inert
is controllable, and control, in the spirit of the parallelogram law,
means knowing a thing through extrinsic forces.
Experiment, the core of empiriological physics, is a controlled
experience, and it is in this area of the controllable that the
startling successes of experiment have been scored. The scruple
to control matter and to equate the meaningful with the con­
trollable marks off the modern empiriological approach to nature
from philosophical physics.
In its purest form, experiment does not get to things as they
are. It disturbs them. Only what wilts before the power of man
is deemed empiriologically significant. For example, the law of
1 Reconstruction in Philosophy (2d ed., Boston, 1949), p. 116.

142

Philosophical Physics

freely falling bodies is known by deliberately varying their sizes
and altitudes and atmospheric resistances. An electron is experi­
mentally known by what man can do with it.
Croce agrees with Vico that man can truly know only what he
makes. Kant said of the great experimenters: “They learned that
reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of
its own, . . . constraining nature to give answer to questions of
reasons’s own determining.”2 Despite the pleas of positivism,
there is radical subjectivity in the empiriological method as such,
where its failure to ripen into fullest maturity is owed to the
deeper failure of empiriological physics to be true to itself. There
is a happy survival, in the mind of the empiriological physicist, of
that prescientific knowledge which he enjoys as a man and which
keeps him from bankruptcy.
Newton did not change Galileo’s methods. He improved and
extended them. His most remarkable contribution took the form
of his three laws which became the basis of classical mechanics:
1. Every body continues in a state of rest or of uniform motion
in a straight line, except in so far as it is compelled by forces
to change that state.
2. Change of motion is proportional to the force and takes place
in the direction of the straight line in which the force acts.
3. To every action there is always an equal and contrary re­
action; or, the mutual actions of any two bodies are always
equal and oppositely directed along the same straight line.

Newton was validating again Galileo’s method of control,
which regards a body as inert and as equivalent to the forces and
factors maneuvering it from the outside. This conclusion is writ­
ten into each of the three laws.
Empiriological physics had fairly smooth sailing in the nine­
teenth century, but storms began to break in the twentieth. It is
not proposed to trace here how Einstein removed large items of
the furniture which Newtonians had put into their model of the
2 Critique of Pure Reason, English transi, by N. Smith (London,
1929), Preface to 2d ed., p. 20.

Motion and Empiriological Physics

143

world. The important fact here is that Einstein asked: “What is
observable, i.e., experimentable?” Relativity emerged from Ein­
stein's purpose to purify experiment from the non-experimental
which Newtonians projected into it. Closer attention to how
Newton spoke of the world rescinded what he actually said.
This sharper definition of experiment in the contemporary
approach is even more forceful in the work of Heisenberg. Ele
reasoned that measuring instruments always interfere with their
object and hence never present it exactly as it is. Heisenberg’s
logic became a blueprint in the newly developing quantum
theory, which is now the contemporary rival of relativity mechan­
ics. He simply redefined an experiment, pointing out that when
it put the mirror up to nature it was a distortion mirror that was
always used.
The philosophical science of nature takes its bearings upon
the objective world. It does not interfere with the object; thus
it leaves the object unaltered for others to see as we see it and to
agree with us on its nature. In philosophical physics, the order is
to know first and to control in the light of what one knows. In
empiriological physics, the traffic runs the other way. We control
first and know later, know in the light of what we can control.
To test knowledge by whether we can control its object is a
sign of the deep anthropomorphism in empiriological physics.
The science of nature proceeding, as Chapters 2-4, have
done, insists on the primacy of the speculative rather than of con­
trol in knowledge. It is more objective and realistic and more
truly scientific. Empiriological physics often abets a certain pride
in the physicist, when his views are not tempered by a genuine
philosophical or theological alertness to things that lie beyond
control and compel submission. The devotee of scientism, con­
trolling reality, has the impression of creating as God does, and so
without the true God, he tends to deify himself and to make the
world his product.
Another remark on control is in place here. Control is not
knowledge any more than throwing a toggle switch means that a

144

Philosophical Physics

man knows the principles of electrical engineering. Control as
control can be included in the abstraction and reasoning about a
context where it is involved, but of itself and taken purely, it is
not self-revealing. Control requires prior knowledge of the sub­
ject, even in empiriological physics, and it is this knowledge that
the philosopher of nature would like the positivist and naturalist
to remember. The first experience is not an experiment, and the
primary knowledge of man is not experimental. But the empirio­
logical physicist who boosts his work to the philosophical level,
gives the impression of forgetting about this prior knowledge and
of seeing his specialized system as having a monopoly on all
meaning.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS IS NOT STRICT SCIENCE

It is not surprising that empiriological physics, after three cen­
turies, is still awaiting a satisfactory diagnosis of itself. It took
long centuries until the identity of philosophy emerged through
its historical achievements. It was a disaster that the spirit which
waved on the empiriological spirit in the modern age should have
had only contempt for those thousand preceding years of intel­
lectual struggle and their hard-earned triumphs in tremendous
issues.
Empiriological physics is emerging more and more into the
clear. Like philosophy, it is taking time to develop and to identify
itself for appraisal in terms besides generalities. Einstein and
Heisenberg purified it more and more, so that it stands out a little
more lucidly for what it is. Into their self-styled experimental
physics, Newtonians were introducing a great deal of extraëxperimental contraband which contemporary systems have re­
moved. The purer definition of empiriological physics is a victory
for philosophy too. In the case of empiriological physics, as in
everything that he studies, the true philosopher wants to know
what it is. Empiriological physics stands on the modern horizon,
more transparently and as it is, than it ever stood before. True
philosophy is unafraid of the genuine advances in the empiri-

Motion and Empiriological Physics

145

ological domain. It welcomes relativity and quantum physics,
and as the sequel will show ever so briefly, it finds in them more
of a reflection of itself than it did in the somewhat pseudophysics
of Galileo and Newton.
With an eye to the direction of empiriological physics, it is en­
lightening to rethink the realistic definition of science as a certain
knowledge in terms of causes.
A thing is scientifically known in so far as we rationalize its
existing nature, arriving, as it were, at the what and the why of it.
There are two kinds of knowledge: (1) speculative knowledge
which is sought and had for its own sake, and (2) practical
knowledge which is wanted for the sake of action. Thus in psy­
chology, the soul is studied with a view to knowing it, while a
radio set may be studied in an electronics laboratory with a view
to repairing it. The practical is a personal and, taken by itself,
strictly subjective kind of knowledge, having for its aim doing
or making in an individual case and therefore taking the form of
prudence or art. The speculative deals primarily with what things
are apart from action, universal to all of us and hence controlled
by none.
That philosophy is a science only the skeptic can dispute. Tak­
ing its stand in experience, full, real, and objective, it strikes a
covenant with the causes and reasons of things, as preceding
pages have shown. But how does the matter stand with the em­
piriological approach, especially with empiriological physics
which is of primary concern in connection with the science of
nature and which provides the prototype of all empiriological
methods? In view of the importance which modern man ascribes
to his empiriological physics, a more elaborate discussion of its
nature is in line with a defense of philosophical physics and with
the spirit that genuine philosophy can profitably bring to our age.
Empiriological disciplines are busied about the measurement,
correlation, and prediction of phenomena. The results of meas­
urement, say the clocking of an object sliding down an inclined
plane, will yield a law like the law of bodies falling in obedience

146

Philosophical Physics

to so-called gravity. A hypothetical background called a theory—
like Newton’s idea of universal gravitation—is then worked out
in order to correlate a group of measurements. But a theory to be
tested and validated must predict new phenomena. That is its
primary reason for wearing the empiriological uniform, and it is
thus more of a tool for discovery than a matter of proof. This
whole orientation, moving from measured fact to theory and to
the prediction of new mensurations, constitutes the empiriolog­
ical method. But how can this procedure meet the classical rigor
that a science must be certain, have a knowledge character, and
attain to causes?
First of all, the conceptual apparatus of empiriological physics
cannot be treated univocally. If theory is filtered out from law,
hypothesis from the facts which the hypothesis is projected to
predict, it is clear that theory has only a provisional character. The
history of empiriological physics teems with the obituaries of dis­
carded theories. Even in the two leading ideas of modern quan­
tum and relativity mechanics, there is such a deep-down contra­
diction that one of them must eventually be discarded or, what is
more likely, both of them must be surpassed. (Quantum theory
holds that the space-time properties of a body have no meaning
when taken together; relativity theory says that exact space-time
correlations are the only meaningful statements that can be
made.)
A theory is of value to empiriological physics only in so far
as it is doubtful and questionable, unsettled and provocative.
Since a theory aims to predict experiment, every experiment is a
test of it. If a theory were the final word, there would be no reason
for experiment since the outcome would be foreknown. In the
words of Fabry, if empiriological physics ever devised a theory
that could explain all phenomena, it would be a sign that physics
had reached an impasse. Even something like the extremely
well-verified atomic theory may be superseded. In fact, Einstein
has already proposed a field theory to compete with it. A theory is
timely rather than timeless, provisional rather than certain, dy-

Motion and Empiriological Physics

147

namic rather than settled, questionable rather than apodictic.
It may also be asked how physical law follows in the wake of
what strict science really means. Law, a generalization of meas­
ured fact, has a contact with the real. But our certitude with re­
gard to physical law is only physical certitude, deriving from the
order of nature rather than dictating this order in stern and un­
breakable terms. Since law is indeed the locus where the empirio­
logical physicist makes contact with the real, it keeps him from
being swept away into the mathematical clouds and is his strong­
est claim to a scientific realism. But besides presupposing the or­
der of nature to give sense to generalization, a law only discovers
and describes facts. It does not explain them.
Secondly, a science must be knowledge. Now knowledge, it
may be shown, is not a transeunt but an immanent relationship.
The idea is immediately and, in a sense, immanently related to
the thing known. The thing known has “been become” since any
other approach would leave the knower outside the object and
hence ignorant of it. The knower becomes the object rather than,
to use a popular phrase, beats around the bushes outside of it.
But the empiriological spirit understands knowledge in a dif­
ferent way. The physicist measures something, but the relation­
ship of the measure to the thing measured is again specified, to
be experimentally meaningful, by another measurement; this is
the reason for symbolic logic and semantics, the application of
the empiriological method to thought. Knowledge is thus en­
visioned as a transeunt relationship. The corridor of the infinite
regression must be faced if this series of measurements is to be
consistently carried out.
The transeunt character of knowledge, as the empiriological
spirit considers it, may be illustrated by the Lockean views that
secondary qualities, like color and sound, are not objective but
are the result of material phenomena, acting transeuntly and ef­
ficiently, on a psychological complex, indeed a physiological com­
plex known as the human nervous system. Such a view takes no
reckoning of the formal character which is demanded if knowl­

148

Philosophical Physics

edge is to remain in contact with the world as both real and really
remaining itself, while “being become” by the knowing subject.
Such a view, as Maritain says, destroys the intentional character
of knowledge. Thereby, knowledge itself is destroyed. Naturalism
has abandoned the term knowledge. Dewey speaks of “having”;
Alexander of “enjoyment”; and Whitehead of “feeling.”
A theory is not related to a fact after the fashion of an idea
which is, in a genuine (intentional) way, the thing known. A
theory is related to a fact transeuntly, if the discussion is had on
the platform of modern physics. The empiriological method, as
such, will not admit that the theory or theoretical entities are the
familiar world in the way in which the idea is the thing known.
Following his method exclusively, the empiriological physicist
will argue that the familiar world is an illusion; he will attempt to
account for the illusion by transeunt relationships. The familiar
world does not remain what it is, valid, immediate, and objective
—while “being become” by theories. It slips away physically into
the theoretical entities themselves. In empiriological physics,
cause and effect are equivalent; there is nothing in the familiar
world which remains after the empiriological physicist has com­
pleted his task—remains, that is, after the fashion of the world
known by an idea which does not destroy its object but becomes
it, leaving it unaltered and objective.
Finally, the empiriological physicist does not interpret the
world in terms of causes. There is no hierarchy in the world of
pure empiriological physics, no difference between cause and ef­
fect. The whole reality of the cause appears in the effect. The
two are equated.
Thus, as certitude, as knowledge, and as a quest for causes, the
empiriological method when taken in its purity everywhere falls
short of scientific rigor. Its strongest point of intersection with real
knowledge is in the domain of law. But here too, the certitude
is only physical, the knowledge empiriologically defined is not
knowledge, and the factors which might be called cause and

Motion and Empiriological Physics

149

effect are rigidly identified so that there is no such hierarchy as a
causal relationship.
What strict science there is among empiriological physicists is
attained because they are men and because they are philosophers,
not because they are pure empiriological physicists. The data of
empiriological physics can be fitted into a truly scientific frame­
work only by a philosopher, either by a professional one or by the
empiriological physicist who like every man is ever thinking
philosophically without knowing it. Since what there is of knowl­
edge proper in empiriological physics is the fruit of philosophy,
the genuine science of nature likewise has a right to interpret
empiriological data. If there is a difference in interpretation, ex­
perience must decide between the rival views. How it does so is
another story and belongs to later sections of this book.
PURE EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS TENDS TO SUBJECTIVITY

Man has tended to become very much self-centered in modern
times for reasons that are theological and philosophical alike and
have their counterparts in the Renaissance and the French and
the Industrial Revolutions. An index of that subjectivity is scien­
tism and the overwhelming commerce of the modem intellectual
with the philosophy of method. Method has, reversing Kant’s
order, practically become a thing in itself, to be isolated, studied,
and glorified for its own sake. Thus Northrop has argued that
throughout the course of intellectual history matter may come
and go; theories may revolutionize our conceptions of the uni­
verse from day to day; the constant through such changes of mat­
ter can be method. Such a sentiment would be echoed by the
naturalists whose symposium, Naturalism and the Human Spirit,
closes with J. H. Randall’s plea for a faith in the empiriological
method. Russell says that what may be transferred from one
discipline to another is not results but method. Dewey dubs his
philosophy instrumentalism which is nothing but empiriological
method in philosophy. Bergson called empiriological physics “a

150

Philosophical Physics

logic spoiled.” Modern philosophy began with a study of method,
in the famous discourse of Descartes. Bacon entitled his leading
idea a new organon. Method in modern times has become very
much of a creature unto itself studied apart from matter. Kant
used the phrase “pure reason,” a kind of method without content.
But what is method in its character as a reality? Actually it
turns out to be a being of the mind, an ens rationis, logical being
only. It is in between the mind and the object, and yet it cannot
be a real being as an interlocutor since the mind is aware of the
object and not the method. Wedged in as a third thing between
the mind and reality, it would not assist man in knowing. It
would impede him. The method would be the object of knowl­
edge, and the real object would never be known. Method must be
transparent like a window and not opaque like a wall. It is there­
fore an ens rationis and reduces to logic. Logical empiricists like
Carnap, Reichenbach, and Morris recognize this fact implicitly
when they trace the grounds of empiriological physics to logic,
where Russell had already carried the discussion. They want to
turn philosophy into a set of rules rather than view it as an organ­
ism of content, and it is gospel with strict logical empiricists that
the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. In his operationalism likewise, P. W. Bridgman draws meaning into an
identity with method when he reduces the sense of a proposition
to the set of operations that confirm it. Contemporary philosophy,
as far as it emphasizes method, tends to acclaim the purely sub­
jective, logical, formal, and non-real.
Whatever genuine philosophy may say about ideas, it shows
that they are representative, patterned after the object. They are
not bald beings of the mind. In fact, it may be disputed whether
philosophy can lay claim to a special method. It proves the con­
vertibility of being and truth—where truth is not something
superadded to the object, like a can to the tomatoes, but some­
thing intrinsic to it, assuring the objectivity of our contact with
being. If truth were superadded, we would always know only it
and never the thing which it wrapped within it. Truth makes a

Motion and Empiriological Physics

151

purely logical addition to being and hence does not change be­
ing’s intrinsic and objective character. That is why by means of
an ens rationis, the mind can know being as it is, relating it to it­
self. Method and matter, in a realistic convergence, cannot be
separated. When method is skimmed off as an entity for its own
sake, empiriological physics becomes nothing but method or tech­
nique and that, taken in all of its purity, is perhaps the chief
originality of modem empiriological disciplines.
Evidence for the lack of ontal reference in empiriological
physics, as such, can be drawn from the picture of the universe
which it strokes. The secret of the empiriological method, as
such, is its preference for control. But being can be controlled
only in so far as it shrinks passively to human power, like pliable
clay. If the entities studied by empiriological physics are the only
ones deemed real and meaningful, then this material universe is
one where pure passivity predominates. In the actual order, pure
passivity is non-being; it is nothing. As Chapter 2 showed, it is
prime matter. If then this passive view of things is ferried to its
ultimate destiny, the universe fades away into a vacuum. Thus,
empiriological physics in its formal method does not study the
ontally real. It does not have objective reference when taken in
all of its purest form. Whatever else he may be doing, one does
not study the real when he decides that it is a vacuum.
This search after the passive is also evident in the notion of
inertia, that every being at rest or in motion continues in such a
state until it is acted upon by external forces. It is not proposed
here to enter into a debate on whether a body, started in motion,
would continue to move forever in a straight line unless disturbed
from the outside. For one thing this idea has already been
scrapped by the theory of relativity. There is also no wish at this
point to discuss the relation of velocity and acceleration and
whether the one is something natural to bodies and the second is
impressed from without. The philosopher is interested in the
ultimates, and the question here is only about the ultimate mean­
ing of inertia.

152

Philosophical Physics

Carried out to its farthest reaches, a universe of inertia would
be a universe of passivity, taking its being and its motions en­
tirely from outer transeunt agents. Even Kant admits that the
only way of formulating this principle is to admit that every ma­
terial change has an extrinsic cause. This means finally that there
would be no intrinsic causality like that exercised by form. Prime
matter alone would remain, and all distinction would be ex­
plained by motors only, acting from without like Mind in Anax­
agoras or the Forms of Plato. The law of inertia states in its dis­
tilled form that all bodies are neutral or indifferent. They are at
the complete mercy of outer forces to change their motion and
direction, their structures and tensions, their quantity and qual­
ity, their densities and distances to each other. Probed far enough,
inertia would rob bodies of all intrinsic reality that has been
called nature. It would evacuate the universe.
The notion of inertia is another way of phrasing the empirio­
logical preference for control. When Dewey affirms that “evi­
dence is always extrinsic”3 he is simply defining the prologue to
the logic of empiriological physics. A thing is known, Dewey’s
analysis means, when we know what is outside of it. What it is is
totally determined from without. In themselves, things become
nothing. Reality once more reduces to a vacuum.
To show passivity in the empiriological world a third clue is
the equivalence of cause and effect for a thoroughgoing empirio­
logical method. It was the merit of Meyerson to have put this
identity into pointed argument.4 In the end, of course, like so
many others who have perceived a partial truth, he carried his
thesis to the extreme of including all human thought. Focused
on empiriological physics, his work gives a valuable insight. The
typical expression of the empiriological method is a mathematical
equation, and this, of course, has interchangeable sides. As Leib­
3 Experience and Nature (Chicago, 1925), p. 18.
4 Identité et réalité (Paris, 1912), passim.

Motion and Empiriological Physics

153

niz put it in one of his phases, causa aequat effectum. Or, effectus
integer causam plenam vel ejus gemellum reproducers potest.5
The effect must be pure passivity. What is inert, the empiriolog­
ical physicist will say, is sluggish; it is sluggish because indiffer­
ent. There is nothing in the cause which does not turn up in the
effect. Empiriological method is grounded on the law of the con­
servation of momentum which is the general truth embodied in
Newton’s three laws and which even relativity mechanics re­
tains. Max von Laue calls Einstein’s E — me2 “the law of inertia.”
When Newton coined the famous slogan, hypotheses non
fingo and expressed his wish to avoid “unknown causes,” he
simply meant to accept no causes into his study that were not
exactly equal to the effect. If there is any doubt about this point,
reference should be made to the first of Newton’s rules for phi­
losophizing, as he called them: “We are to admit no more causes
of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to ex­
plain the appearances.” In the ultimate, cause and effect become
equal. Newton’s apparent condemnation of hypotheses is but his
way of defining the modern logic which is based only on econ­
omy in idea and principle.
The stark equating of cause and effect would tend to destroy
the entitative character of the universe in the sense that nothing
could ever he an effect, owning a character that sets it off from its
causes and from other things around it. There would be an un­
differentiated continuum, lacking in activity and in being. Noth­
ing could ever produce anything else since there would be lacking
a preexisting subject, one that was more than pure passivity. All
would be ex nihilo. The transeunt cause would be responsible
for the total effect. If nothing acts out of a vacuum, there must be
something more to the universe than pure passivity.
Empiriological physics, emptying the real as it does, is less
ontology than it is logic. It is more method than matter.
3 “The whole effect can reproduce the full cause or its exact equal,”
Mathematische Schriften (Halle, 1860), VI, 439.

154

Philosophical Physics
PURE EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS LEADS TO NIHILISM

Empiriological physics has tended more and more toward unity
as its history has developed. Our contemporary research is wit­
nessing the latest steps of this forward drive. Radiation and me­
chanics, believed separated by classical systems, are now united in
quantum mechanics. Einstein’s theory combines the field and
particle approaches to empiriological physics. It tends to unite
electromagnetic and gravitational phenomena into one all-em­
bracing theory that will describe the whole universe. As this
march toward unity proceeds, there is a growing vagueness and
generality of expression, a progressive diluting of content to ob­
tain universality of form. Carrying this tendency to its ultimate
fate by simply following present directions means that in the
limit empiriological physics will wind up with an equation so
vague that it will say nothing. This only confirms the views ex­
pressed above that empiriological physics tends to be pure method
without matter, all frame and no picture, formalism without con­
tent, skin without the bones. The approach to being in empirio­
logical physics is in terms of passivity, thinning out the act and
the being of things until they vanish. Unity of method is being
won at the expense of forsaking all content.
The ambition to make nothingness the ultimate can also be
traced from what has been said about control which Dewey seems
to take as the essence of empiriological method and in what has
been said about making the world to man's image and likeness in
the empiriological method as Kant welcomed it. By its theories,
empiriological physics aims ultimately to deduce the whole range
of human experience. 4 he starting point for this deduction of all
reality can only be the non-reality or nothingness if the deduc­
tion is to be radical and untempered. In its insistence on the
primacy of control, empiriological physics would like to officiate
at the creation of the universe, leading it modo humano out of
nothingness and turning absolutely everything into its controls,
uses, and forms. Empiriological physics is closer to Plato than to

Motion and Empiriological Physics

155

Aristotle. Its world is a chaos, known by logical forms from out­
side it, and the ambition of the pure empiriological physicist is
to be a Platonic demiurge, making the world according to an ex­
trinsic pattern, rather than discovering it as it is.
This tremendous productive ambition of empiriological physics
was foreseen by Descartes who wanted it “to render us masters
and possessors of nature.”6 How Francis Bacon, another promoter
of the empiriological enterprise, wanted a science of works rather
than of thoughts and how he lauded Knowledge as Power are
well known. Descartes and Bacon were more than the pioneers
of the empiriological method. They were its prophets.
Actually, it is what we do not control that is most important.
Act and being man cannot make or break. He must take them as
they are, obeying their laws and recognizing his dependence for
knowledge and action on the eternity of their stable principles.
These realities empiriological method simply cannot attain, and
so scientism is hopeless as a teacher of what men should think, do,
and hope to achieve. It is these ultimates that the philosopher ex­
amines. He attains ultimates because outside being there is
nothing, and being is what he studies.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL METHOD IMPLIES UNDEFINED TERMS

Kurt Gôdel, the German logician, has established conclusively
that the empiriological method must contain a certain number of
undefined terms which he called “the undecidables.” This is but
a thesis, in the symbols of mathematical logic, of what philos­
ophers have long labeled as a vicious circle in empiriological
method when it attempts to verify its own self by using itself to
do the verifying. Another way of putting this is that empiriolog­
ical method is ever heterological, to use Grelling’s language, a
heterological expression being one that does not apply to its own
self. Thus the word “sound” when spoken is a sound and is not
6 Oeuvres (ed. Adam and Tannery, Paris, 1897—1913), VI, 61—62.

156

Philosophical Physics

heterological; “silent” when spoken is not silent and hence does
not apply to its own self in oral speech.
Recognizing that empiriological method is basically heterolog­
ical and must always contain “undecidables,” modern logicians in
their attempt to ground empiriological knowledge have been con­
cerned to reduce the undefined terms to a minimum and, if they
fail in the project of elaborating a system that accords with the
data of the working empiriological physicist, they abandon the
project and start all over again with new terms. Such efforts have
turned philosophy from a serious business into a mental sport.
This is true especially in works inspired by David Hilbert and
Rudolf Carnap, and to a great extent by Bertrand Russell. Car­
nap tried to construct the world from one undefined relation,
that of similarity. Russell attempted to build the universe through
undefined ideas called types. In a similar vein, the naturalists are
aware that their first premise, the nature of empiriological
method, is not rigidly established, and so they accept the method
on faith.
Now to begin with what is not rigorously established or estab­
lishable is really to begin ad libitum. It is to sink the whole edifice
of empiriological knowledge into the mud of mere whim. When
naturalism counters, for instance, that the evidence of empiriolog­
ical physics is validated by its public character, it still must be
accepted on whim that publicity has something to do with vali­
dating and verifying. The only real reason why the conclusions
of empiriological physics are public is because the empiriological
physicist does not practice his method purely and simply. In the
back of his mind, if not in the foreground, he has unconsciously
held on to the sanities of being, unity, cause, and objectivity
which the philosopher discusses and justifies. Left on his own,
the empiriological physicist, qua empiriological, would become
purely subjective.
But if the principles that save the empiriological physicist
from lapsing into solipsism are really defended in philosophy,
why, it will be asked, has the genuine philosopher in modern

Motion and Empiriological Physics

157

times received so little public accord for his views? The reason is
that the empiriological physicist, while retaining the traditional
views of things as the support of his ideas, has placed all his ac­
cents on shallow phenomena. He has simply measured, and by
the concreteness of his measurements and their engineering
achievements he has appealed to the emotions. Ideas, abstracted
from matter, cannot as ideas stir the emotions, but images always
set them going. It is in the zone of images and sensations that the
empiriological physicist, as such, conducts his whole enterprise.
Readings can be taken with our eyes, atomic blasts can be heard
and felt. The reason why the empiriological physicist has received
more of a hearing than the genuine philosopher is that his ulti­
mate criterion of truth, when he makes his physics his philosophy,
is an emotional one. Strange as it may sound to men like Dewey
who think they are living in a rough and tough world, the ex­
tremist of scientism is ultimately a sentimentalist in philosophy.
It is the case of the emotions of man running counter to the
higher faculties and crowding them out of their proper use. The
reason for the greater belief in modern empiriological physics is
that man has a physical as well as a rational nature, and the phys­
ical nature can deform his higher capabilities.
Measurement, without the self-evident relationship between
the measure and its object, likewise becomes a matter of caprice.
A yardstick is known to be a yard long ultimately because it is
seen to be so, not because it is measured by something outside it­
self. Such a process of measuring one thing by another ad in­
finitum would not offer a starting point unless the principle of
identity holds objectively and a thing can be eventually related
meaningfully to itself. If there is an infinite regression of stand­
ards, one can begin the study of the universe with an initial in­
difference that would convert the first premises of empiriological
physics into affairs of random selection, as from the rolling of
dice.
This thought can be given another turn. Opening the infinite
series of standards, where one is calibrated by another, would

158

Philosophical Physics

lead to an indeterminacy. Thus the method of empiriological
physics, like the picture of the world which it makes, points to a
pure passivity. In fact, “the undecidable” is practically a synonym
for “the indeterminate.”
PHILOSOPHICAL PHYSICS KNOWS MOTION THROUGH BEING

Empiriological physics, to repeat, seeks to interpret reality only
in terms of an outside frame of reference. Einstein and Heisen­
berg should never allow us to forget it. A frame of reference is but
a yardstick or standard in terms of which values are assigned, just
as the sun is a frame of reference for measuring the motion of the
earth. But what is the frame of reference in the philosophic sci­
ence of nature? What is to be the criterion for assessing when an
explanation is sufficient and satisfactory?
For an answer to these questions, it may be remembered that
being and its motion, as Chapter 1 indicated, are to be taken to­
gether. In the final analysis, this is still to be starkly maintained.
But within that whole that is mobile being (ens mobile simplic­
iter'), a real distinction may be made between the two terms, and
it can be readily defended that the being apprehended by the in­
tellect is clarified by the motion which the senses experience, and
motion is in turn illuminated by being. In broader way, it could
be argued that the effects in causal argument may be used to in­
dicate the existence of a cause, and the cause in turn clarifies the
effects when they are reconsidered. William James and Bertrand
Russell, taking their cue from Ernst Mach, speak of thinking a
thing “twice over.” Here, changing being may be considered
once as changing and once as being, and the two clarify each
other. The principle of identity—being is—is not tautological.
Reflecting on its meaning enables the metaphysician to draw out
all his first principles without the middle term of a syllogism.
To say being qua being, for example, is not to be tautological.
In the first case, being is materially considered and in the second
case, formally. A similar situation confronts philosophical physics.
The clash of being and motion helps the mind to abstract and

Motion and Empiriological Physics

159

thus to clarify both notions while insisting that in philosophical
physics they are inseparable. These remarks may help to explain
how the philosophical physicist can stay in his own territory and
still make progress, rather than elope with the empiriological
physicist to the second order of abstraction. Philosophy recog­
nizes that a thing can be understood in terms of its own self. It
may be its own frame of reference. And this is true no less in the
first than in the third order of remotion from matter. To be its
own frame of reference is what is meant when a thing is called
self-evident or per se notum.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS IS METHOD ONLY

Indications that empiriological physics is a method only can be
found in the words of the existentialist Martin Heidegger that
the major advances in science have been in method or concept
more than in matter. The two twin cornerstones of twentieth­
century empiriological physics, the principle of indeterminism
and the theory of relativity, both arose from the question as to
what is observable. They were questions that one would expect
from critical philosophy, and they emerged when empiriological
physics became self-critical by seeking to work toward purer
form.
Heisenberg and Einstein might just as well have asked what
is passive or what is controllable. Their questions and their an­
swers enable man to get a better hold on the universe, as later
chapters will indicate.
Passivity is a principle of difference rather than of likeness.
Only being is great enough to be shared. Traditional thought has
always associated the fact of individuality with the principle of
passivity in matter, insisting that species or form accounts for
likeness. In James’ language and to a certain extent in that of
Santayana, the universe of empiriological physics is pluralistic,
indifferent, amenable to man. There is no being in it and hence
no dictation of reality prescribing rules of thought and norms of
conduct. Only in a universe of being can there be objectivity,

160

Philosophical Physics

universality of conclusion, certitude, necessity, and immutability
in knowledge.
Passivity indicates plurality from another angle also. It can be
actuated, so long as it is passive, by a number of agents in a num­
ber of ways. It has no absolutely fixed and firm ground in the
order of determined reality. Act is a principle of unity. Once
passivity has been actualized, it can be thus and nothing else.
What is, is. But so long as it is passivity, a number of fates could
befall it. A pluralistic world is always an indifferent one.
From still another viewpoint, passivity betokens indifference,
and pluralism. Only what is actual has tendencies since a reality
cannot tend or act toward anything until it first actually exists.
The passive is, as it were, lacking in what is termed a final cause.
Mechanism is the consideration of reality entirely in terms of
passivity. A machine has no intrinsic final cause because it has
no inner tendencies as a machine. Its reality and its meaning
come from outside it. The denial of the final cause, like the ignor­
ing of the formal one, is accomplished only at the sacrifice of all
the act and being of matter, with their reduction to a passive
state that could neither initiate motion nor respond to it. Such a
view transfers the reality of things to the controlling mind and
thus exalts method into the importance reserved by the philo­
sophical science of nature to the objective world. Method be­
comes the thing-in-itself. The world collapses into a chaos.
THE EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICIST IS NOT A COMPLETE PHYSICIST

Man does not really learn about reality by studying how it is
acted upon. It is only when, under the impact of an external stim­
ulus, a reality acts from within that man knows something of it­
self and of its nature. When birds sing at dawn, there is some­
thing in the sound that does not wholly require the existence of
outside inertial influences to generate it in the birds and to iden­
tify it in man. A tree has a reality from within itself. Iron never
has the properties of copper; and we would never learn anything
at all about the iron as such if we adverted only to the external

Motion and Empiriological Physics

161

forces slanting in upon the iron, without referring to the iron as
distinct from these forces. We could never learn about iron by
studying only the not-iron. Iron is something more than a name
for a collection. It is really and truly contrasted by the mind with
the forces acting upon it, otherwise it would pass unnoted. It is
only when he closes the doors in his laboratory that the empirio­
logical physicist equates iron to these outside forces. The in­
trusion of the empiriological physicist as a man into his life and
learning as an empiriological physicist is so constant and con­
natural as to escape detection. It is as natural, in Meyerson’s lan­
guage, as breathing. Does method imply man’s freedom to choose
his approach to reality? In actual fact, man does not have the
power beyond incidental vagaries of procedure to choose his own
method of knowing anything. It is said that method is a constant
in empiriological physics. But is not this very constancy, this
freedom from the arbitrary, precisely owed to the fact that the
matter determines the method rather than the method determines
the matter—to the fact that reality is something more than the
passive controllable stuff that empiriological method studies?
In other words, the empiriological physicist, though his rules
do not tolerate it, clearly indicates that his logic is coerced by on­
tological considerations and that it is ontological and uncontrol­
lable facts that guarantee the fixity of his method. A certain
method is applied because the material, say the quantified aspects
of the real which the empiriological physicist chooses to chron­
icle, requires it and is seen to do so. This means that there is a
third reality which sees the relations between matter and method
with the one dictating to the other. This reality is nothing but
human intelligence, apprehending being and apprehending truth
or method as only a logical addition to being, thinking a thing
“twice over.” If the empiriological physicist followed his metrical
method to the letter, he would have to represent what is measured
without representing it. He would have to measure only, rather
than think of what is measured as a thing. To ignore a being that
is measured is a rank impossibility, and fortunately the empirio-

162

Philosophical Physics

logical physicist ranges beyond the harsh limits which his meth­
ods impose. He is never a complete empiriological physicist. If he
were, he would cease to be a man.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS IS PRIMARILY ART, NOT SCIENCE

But if it is decided that empiriological physics is not primarily
science but more of a method unqualified, what is its positive
meaning? To answer this query, it is important to rethink the
logical and methodological character of empiriological physics,
taken by itself. Empiriological physics tends to present the cre­
dentials of a practical type of logic. Logic is a liberal art which
classifies thought with a view to putting it together in knowl­
edge. Empiriological physics—and the empiriological disciplines
generally, all of which view physics as their prototype—classifies
things with a view to combination in the mechanical order.
From many points of view, this conclusion is impressed upon
a critic. Empiriological physics goes wholly after the potential
aspects of things. The reason for such an approach is to determine
how matter will yield to human power. It is only the potential
that we can control. What is known, however, in true specula­
tion is certain and cannot be changed, and already it appears that
empiriological physics, taken in all of its purity, does not have
truly scientific knowledge for its object.
Human motor causality is largely a reshuffling of parts rather
than the unaided production of new beings. Man did not make
an atom bomb in the fullest sense. What he did was to dig out
laws of interaction and combination in matter. He put nature
together in new ways, adding nothing new to it since everything
he employed was already in nature in the year 2000 b.c.; the idea
alone is the twentieth century’s. The bomb is a work of art, and
to make it, man discovered in what respect nature was potentia],
and how, by his activity, he could control nature.
The indeterminate, the plural, the disorganized, and the pas­
sive are not directly knowable to man, and as Aquinas says, prime
matter is the last reality recognized in our analysis of a thing. It

Motion and Empiriological Physics

163

is easy to see from what has already been said that empiriological physics, which descends toward prime matter more than
toward anything else in the universe, is posterior to the philo­
sophical physics. It strikes out toward what is last and least
known in things, and what is known with respect to form; and
hence it is not a prolegomenon to the philosophy of nature but,
if anything, an epilogue.
Passivity is the locus of human motor causality. It is only art,
or its analogue, that becomes important for its own sake. It is
only the passive that man can command.
Art, it has been shown, has its principle outside it. This is the
same as saying that the material, in art, qua art, is inert. Though
in a practical case, art can never completely purify itself because
it would require pure passivity as an actual medium, it remains
the secret ambition of empiriological physics to view matter as
pure art—eviscerated of all intrinsic character and indetermi­
nately there for man to shape. When Protagoras utters his famous
dictum, “man is the measure of all,” a realist would agree with
him in art qua art. Aquinas also states that art takes its measure
from man and redounds to him.
But the world is not merely art to be controlled by man; it is a
network of natures to be studied for what they are.
Art is thus a kind of controlled nature, and the element of con­
trol reveals the affinity of art with empiriological physics. Dewey
was at one with realism when he wrote that “art is not nature,
but is nature transformed . . .”T The more nature is harnessed
in the laboratory the more material progress man can make in
life. The purpose of empiriological physics, as its history shows,
is to discover how and where nature is inert and how and where
man can gain a hold on nature, turning it for his own ends. This
purpose and that history show empiriological physics as fulfilled
in engineering, making new devices for human use like refrig­
erators and airplanes and television sets, studying how things may
7 Art as Experience (New York, 1934), p. 79.

164

Philosophical Physics

be acted upon but never what they are. It is significant that the
theoretical physics of one generation becomes the engineering
rules of thumb in the next.
If the passive taken in itself has meaning only when there is
something to be made, and if it appeals more to the artist than
to the pure scientist, empiriological physics slopes toward the art
of logic in the mechanical order where the prime purpose is not
knowing but production. Samuel Alexander has detected this
tendency and pointedly expressed it:

Experiment is our control as to the material or empirical details.
Logic controls us in the formal nature of this process, for it is
concerned not directly with the empirical features of reality but
with its categorial (sic) ones.8
Knowledge, to be objective, cannot interfere with the thing
known. In empiriological physics, this interference is the rule. In
such physics, whatever is meaningful is controllable.
Empiriological physics thus classifies material for putting
things together. Logic, as an art, does not have, knowing for its
purpose, but use; it classifies thought for combination. Empirio­
logical physics has a purpose that lies beyond itself, and that
extraphysical territory is the area of human use.
Bergson argued that man tended to turn the real into geometrical solids in order to manipulate it. But this analysis, in both
philosophical and empiriological physics, is misdirected. The
model for the empiriological world is not solidity but the contin­
uum, the flux and flow of Heraclitus which Dewey detects in
modern empiricism and calls “the most revolutionary discovery
yet made.”
The empiriological physicist must envision matter as a Heraclitean continuum to get a hold on it. The indeterminate, the in­
finite, the purely passive, and even chaotic proportions which
the empiriological world assumes under the seal of the empirio­
logical method are only the synonyms for the inert and control­
8 Space, Time, Deity (New York, 1920), II, 271.

Motion and Empiriological Physics

165

lable cosmos that has been in the making from Galileo to Ein­
stein and Heisenberg and Schroedinger.
An insight running from Aristotle through Aquinas and even
to Whitehead affirms that the potential is the continuous and un­
differentiated, while act confers identity on things making them
different from each other. The element of difference between
things involves a breach, the gap between being and not being
this or that. When matter is viewed as a continuum it is impos­
sible to assign differences and to account for the original and in­
trinsic character of the various differing realities. All things fuse
into the potential.
What is continuous is controllable. Empiriological physics
wants to shift the universe into neutral to get a better command
over it. What is act and what is being man does not control, but
obeys. Thus Einstein, to achieve a better control on things, de­
nies the difference between quantity and motion, space and time,
matter and energy. Quantum physics shrinks away from treat­
ment of discrete and individual particles, preferring to work with
continuous aggregates. There has always been a temptation to
idealism in the empiriological enterprise, to a doctrine of con­
tinuity between mind and its object that stands in contrast with
the realist’s notion of a break between inner and outer worlds.
That tendency to idealism, the empirical spirit has never over­
come. It is the signature of pure art.
By holding to continuity between knower and object, space
and time, quantity and motion, and among the various particles
in an aggregate, the empiriological physicist retreats from act
and strokes out a more potential and controllable and neutral
world. He wants a fluid world, water that will take the shape of
any Protagorean vessel he prepares for it. Only he wants to give
the water more than shape. He wants to invest it with everything
that it owns.
But just as logic is never pure logic, so empiriological physics
falls shy of its ambitions. There can never be a pure logic, for the
reason that it would have nothing left to logicalize; there must

166

Philosophical Physics

always be the intuitive, the directly apprehended which will
stand in the way of what modern logicians call “the formalization
of logic” in its entirety. Neither can there be a pure empiriolog­
ical physics. Empiriological physics can grow onward indefinitely
and so can the mechanical aspects of civilization which it ferti­
lizes. But matter, because it is not pure potentiality, will con­
stantly rebel at being reduced to the empiriological categories and
will break out to dictate their revisa!. The theories of physics are
schemes to help experiment gain a hold on the passivities of
things. But since matter is never completely passive and poten­
tial, the theories will keep failing, and new ones will constantly
be projected to take their places.
But if empiriological physics is directed toward the practical,
how can its knowledge character, or lack of it, be explained? The
answer is that every art must work with a medium. In sculpture,
the medium is marble; in music, it is sound; in carving, it is
wood. The theoretical side of empiriological physics studies this
medium, as any artist must do, to exploit it to the fullest in the
mechanical order. Empiriological physics is not pure at this point
because the art is not pure. Thus no art can proceed without
knowledge, whether it be the painting of a madonna, the making
of a stained-glass window, or the cooking of a meal. But the
knowledge is for the sake of the art.
Every art is a compromise between the general principles of the
art which are known and used and the practical demands of an
individual situation where the rules are applied. For matter is
never wholly passive, obedient to the law of inertia, which every
artist must somehow recognize, and which empiriological physics
has devised a means of studying in an intense way and as applied,
theoretically, to all matter. There is a point beyond which the
typewriter, for instance, will not yield in obedience to inertia.
If it were made purely passive and potential, a stenographer
could not wTite on it. The real originality of the artist designing
the typewriter consists in getting the most out of the potentialities

Motion and Empiriological Physics

167

with which he works without losing the reality of the typewriter
in the process.
The necessity of relaxing its hopes for controlling nature at
a single stroke and the need to bargain with its matter that makes
any art a compromise has often split empiriological physics into
what it calls a crisis. In the classical system, for instance, field
physics was at odds with particle physics; matter would not obey
the laws of energy; the luminiferous ether was so hotly debated
that someone finally defined it as “the subject of the verb to
undulate." These large oppositions of view simply reflected dif­
ferent ways of gaining a hold on matter which refused to ease
itself into any equation that attended only to passivity. As in the
case of a household artist, painting a kitchen chair, the atomism
and the modified dynamism of the nineteenth century repre­
sented different stances and angles of swing and intensities of
stroke upon a matter that would not wholly surrender to a single
formula for its inertia.
Because matter can never be simplified into a pure passivity,
empiriological physics, an art, will always oscillate between var­
ious theories, each of which yields it something of matter’s secrets
but none of which can tell all. Crises are normal to it. There are
such conflicts even in the present between relativity mechanics
and quantum theory, between spacelike intervals and timelike
intervals in relativity itself, and in quantum mechanics between
wave and particle approaches. There are deep differences, as
the next chapter will show, between the first and second laws of
thermodynamics, and between the statistical and macroscopic
treatment of thermodynamical phenomena. Matter will always
revolt at being treated too passively; nature will always revenge
itself upon an art that becomes too conscious of its own power
and its own purposes. The empiriological physicist must use now
this theory, now that—whichever gives the best results, and as
with every artist, we are not interested so much in how he pro­
ceeded in his work as in what he made.
Einstein’s latest view (1949), which he calls the generalized

168

Philosophical Physics

theory of gravitation, is a bid to overcome the cleavage between
gravitation and electromagnetism. It is a movement toward a
unified field theory that would not only harmonize relativity
theory with Maxwell’s work in electricity but join relativity and
quantum mechanics which have been at odds. Thus far Einstein
has been unable to give physical meaning to his mathematics
that would suggest experimental tests of his theory. But signifi­
cantly he works out his deductions from an equation (gifc =
stk + atk) containing a symmetrical factor (sik~) and an anti­
symmetrical factor (aik). Once more a split remains to annoy the
empiriological mind since electromagnetism is still somehow ad­
mitted to follow different and anti-symmetrical laws by compari­
son with the greater symmetry of gravitational phenomena.
In the conception of his work, the artist cannot consider pure
passivity alone, or he would have nothing to make and no end to
be attained and nothing to use for a material. To achieve his goals
in a practical way, the artist selects the best combination of his
matter’s potentialities with the end that he has in view. It is on
this point that the empiriological disciplines differ. Their method
of knowing general rules is alike, but they all have a different
subject matter and a different actuality which they wish it to
possess. Thus biology differs from empiriological physics, and
physics from chemistry, and empiriological psychology from em­
piriological sociology. It is this practical consideration of their mat­
ter and the ends they put upon it that divide the empiriological
disciplines from each other, and it is this point in the practical
order also, uniting the theoretical side of empiriological physics
with its engineering aspects, that explains why the empiriological
method does not misfire into nihilism.
From the knowledge viewpoint, nihilism would result from
the empiriological method; but empiriological physics is not
speculative knowledge primarily and absolutely; it is in the ambit
of art, and every art is a compromise. This compromise forces
empiriological physics incidentally and secondarily to be knowl­
edge. There is a resistance to the physicist's sorties, just as it is

Motion and Empiriological Physics

169

wind resistance that keeps an aircraft flying. It is this contact
with the actual and the objective—for no science is possible with­
out them—that enables empiriological physics to participate in
knowledge in a derivative sense, and that ought to be explored
further elsewhere.
This resistance element that empiriological physics does not
control but must ever concede, philosophical physics takes into
account. It could be argued, in this fashion, that it is the things
which empiriological physics does not know in its own method
that give it whatever claims it has to be speculative knowledge.
The realities which the empiriological physicist will not concede
to be real and objective confer the only realism and objectivity
that his efforts can boast. Speculative knowledge of the world is
only in terms of nature, not of art; and the empiriological phys­
icist, in a secondary sense, makes some oblique contact with na­
ture which compels him even when he controls it, which yields
its inertia only if he will take its act, and which rewards his
obedience, making him come to terms.
It should also be pointed out again that since art is an imita­
tion of nature rather than nature an imitation of art, the conclu­
sions of empiriological physics cannot be transferred to the
objective world without criticism by the philosophical physicist
who has kept his roots in nature and therefore his branches in a
realistic atmosphere.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS FREES MAN FROM NATURE

Freedom, as this concept is understood and defended in genuine
philosophy, is always freedom for . . . freedom for God, free­
dom for self-development, freedom for religion. It is never free­
dom from ... In the aim of empiriological disciplines, this
relation is reversed. The purpose of empiriological physics is to
free man from nature, to make him independent of hot and cold,
hunger and material need. Modern travelers are free from the
vagaries of nature which played havoc in a day when vehicles on
land and sea were far less secure than now' and when weather

170

Philosophical Physics

forecasting was hardly known. Man is no longer a slave to nature
in the way of travel, farming, disease, and time-consuming tasks
about his home. Empiriological method has rendered him freer
from nature.
But such a freedom does not make sense unless it is supple­
mented by a doctrine which tells what freedom is for. Freedom
from ... is a mark of conquest and respects only those things
which man can control. Freedom for . . . is the mark of obedi­
ence, law, and order. It respects that which controls man. Man is
free only because he is controlled and created, having within
himself a principle that requires his allegiance. Right is always
founded on duty. Even in freedom from nature, man is never
completely free because his art is never pure. He develops a
trolley-car system which makes it easy to go to and from his work,
but he must stand on the comer and wait for the streetcar to
come by. Man is a master. But nature is not purely passive before
his power.
Empiriological physics, when left to itself, tends to free man
in a purely pagan way. From its premises, if they become philo­
sophical dogmas, naturalism is the logical outgrowth. What keeps
the various tendencies of man, individual and social being that
he is, from getting out of stride is something outside the empiri­
ological domain. The potentialities of things are what make them
good instruments. What is outside the instrument, however,
measures what it will be and what it will do. To be attracted
to others for what they can do to us is the lowest kind of friend­
ship. The highest type is benevolence, the love of like for like.
There is something of this sort also that can be applied in our
attitude toward matter. To regard matter only for its potencies,
to think only of its uses, is selfish and subjective. To be attracted
by what is actual is to be attracted by what makes man lift up
his mind and heart to God. Here there is another way of setting
empiriological physics off from philosophical physics and iden­
tifying its aims. Empiriological physics is geared to action; phi­
losophy, even in the first order of abstraction, aims to know. The

Motion and Empiriological Physics

171

empiriological method, as a way of knowing, cannot bring man
up to God. Since God is pure act, as metaphysics shows, nothing
can be learned of Him by thinking of the purely passive. Em­
piriological physics has use for its purpose. Being is that which
determines the use and the user. When we emphasize only po­
tentiality, we have an indifferent universe.
The laws and theories of empiriological physics tend to show it
only as an instrument, to use Dewey’s term, without being able
to give certain knowledge of the causes and reasons of things.
Of what value is it for us to know the so-called law of gravity
except to use it in our daily lives, for example in designing an
hydraulic elevator or the wing structure of an aircraft? It is
important to know that hydrogen and oxygen combine in such
and such a proportion with a view to the manufacture of hydro­
gen peroxide or for the decomposition of water to obtain the
elements for other uses.
Theories have for their purpose to predict. To gain a hold on
things, a certain temporal sequence is necessary—a continuous
passage from potentiality to actuality. The empiriological physi­
cist, getting ahead of a thing and predicting its arrival, has the
impression of presiding at its production.
Prediction in time is the analogue of deduction in thought.
The empiriological physicist cannot study this temporal se­
quence causally, and he has no wish to do so. His world is poten­
tial and what is potential as such (passive potency) cannot be a
true motor cause. So the empiriological physicist studies temporal
sequence descriptively. This is but another way of saying that he
classifies, and Tennant was right when he pointed out that em­
piriological method does not really seek the order of nature but
a certain logical type of organization and deducibility, “not a
teleological reasonableness, but rather a quasi-logical rational­
ity.”9 Simon10 argues that there is a “resemblance” between
antecedent and consequent in what he holds to be the notion of
9 Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, 1932), p. 145.
10 Prévoir et savoir (Montreal, 1944), p. 52.

172

Philosophical Physics

causality in empiriological physics, and McWilliams11 takes the
empiriological concept of cause to be one of form rather than of
efficiency. Is not the ‘'resemblance” that of classification and the
“form” chiefly that of the logical world?
Logic involves a description or classification of things. Philos­
ophy is the study of their causes. To classify and describe is not
to explain. To explain is to give causal reasons why a being is in
this or that class and not simply to establish the fact of classifica­
tion. Truly scientific knowledge can never be purely descriptive
since it is only in terms of causes and reasons that science is
science. Description is a logical device.
Functionality also is not a process of explanation. It is a process
of classification or description, to test the classes that belong to­
gether.
The only reason why the empiriological physicist comes to
concepts of true causes is because he is not a pure physicist. He
is also a man, thinking like a man, and matter not being purely
inert has likewise resisted him. He attains speculative knowledge
because he goes beyond pure empiriological physics and because
matter puts more than its passivities before him.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS CATALOGUES FOR THE ENGINEER

Description is something characteristically human. Like logic, it
does not exist in either God or in the angels. Men like Kirchhoff,
Pearson, and Mach held that the aim of empiriological physics
was only to describe, and Husserl has elaborated a complete
philosophy of description called phenomenology.
Description must go from part to part. It must presuppose its
object to be like a machine and like the prototype of all machines
which is the undifferentiated continuum. Description is stopped
by the chasm between being and non-being, which is another
way of saying that it cannot get at being from within. Like logical
classification in the tree of Porphyry, description can never state11
11 The Modern Schoolman, XXIV (1947), 11-18.

Motion and Empiriological Physics

173

what a thing is in terms of its own self. It does not bespeak self­
evidence. Description is always in terms of outside genera and
figures. It is formalistic and artistic. What is formalistic is what
is logical, and classification in terms of parts bears a close kinship
with mechanism. Description, art, formalism, classification, and
mechanism are closely interlaced. It is only in terms of causes
that being can be studied.
Empiriological physics deals with the description of events. It
remains on the level of the reality described, the universe of
quantity and its relations. Indeed, only quantity and the quanti­
fied cede to descriptive techniques.
In the empiriological field, functionality allows the scientist
to describe what happens when something else happens. It is a
way of classifying.
Induction, as the empiriological physicist conceives it, indicates
the potential character of the being which he studies. Pure induc­
tion is the counting of things that are singular. As singular things,
they are not intelligible, but as singulars they can be marshaled
for human use. Counting the singulars is a way of classifying
them. In empiriological physics, describing them, it is their use
that is important.
Probability plans a tremendous role in the discussion of con­
temporary physical problems where large numbers of particles
are involved and where precise individual measurements are not
feasible. On the practical plane, probability is often satisfactory
as mental state. It has often been said that probability is the guide
of life. Whatever truth this maxim may have in the science of
ethics, it can easily be seen that probability is a good guide in the
field of production. It is lacking, however, in full scientific rigor
as far as it falls short of certainty.
In philosophy, induction (abstraction) is a method of dis­
covery, and deduction is a method of proof. It is by induction
that the premises of demonstration are formulated, induction in
the sense of abstraction. By deduction, the premises are properly
combined so that a conclusion may be drawn. It is known by in­

174

Philosophical Physics

duction, for example, that man is a rational animal and also that
what is rational is spiritual. Hence, it can be concluded that man
has a spiritual character.
In empiriological physics, deduction is in the order of discov­
ery. It is the purpose of a theory to predict experiment. Deduction
is the organon, and if a theory can uncover and predict new
individual facts, it is said to be validated. Induction is more a
method of proof. The criterion of truth is the facts of experiment,
inductively assembled. This only shows again that the highest
activity of the empiriological physicist, his ideational back­
ground, which is called theory, is really subservient to another
end besides scientific knowledge. It aims at discovery.
Discovery, not proof, is the goal of empiriological physics.
From Georges Sorel, one may borrow the term systematic and
some of its meaning. Empiriological physics makes a system or
catalogue of facts for the engineers. It multiplies data by schemes
that are not explanations and are not ultimate. The ultimate in
the empiriological order is the practical and the factual of experi­
ence.
If discovery is the main target of the empiriological physicist,
there are some important conclusions to be drawn, and empiri­
ological physics, in its most characteristic feature, is removed from
the field of philosophy where it has been conducting at least a
cold war throughout the modern period.
Empiriological physics has to do not with the cognition of
causes but with the discovery of fact. Discovery is a matter of
experience in philosophy. It is the point of departure in philo­
sophical physics rather than its highest goal. The empiriological
physicist multiplies data, but such a multiplication of experience
does not explain experience any more than merely counting eggs
can ever reveal what is inside a single one of them.
But such a multiplication does provide the practical man with
new ideas. As Max Scheier says, the destiny of empiriological
physics is in what the Germans call Technik and what might be
translated as applied art or engineering—adapting man to his

Motion and Empiriological Physics

175

environment. In the maxim of Auguste Comte, savior pour pré­
voir afin de pouvoir—“knowledge for prediction and prediction
for power.” Practice is learned only by experience. By multiplying
experience, although we may not add immediately to speculative
knowledge, new practical insights can and are being developed.
Multiplying experience also multiplies data for the philosopher.
Empiriological physics, it was seen, tends to be a pure method,
geared toward discovery. Attending only to the inert, it searches
out the ways in which matter is passive for control. Speculative
knowledge, in the proper sense, is secondary and comes into play
because man is never a pure empiriological physicist and nature
is never sheerly inert. Realistically assessed, empiriological phys­
ics tends, it would appear, to the temperate zone of art, controlling
by classifying and classifying for control. Empiriological physics
aims not so much to explore as to exploit, but the medium of
matter with which it works prevents its art from ever being a
pure art, guaranteeing thus the unlimited progress of empiriologi­
cal physics while forever forcing its final hopes to crumble. But
while showing the engineer how to get more for the investment
of his efforts, empiriological physics also makes oblique reference
to philosophy.
This remark serves to recall a statement from the beginning of
the present chapter. Empiriological physics is a complicated busi­
ness, and it is not likely to yield its definition in a terse and tidy
formula. Though the foregoing developments attempted to fol­
low it in its principal aim, it would be fatal to close the eyes to
everything else. Since in the practice there can never be a pure
art, the empiriological method tends to bulge out beyond its
narrow limits and make contact with philosophy. There are thus
several ways in which empiriological physics may be considered:
1. Pure empiriological physics is in the direction of art, as shown
by its vision of matter as only passive and its method of study
which is control. It aspires to formalize its subject, but the
achievement always stops short of its goal. Empiriological
physics in this light is always becoming fin fieri).

176

Philosophical Physics

2. Empiriological physics in a loose sense is more modest in
practice. It mingles common sense philosophy into its techni­
cal models, constructing what Simon calls “a cosmic image.”12
This looser form is the status that empiriological physics must
always take in the concrete. Backed by common sense ontol­
ogy, it is hence not devoid of certitude. Ohm’s law is not a
logical figment, and neither is the valence of nitrogen or the
Carnot principle or Boyle’s law.
3. Empiriological physics in the line of philosophy affords data
to the philosophic science of nature that must be interpreted
in the light of the full experience where philosophical physics
ever takes its stand while empiriological physics branches off
into experiment. In the early stages of empiriological physics,
like the classifying of the stars or the clocking of falling bodies,
the interference by experiment is not very prominent, if pres­
ent at all; the stage is more one of observation within experi­
ence and its philosophical and empiriological physics are close
together if not one. But when the experimental technique is
pressed, empiriological physics begins to take its distinctive
shape as a discipline of control. Even here, however, the
philosophical physicist can appropriate the experimental data,
supporting them not by a common sense ontology but by his
certain speculative science and finding that they relate to his
larger truths previously established. The consideration of data
from empiriological physics is not the basis of philosophy.
Passivity and potentiality are the last things known about
bodies and presuppose a prior science if they are known at all.
Knowledge should always go from the more familiar to the
less if it is to be consecutive, as logic requires.
When empiriological physics comes to be evaluated, it is in the
first sense that it is to be taken. A subject should be judged by
what is principal in it, and the originality of empiriological phys­
ics is the approach to matter by controlling and classifying its
12 Op. cit., p. 104.

Motion and Empiriological Physics

177

passivities. In the second and third senses, the primary aspect of
empiriological physics is mixed with other ingredients, and the
empiriological method, as such, must be isolated from the mixture
to be assessed properly for itself.
In the second sense, the empiriological physicist as a man, with­
out a formal philosophy, tempers his technical world view with
whatever support it needs from common sense to keep it from
shriveling into the vacuum which pure art would make out of
objective reality.
In the third sense, philosophical and empiriological physics can
cross-fertilize the world view of man, the whole. Though the
experimenter, because of the metrical character of his work, can­
not pronounce on the significance of what he is measuring in the
line of mobile being, philosophical physics can take the data
which empiriological physics uncovers and submit them to specu­
lative appraisal. Or better still, the empiriological physicist should
be equipped with a philosophical background to appreciate for
himself the significance of those aspects of the whole of matter
which he brings to experimental focus. Philosophy thus can
bring experiment meaningfully back to experience and by in­
tegrating empiriology with speculative principles can give the
findings of the laboratory a much more scientific character than
they now have. In this sense, empiriology opens up a vast treasure
of discoveries to be evaluated for the completion of empiriologi­
cal physics, the enrichment of philosophical physics, and the
integration and progress of human thought as fully human.
This truth is especially apt for the present age where the
opinion is rife that the empiriological physicist alone is busied
about what is truly knowable, while genuine philosophy, which
is after all the highest science of nature, is often ranked with
poetic fancy or is called, in the naturalist vocabulary, a supernat­
uralism. It is easier to throw bricks than to lay them in place for
a home, and naturalism’s home is far from orderly.
Probably no age is as rich in data as ours, and if the philosopher
thrives on experience, in no age have the potentialities of philos-

178

Philosophical Physics

ophy been as great. That profit has not been reaped from all this
capital of material can be explained by the fact that the over­
absorption in matter and overconfidence in the power of control­
ling it have dulled the proper use of man’s higher spiritual pow­
ers, which are directed to truths that he cannot control and to
good that he has only to obey.
The theses here defended differ somewhat from the opinion of
Maritain who gives to empiriological physics the status of a
science distinct from philosophy; and they diverge also from the
verdict of De Koninck and the Laval school, where empiriological
physics is taken as a continuation at the dialectical level of the
demonstrative science that is true philosophy. According to this
latter view, empiriological physics would search out ultimate
differences among things that demonstrative philosophy, beamed
upon the larger and more universal truths, cannot strike. Em­
piriological physics would thus read the fine print in the book
of nature.
This chapter has taken a different slope toward the nature of
empiriological physics than does Maritain.13 It has inflected the
experimental side of physics, while Maritain has underscored its
mathematical form and has envisaged perhaps the second sense of
empiriological physics in the foregoing division. Though sug­
gestive of classical intermediate sciences in its noetic aspect and
perhaps only in the way in which an operative science is subordi­
nated to a speculative one,14 knowledge is something secondary in
empiriological physics taken purely. The only reason for its anal­
ogy to mixed or intermediate sciences might be the way it lumps
physics and mathematics, extension and motion, and all the other
dualisms, into that mixed or continuous status to gain a better
hold on its matter. The continuous or potential is the controllable,
and the more continuous the empiriological world and empiri­
ological disciplines can be made the more control results. So the
18 Cf. La philosophie de la nature (Paris; Tequi [n.d.]); also, Les de­
grés du savoir, chs. 2, 4.
14 Cf. In Boethii de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1, ad 5.

Motion and Empiriological Physics

179

analogy to intermediate sciences may be only an analogy and an
historical accident besides. Far from rejecting Maritain, the
analysis of this chapter would find him an ally on many points
and fit his larger conclusions into the present context.
De Koninck’s view,15 which is also suggested by the independ­
ent and later development of Sofia Vanni Rovighi16 in Italy,
seems also closely akin to the conclusions which the preceding
pages indicate. This is especially so, if dialectic is truly accepted
as the attempt to know a thing by principles extraneous to its
nature—an analogue of the empiriological ambition.
The difficulty is, however, that when empiriological physics
is taken by itself, its logical structure and its ontological references
are so radically opposed to those of the philosophical science of
nature that one can scarcely be regarded as the continuation of
the other. When the empiriological physicist, as such, goes after
pure inertia, he can hardly do so in order to know it since it is
not properly in the line of knowability for man. To put the
thought in another way, the emphasis on control would seem to
put the empiriological physicist in the company of art, of the
regulative and operative, rather than the speculative and scien­
tific. It is by that which is principal about a thing that it is to be
judged, and everywhere within the strict limits of his method,
the empiriological physicist has been found busied about the
passive and potential only. In this light, the end of his method,
taken purely, is not in speculative knowledge but in man, the
artist.
Empiriological physics, as the progress of the sequel will show,
can analogate philosophy. It can illustrate philosophy in a sense
in which Aquinas used the word inductio. But it can hardly
enunciate philosophy. Thus, philosophical physics can interpret
the data of empiriological physics, refining the ore to exemplify
13 Culture, IV (1941), 465-476.
16 Rivista di filosofía neo-scolastica, XLI (1949), I, 77-90. Vanni
Rovighi is, however, poles apart from De Koninck in the role assigned to
the philosophy of nature, as opposed to metaphysical and empiriological
disciplines.

180

Philosophical Physics

its own certitudes and using what is descriptively organized as an
aid in abstracting explanatory principles. In this fashion, em­
piriological physics is accepted (finis operantis) into the status
of a naturalized citizen in philosophical physics. But to search out
the passive would seem to install empiriological physics as prima­
rily concerned (finis operis) with the operable and the productive
which man approaches to alter and not to contemplate.
If the reasoning of this chapter is accepted, it leaves no grounds
for the scandalous war that has racked the modem period, be­
tween laboratory and life, empiriological and philosophical phys­
ics, the matter of ancient learning and the method of the modern
one. All men are philosophers by birth because they are thinkers,
and in some inchoate form, they are also empiriological because
they are makers. Between philosophical and empiriological phys­
ics there is no more conflict than between man, the thinker, and
man, the maker, using both his thinking and his making in differ­
ent ways to attain his supreme goal of happiness.

Suggested Readings

Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (passim).
Dewey, John, How We Think (Boston, 1933).

6
Motion, Dualism, and Modern
Physics
MATTER DISCLOSES A PLURALITY OF SUBSTANCES

The question of whether nature is one or many is a favorite
theme of philosophers. In a variety of form, it plays through the
whole symphony of man’s philosophical endeavors, leading him
at times into the discordant notes of pluralism or monism and
often to that delicate harmony of a realistic mean.
The extreme views in this controversy are alive today. Wil­
liam James, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap,
Charles Morris, and in general the whole empiriological spirit
slopes toward the view of pluralism. This doctrine involves the
Humean reduction of substance to phenomena and the tendency
to hold the infinite dividedness or the radical indetermination of
all things in themselves.
Monism, typified in the ancient world by Parmenides and on
the modern stage by Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, and F. H. Bradley,
comes to light in the present-day systems of dialectical materi­
alists, of Samuel Alexander, of Alfred North Whitehead (in a
modified way), and of the theory of relativity when it elevates
its space-time continuum into a philosophical altitude. For
monism, everything is substantially one and at most only appar­
ently different. If this reality is called God, the monism is called
pantheism.
In this chapter, evidence will be adduced first in a familiar way
and then a little more technically to show that atoms and mole181

182

Philosophical Physics

cules are all distinct substances and that the changes which they
undergo are therefore substantial changes. But a preliminary
issue is the problem of whether there are no substances whatever
in the universe, resulting in a pluralistic cosmos; whether there
is only one substance in nature, justifying monism; or whether
there are, as a realism would hold, many substances in nature
each charged with a unity of its own, making for a plural (as
opposed to pluralistic) universe.
As the philosophical science of nature presses onward in its
reflex purification of common-sense notions, it observes that the
realities in the mobile world are, so to say, drawn in upon them­
selves; they are invested with a stamp, however frail it may
sometimes appear, of isolation, exclusiveness, nucleation; things
have a certain centricity (a datum which the atomic physicist
also admits when he seeks and sees the centralizing tendencies
of the nucleus in an atom and now, in the era of the meson, of
the “nucleolus.") As Bergson put it, “matter has a tendency to
constitute isolable systems . . .” 1 All these facts are crystal clear
in that part of the mobile world which is living. Plants have an
intussusceptive character; animal action is more immanent than
the vegetative; at the summit of nature stands man, so centralized
within himself that he can achieve a total reflection on his own
being and determine his own actions through his own will. In
the organic world, the hierarchy of being stands forcefully there
for man to see. The original substantial character of each living
thing is shown by its .inferiority to itself which we may call im­
manence.
The substantial nature evidenced in a man, an animal, a plant,
is also realized, however feebly, on the level of inorganic or
mineral matter.
This could be shown, according to one approach that looks
promising, by comparing the thinker’s experience of himself with
the similar but lesser types of being whose operations are apparent
L’évolution créatrice (Paris, 1918), p. 108.

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

183

in the outer world. According to this view, man understands the
sensation of the animal and the vegetation of a plant much more
intimately when, as justified by their operations which are seen
as analogous to man’s, he projects beneath these operations what
sensation and vegetation mean in his own self-experience.
This understanding of the lower world in terms of ourselves
rather than the reverse procedure, which evolutionary psychology
has popularized, is suggested by the psychophysiológist, Kurt
Goldstein. It could be extended easily to the inorganic world
where there is found a feeble analogy to that substantial unity
which man himself understands in his own being, and finds
tapered off as he goes down the scale of reality. Certain existen­
tialist approaches might be taking this heading.
But on the other hand, valid knowledge, it was established in
Chapter 1, must begin with the general and move toward the
more determinate, and a take-off from our subjectivity, an indi­
vidual beins, would involve the reversal of this direction. Hence,
the approach suggested here seems inadequate and wears at most
the character of a confirmatory argument.
But there is another avenue also open to show the plurality of
substance in matter. What is meant by saying that in the objec­
tive world beings seem drawn in upon themselves, centers of
action, nucleating identities? A first approximation to this an­
swer might be given in Spinoza’s maxim, unumquodque in suo
esse preserverari conatur. Things in interaction resist one another.
There is no mere Heraclitean flow. There is dynamism in nature,
but at the same time, there is something somewhere that is defi­
nite in everything. There is a plurality of differences, or else
things would be indistinguishable. No motion, and above all, no
distinctions in motion could be and be discerned in a pure flow.
To deal rigorously with this problem, philosophical physics
may well resort to the idea of inertia which is at the core of em­
piriological physics and should be clashed against the notion of
nature. What is inert has its principle of motion outside of it, as
the very converse of natural movement; what is inert is sluggish

184

Philosophical Physics

because it is indifferent, passive, actualized completely by outside
agents. If inertia rules the real and nothing owns anything from
within itself, there is an infinite regression in matter.
Aquinas censured the Pythagorean spirit for using principles
“extraneous to the natural.” Moreover, he argued, if a thing has
a finite velocity, it cannot be moved completely from the outside.
For if bodies did not put up resistances to these outer agents and
did not bear a reality from within, by the same force that moves
a thing it should be moved faster and faster until an infinite
velocity has been attained.2
Now if there were no natures with their inner principles and
if all things had their principles of motion outside them, any­
thing that moved would move infinitely fast. The plain fact is
that there are no infinite velocities in our universe and that, if
(per impossibile) they did occur, they would be indeterminate
and hence closed off from knowledge. If bodies differ in motion,
as they do, then none is infinite. Far from being indeterminate,
they are comparable and hence definite in themselves. In other
words, granted that there is such a thing as inertia at all, it cannot
be unlimited in this moving world of ours, and if it is limited,
there are brakes. And these brakes are natures or substances.
It is said that there must be natures or substances, a plurality
of them. For differences cannot be explained if there is only one
so-called bottleneck to inertia. Opposites have diverse principles.
To ground the fact of differences, there must be a manifold of
these counteragents to inertia, a plurality of things moved from
within. Aquinas depicts every nature in the strong language of a
“prime mover” and declares as the study of being more clearly
shows, that these prime movers on the finite scale are not moved
inertially but by participation in the Prime Movership of God.
The empiriological physicist may counter that the resisting
principles to inertial movement are inertial themselves and that
In de coelo et mundo, Bk. Ill, chs. 3, 4, 7.

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

185

the world is a cosmic cascade of mere inertia where the fluid is
simply seeking and finding its own level as time goes by. But
this view is not satisfactory. For what is inert cannot be differ­
entiated; one purely inert thing could never differ from another,
and if there is only inertia in the world, there are no differences.
If there are differences in inertia, there is no pure inertia; there
are principles of difference within the inertia, an equivalence to
saying form and matter. Since the inert as such is indeterminate
and has no distinctions and since nature unfolds a plurality of
differences, there must be a plurality of non-inertias, a plurality
of substances, a plurality of natures. For substance is a nature
existing.
A purely inert world would be actually nothing. Where there
is one divergence from inertia, there would be only one being
formed by the two opposites. Where there are two such diver­
gences, there would be two differing citizens in the cosmos. If
there is a plurality of being, there is a plurality of non-inertias.
This logic is enough to show plurality, but it may not convince
the monist, holding that the mineral world is one substance, at
least at its roots, while branching into a plurality of appearances
or attributes. In Spinoza’s language, the world is natura naturata,
and for Alexander, it is a continuum in which individuals are
nothing but “pieces” of space-time.
There are some pointed answers that can be given against
the monism of the material world. This world, if it is radically
one, would not be a mobile reality since it would have to move
itself; there is nothing outside it in matter that could move it, and
ontologism of course would lead to pantheism too. Hence, there
could be no motion in a monism of matter.
Nothing could account for such a world in its temporal history.
If it were one, it should be absolutely ordered, and yet there are
disorders like earthquakes and tropical storms which clearly argue
to a cosmos that is more than a single substance.
A monistic world should not produce the novelty which motion

186

Philosophical Physics

discloses. As a mover, it would have the actualization in the first
place and would not, could not, confer it on itself what it already
owned.
But there is another way of disproving monism. An acute ac­
cent should be laid upon the difference between the living and
the lifeless which the philosophical science of nature, the study
of mobile being taken simply, has a duty to discuss. Plants and
animals, acting immanently, are more perfect than lower matter;
they are more finalized with respect to themselves. The lifeless,
lacking the immanence-conferring form of the living, has less of
a unifying principle to muster its various differentiations into
unity and marshal them to final good of their subject. From the
amoeba to man, a living thing shows its own individuality by its
motions, and is capable of achieving a remarkable unity amid
functional and structural difference.
The living is greater than the lifeless, more directed to itself,
more whole-making, more unifying of variety. A single tree is
greater than the entire mineral universe, just as all the trees in
the world could not act as immanently as a single moth.
Now of the unity amid variety in the inorganic world, there
can be no doubt. The coursings of the stars, the cycles of the
weather, the neutralization of storms and lightning and even
meson showers, the pull of gravity that presumably keeps the
crust of the earth from peeling off into space, in fact all the phe­
nomena pondered by empiriological physics show the order, co­
ordination, harmony, and general balance of the material world.
But if this material world were all one being, the perfection of
it would have to be greater than that of a living thing. The non­
living world, single reality that it would be in a monism of mat­
ter, would be ordering itself, acting on itself, and integrating
such variety into unity that the single mineral substance would
be a being more perfect than the individual plant and even the
animal. The single material nature would be more versatile than
the life above it, if it could unite the whole manifold of the min­
eral world into a radical oneness. To state a corollary, this min-

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

187

eral unity would have to act, like every cosmic being, for its own
intrinsic good, and its unifying achievement would be greater
than that of life. So if the inorganic is less perfect than the living,
as the previous logic revealed, then the material world cannot be
one substance, and monism must be rejected.
The argument against pluralism showed that there are natural
differences in the universe. The present assault against monism
shows that these differences cannot simply be modes of a single
substance and that there must be many substances in the mate­
rial world. If then, nature is neither many nor one, it must at the
same time be one and many, or since the oneness and the mani­
fold affect the same things, it must be one-in-many. This is one
of the meanings of matter-form.
It was said above that inorganic things are bent in upon them­
selves, self-centered, and nucleated. There is a real resistance
by a thing to every movement which tugs at it. There is always a
reaction to action, a stubborn opposition of things differentiated
from each other, and this balking character in the mineral world
shows itself whenever differences are to be changed. When hy­
drogen reacts with oygen to become water, it does not do so with­
out putting up a resistance. It does not flee off, falling away like
an infinitely long line of tenpins when the first one tumbles over.
It stands fast. It tries to hold its own. If it did not resist becoming
water, it could never become water at all. If there were no fric­
tion, a machine could never produce anything—automobiles
could never run, a pen could never write; if there were no ana­
logue to friction in the atom, the atom bomb could never have
exploded. The thing that resists in an atom must be the very
same thing that yields. Otherwise, there could never be any ac­
tion at all.
One may well use empiriological physics as Aquinas applied it,
by way of illustrating philosophical physics rather than by way of
proof. In such a light, an example of the centricity of the atom
can be seen in the present attempts to account for it. The orbital
electrons are viewed as moving around the nucleus. The nucleus

188

Philosophical Physics

is composed of protons and neutrons, and their cohesion is pres­
ently believed associated with the meson, the supreme central­
izing agency so far detected in minera] matter. But how can this
centralization of the atom and its withdrawal toward itself be
explained?
Such use of empiriological physics does not of course subscribe
to an ultrarealism regarding the submicroscopic and insist that
so-called “scientific objects” in Whitehead’s language—such as
atoms and their substructures—really exist in matter as they do
in empiriological theory. But they have at least a basis in the real
world. There is some analogy in matter, some real counterpart to
the empiriological report on them. Otherwise, the triumphs of
empiriological theory would be impossible. “Scientific objects”
might be called constructs, partly real and partly logical, but Rus­
sell has given the construct an unfortunate meaning. It is safer to
say that electrons, protons, atoms, and the like in some way analogate real things, and this applies not only to the foregoing
mention of “scientific objects” but to the discussion that will soon
get under way.
Material substance cannot be its own passivity, for then all
would be prime matter moving, when moved by the lightest
stroke, with an infinite velocity, and making the universe inde­
terminate. It is something more than potency, plurality, and
quantity. It is acted upon through its potency, but it is not pas­
sivity and inertia alone. The world is not pluralistic.
Nor can material substance be its own activity. For then it
would have its own perfection to begin with and motion toward
the new would be impossible. It would be pure act. Hence the
world is not monistic.
The same subject must ultimately be active and passive. If this
were not so, then either the passivity and activity, running in
parallel, would never be rooted in the same principle, and no ac­
tion could occur; or the substance would be both passive and
active simultaneously and under the same aspect—a contradic-

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

189

tion. That is why Aristotle argued to the existence of nature as
the subject of contraries and why, in his view, the active char­
acter of things seen by the monists and the passivity which the
pluralists exalt are accounted for by avoiding the errors of both
extremes.
THE ATOM IS A SUBSTANCE

It may be now be proposed that this fact of substance is realized
at least on the level of the atom and the molecule. No one can
deny that atoms of the various elements parade a dazzling hetero­
geneity. One can begin with hydrogen, the first element, and
run the scale to the recently fabricated element, berkelium, the
ninety-seventh, finding in the long stretch that no two elements
have the same pattern of properties. Some are colorless, some are
colored, and their colors, varying in wave length and wave am­
plitude, cover the whole visible spectrum and range beyond it at
both ends. Some of the elements are gaseous, some liquid, some
solid. They taste differently and smell differently. Each has a dif­
ferent weight, a different electrical and magnetic structure, dif­
ferent spectroscopic lines when suitably excited. Some are soft,
some are hard, some cannot be felt, others would be injurious if
we touched them. The same rainbow of difference shines at the
level of the molecules, as every freshman chemist leams.
Now the point to be debated is this: Can a single type of sub­
atomic substance account for these differences of atoms, or if
there be a plurality of types of subatomic substances, can they in
turn by a merely mechanical rearrangement explain this hetero­
geneity which the atoms of the various elements exhibit? This is
the critical issue in the struggle between the dualism of matter­
form and the contemporary empiriological spirit. (The case of
mechanism in chemical compounds will be discussed after set­
tling the question of the atom.)
The first alternative can easily be dismissed. A single type of
subatomic structure, rearranging and recombining in myriad

190

Philosophical Physics

ways to form the manifold of the mobile world would have to be
as versatile, as adaptable, as pregnant to relations, and as imma­
nent as life itself. There must therefore be a plurality of different
types of substances. At this point, the issue becomes: Can these
different subatomic types by their various recombinations give
rise to the manifold of motions in the sense world? Though the
answer is somewhat more difficult than in the preceding case, the
philosophical physicist is compelled to decide in the negative.
The reason for such a decision would lie along this line: As we
scale up the ladder of being from mineral, to plant, to animal, to
the human level, there is noted a growing interiority and a dying
away of that inertia which limits the spontaneity of a nature.
Neutrons, protons, and electrons, together with the lesser known
entity, the meson, are the building blocks of minerals and would
lie at the base of the ladder. Looking again at mineral hetero­
geneity which experience discloses, if so few units could account
for such a vast and varying number of immediate relations—for
every relation must ultimately be rooted in the immediate—the
periodic chart would be a story of subatomic particles more ver­
satile and adaptable than life itself. These (four or so) particles
would have to be capable of immanent operation, of the spon­
taneity, interiority, and originality displayed by plants, animals,
and even man.
The material world which affects our senses (much less, as
will later be shown, the subatomic particles which are even lower
on the scale of mobile being than elements) is not capable of
achieving the immanence of a living, many-talented thing. Im­
mersed in inertia, activity and spontaneity are limited to a corre­
sponding degree. Whether matter-form terminology be employed
or not, the point cannot be denied that such entities as neutrons,
protons, and electrons, few in number and poor in property, do
not have sufficient reality, an adequate amplitude of substance,
being which is intrinsic enough, to individuate so many attri­
butes and relations as the elements reveal. Charles Hartshorne

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

191

has rightly pointed out, for instance, that the superiority of a dog
over a pillar is that the dog can relate itself in various ways to the
pillar but that the pillar cannot do likewise to the dog.34 As
Aquinas remarks, the degree of actuality, of perfection, of inte­
riority in a subject is measured by its ability to receive accidents."'
The subatomic particles do not have such perfection, actuality,
and interiority to account, of their own inner natures, for the
heterogeneity of our experienced world.
A comparison of the mineral and living worlds spells out the
verdict that the living is higher than the lifeless and cannot en­
joy an immanence and versatility greater than that which turns
up in the living domain. In full-dress terminology, the subatomic
particles are much more “determined to one" capacity than living
things, much more limited and localized, much fuller of inertia
and passivity, much more specific and particular, ampler in po­
tency and poorer in act. “Determination to one” is the opposite
to originality, spontaneity, versatility, and immanence: “the less
a thing is immersed in matter, the less it is finited,” says Aquinas.5
Form in the inorganic world is so faint that a mineral is almost
completely under the tyranny of inertia; hence, the success of the
empiriological method in the region of the mineral, its lesser suc­
cess in biology where form is greater and more exertive, and its
shortcomings when it attempts to philosophize about man, the
reflective self-determining creature, where form triumphs over
matter or over inertia. Mineral matter is much more “determined
to one” accident (or several) than it is capable of subsuming
many. If all facts of difference could be reduced to a few rather
simple subatomic substances—electron, proton, neutron—deter­
mined differently in forming atoms by the corresponding inte­
riority and versatility of their own intrinsic powers, there would
be a contradiction in nature. Effects would be beyond the com­
3 The Divine Relativity (New Haven, 1948), p. 7.
4 De natura accidentis, ch. 1.
5 De natura materiae, ch. 1.

192

Philosophical Physics

mand of their causes. The operations of subatomic particles,
achieving such heterogeneity, would be richer than their impov­
erished principles.
On the ladder of being, it is found that the plant embodies the
perfection of the mineral world; animals have the perfections of
plants; and man has the perfection of all the world below him.
Man has all the perfection of, say, a rose, but this perfection is
not specifically and distinctively present, like a panel on the door.
It is indeterminately present in the unity of man’s being. In
Aquinas’ view of men by reference to lower creatures,” they are
less finited.” Rose-ness is indeterminate in man because man’s for­
mal determination is of a higher nature. At the very peak of real­
ity stands God, the exemplar of all things, and yet He is a simple
substance. Now if all the facts of difference which experience re­
veals in the mobile world are to be reckoned from a few sub­
atomic realities, recombining under their own mechanical power
and in a purely mechanical way, they would be, as it were, the
exemplars of all their possible determinations. They would have
a fullness of being that would be as the fullness of man, contain­
ing all the perfections of the world below him. But such a rich­
ness cannot be conceded to the subatomic entities.
The stature of a being may be measured, to borrow a Kierkegaardian expression, by its ability to relate itself to itself. In this
respect, man is the greatest of changing beings and a mineral is
the lowest. A living thing is more operative of itself, and though
still requiring potencies for all of its activity, is more capable of
coming into direct contact with what is external to it without
changing in its substance. The ability of a thing to relate itself to
itself is the measure of its ability to assume relations to the out­
side without changing. The lower beings in nature depend on
their accidents and have a feebler power, from the natural re­
sources of their own substances, to assume relations to the out­
side without that loss of identity which matter-form dualism
would claim to be the fate of subatomic particles within the atom.
The “determination to one” is but a paraphrased and realistic

Motion, Dualism, and. Modern Physics

193

version of Spinoza’s maxim, “every determination is a negation.”
There is a determinate proportion between an agent and what
this agent can produce. If the principle to be acted upon by the
agent exceeds the proportion of the agent, no effect will follow;
but when the passivity in the being to be acted upon is scaled
downward by increasing and thus brought within the sphere of
influence which the agent commands, then motion can eventu­
ate. This is but a rephrasing of the principle of causality or suffi­
cient reason.
The variety in the mineral world demands a variety of prin­
ciple, while the subatomic principles actually grow not more var­
ied but fewer in number than the mineral heterogeneities they
are supposed to explain. And as the units become fewer in num­
ber, their depth of being would have to be greater to assume,
without changing, so many relations as the macroscopic manifold
would require. Is their being so deep, their reality so rich?
MODERN RESEARCH ARGUES TO HIERARCHY

To answer, it is enlightening to consider the Thomistic prin­
ciple of continuation or hierarchy, compared with the latest de­
velopments of empiriological physics. The hierarchy in nature is
arranged according to the degree of actuality owned by the vari­
ous grades of being or in other words, starting from the higher
entities and tapering downward, according to increase of passiv­
ity or inertia. As Aquinas so pointedly puts it, plants are more
inert than animals and the atoms and molecules are more inert
than plants:

And therefore in the elements the matter is least perfect, be­
cause only one form of one element is actuated at a time: and if
sometimes the form of another element is virtually present, there
is no abiding of the first thing but a change, as for example
when the heat of fire acts on air inducing the quality of fire.
In compounds, indeed, matter is more perfect: for here, with the
one form conferring actuality to the compound there are present
all the forms of the elements, virtually however and not essen­

194

Philosophical Physics

tially because each of these requires its own determinate quan­
tity ... ; hence since there is one substratum for the com­
pound and one existence, its form is one. Some compounded
substrata, however, are animated, and especially man whose
form is not produced from matter predisposed by the quantity
of the compound; hence it is fitting that in the animate world
the essences of some forms should be without their full perfec­
tions; for this is the profoundest way in which animate things
transcend simple compounds, namely by perfecting their mat­
ter through the acquisition of more than one form at a time,
just as we see that in one way what is simple is resolved from
compounds and in another way from prime matter in which,
prior to the becoming as such, there is nothing actual of the
form to be produced . . .6
The reality of hierarchy in the world of changing being is of
so striking importance that another analysis may be cited:
And hence it is that the forms of elements which are the most
material of all are characterized by active and passive qualities,
say hot, cold, humid, dry, and so on as befits the disposition of
the matter. But the forms of compounds, namely of inanimate
bodies such as stones, metals, minerals, besides the powers and
activities which they participate from the elements of which they
are composed, have some other more noble powers and activities
characterizing the forms specific to them . . . and thus in a
constant ascension, the nobler the specific form, the more excel­
lent the powers and operations proceeding from it; so far forth
that the noblest form which is the rational soul has the intel­
lectual power and operation, that not only transcend the power
and action of elements but all corporeal power and action.7

Empiriological physics has disclosed data on particles below
those of the element which provided the first step in the Thomistic hierarchy, a hierarchy that may be described in terms of
matter-form, as Aquinas himself preferred in the foregoing pas­
sages, or described in the broader perspective of various degrees
6 De -natura materiae, ch. 4.
7 De occultis operibus -naturae.

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

195

of changing being. Descending beneath the surface of the atom,
the empiriological physicist has sounded a further increase in the
degree of inertia, a greater determination to one, or in the more
picturesque way of putting it, a greater immersion in matter.
According to relativity mechanics, even energy is inert. A pho­
ton (light particle) at rest would be of zero mass; it must be kept
in motion to preserve its being. A single atom or molecule is ther­
modynamically meaningless since heat depends on the agitation
in an aggregate; a single particle is neither hot nor cold, accord­
ing to empiriological physics. An electron by itself is also without
significance; it is inertly defined by what is outside of it, say a
proton. Such entities are poor in their being.
The free electrons which account for electric conductivity are
“free” in different ways depending on the substance in which
they float and in whose tyranny they are. That is why the con­
ductivities of different substances differ. An electron, if empirio­
logical physics be correct, has only two properties, mass and
charge. In the same category is the proton. The neutron has only
one property, weight, and like its fellow subatomic particles, it
manages to enjoy a magnetic moment by its spin. A neutron in
nature is limited and quite determined to one, like all the other
fundamental particles. Its slot in nature is the nucleus whither it
tends, never having enough interiority and independence to
make a permanent abode elsewhere, for example amid the orbital
electrons. The negative meson, first detected in cosmic ray show­
ers, survives in independent status for only millionths of a sec­
ond, and the neutral meson, believed now as the fundamental
cohesive particle of the atom, has a lifetime that is almost incom­
parably shorter. Such entities are in matter's poorhouse.
Atoms, empiriological physics reports, can appear colored
through a kind of resonance radiation : the wave length of the in­
cident light which strikes the natural vibrating frequency of the
outer electrons in the atom will be reflected, while the other wave
lengths are absorbed. An electron is the cause of color, but color
itself it cannot claim. It is impoverished. The neutron, proton,

196

Philosophical Physics

electron, and meson can be combined in so many different ways
only because they are so dependent, impoverished, and inert, so
determinable not of their own intrinsic powers but by forces act­
ing from without.
An atom is much more respectable in its status. Oxygen cannot
combine in as many ways as an electron combines into other sys­
tems, simply because oxygen is less inert and has more of its own,
more independence, more nature. An atom is richer, less im­
mersed in matter, greater in nature and in being; in the Thomistic terminology of hierarchy, the subatomic particles even
more so than the elements are characterized by their enslaving
localization to only one form at a time; they are more determined
to one, more impoverished, “more finited”; they have less power
and activity than even the elements; they are more inert.
What empiriological physics has done and what the following
sections will attempt to deepen is to revise downward the hier­
archy of being detected in experience, a hierarchy that begins
with the material and mounts from the element to the compound
to the plant to the animal, and finally to man. Empiriological
physics has dug out a world below the elements. Such a world is
weak in being and can no more account by its own power for the
level above it than inertia added to inertia gives less inertia or the
sum of passivities yields act.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS TENDS TO THE LOGICAL ORDER

In Chapter 5, it was seen that the difference between empirio­
logical physics and philosophy may be projected against the dif­
ference between art and nature, the logical and ontological orders. A further pursuit of what this means will forge a powerful
tool for the denial of mechanism in the atom.
In the ontological order, the so-called order of first intention,
beings become richer and fuller as the scale is mounted, begin­
ning with the quiddity of sensible things and stretching to the
perfect simplicity of God. In the logical order, the richness of a
thing, as the analytic of logic moves along, becomes less and less,

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

197

intension decreases as comprehension increases. In the end, being
has become so vague that it has virtually lost all content. Hegel,
mistaking this impoverished being of logic for real being, denied
the principle of non-contradiction and identified being with the
naught. From the content angle, the procession in the ontological
order is from the complex to the simple; in the logical order, it is
from the simple to the complex. In Alexander's words, "Things
are grouped extensionally into classes; intensionally they are con­
nected by a common nature.”8
Kant held, in his attempt to ground Newtonian physics, that
ontology must give place to analysis, and Lachelier was keen
enough to detect that empiriological method is essentially ana­
lytic and regressive. Empiriological physics as such seems to make
this option for the analytical and logical sequence. Each part iso­
lated, not being capable of immanence or nature, tends to have a
distinctly compartmented function; united the parts form the
whole as in the logical sequence. Theories, for instance, are
judged not by their intension but by extension in their domain of
application. Intension cannot be treated in empiriological physics
as such; it is available only to abstraction.
To reinforce this view of the empiriological disciplines as cate­
gorical and summative, a typical modern textbook on biology may
be consulted. The simplest forms of life are studied first, the onecelled amoeba or paramecium, then comes the study of the hydra,
then perhaps the earthworm, then fishes, frogs, guinea pigs, and
so on—until man is studied last, as though he were simply a more
complicated form of the preceding structures. This order is dic­
tated largely by the theory of evolution, and it moves from the
simple to the complex. A similar direction is revealed in empirio­
logical physics where, for instance, the world experienced by man
is pictured as a more complicated form of particles and processes
of submicroscopic dimensions. Even in Russell’s latest language,
for instance, and "event” is “a bundle of compresent qualities.”9
8 Space, Time, Deity, I, 176—177.
9 Human Knowledge (New York, 1948), p. 83.

198

Philosophical Physics

It is not surprising to find logic joining hands with mecha­
nism; both are formal, both are art, both stress categorical parts
rather than participated or entitative wholes. Reality, instead of
ever being thought in the form of a whole, is perpetually treated
as a sum. Empiriological physics stresses the differences between
things and their dividedness, just as the logical categories do in
their purely logical aspect. In the end, the universe becomes a
pluralistic one for the physicist because he studies only differ­
ences, as J. B. S. Haldane, a Marxian scientist, has recently
averred. The logical universe is likewise plural since the only
unity studied is itself a category, the predicamental unity within
the genus of quantity. Comte divides the sciences not according
to the intensional hierarchy outlined in Chapter 1 but according
to scope or extension. It is more than a coincidence that positiv­
ism should finally wed itself, as logical positivism shows by its
name, to the science of logic. Logic is the favorite pastime in logi­
cal empiricism, and Dewey with his company of naturalists also
makes capital of it. It is in logic that the final meaning of the em­
piriological method is today being sought, and typically enough,
the critical issue in the search is the relation between intension
and extension. Russell now founds the first in the psychology and
the second in the logic of form.
Logic and the empiriological approach to reality have more
than the name, logical positivism, to indicate their points of
matching. Both logic and the empiriological method prescind
from being as existing, as unitive, as substantial, natural, iden­
tical, immanent; they prescind from being as changing. It is by
existence, as the metaphysician shows, that all realities are alike;
it is by their categorical, essential, logical, inert implications that
they differ. Empiriological physics has made its option for a plu­
ral, logical universe, and though perfectly legitimate as a means
of gaining the control on matter which logic seeks on thought,
such a universe should never be allowed to disguise itself as on­
tology.
Aquinas accused the Platonists of his day of neglecting the

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

199

world of nature. He charged them with a logical approach, de­
claring that “from many things which they, in the logical order,
consider in universal form, they make facile conclusions.” Pla­
tonism is categorical and mechanistic, having much in common
with the modern empiriological approach. Like empiriological
physics, Platonism fits its forms—obtained as in modern theory
ahead of the sensations which they interpret—to the world that
is not self-intelligible but transeuntly known. Russell's logical
universe, capped by Frege’s notion of “types” which are unde­
fined terms that define other terms, is similar to Plato's. Empha­
sizing the logical construct Russel] has coined a “supreme maxim
for scientific philosophizing” which states: “Whenever possible,
substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to
unknown entities.” These ideas will be considered more specifi­
cally in Chapter 9.
Platonism, like Russell’s logicalism, is not the science of chang­
ing being, and neither is logic or empiriological physics. In seek­
ing to free empiriological physics of anthropomorphism, positiv­
ism has made the physics more than ever anthropomorphic be­
cause empiriological physics has thereby lost contact, qua empir­
iological physics, with objective changing being. The logical ap­
proach affords the empiriological researcher better control on the
relation of method to matter which he conceives as art, and by a
better control over method, he gets a better control over matter.
It is art working on art. But it is not ontology.
Only a metacategorical, natural universe can be objective and
non-anthropomorphic.
SUBATOMIC UNITS ARE LOGICALLY GENERAL

The protons, neutrons, and electrons are poor in their being
like the entities of logic. They are extremely passive and deter­
minable. They are general. They do not exist independently in
nature but tend immediately to servitude elsewhere. Certainly,
when passing from one atom to another they may be said to pos­
sess a minimal form, like an atom existing in nature that will

200

Philosophical Physics

later be part of man. But the point here is that the atom is not
simply a subatomic machine shop. It is a substance, a nature exist­
ing, and the subatomic particles cannot, by simple summation,
explain it because they are too poor and general to account for its
riches and heterogeneity.
The subatomic particles have a meager independence and a
paucity of property which makes the “determination to one’’ al­
most literal as a determination to one property only, and such en­
tities cannot account for the variegated motions in the universe.
In their own operation, the subatomic particles display an inert
and almost total determination from without. An electron will
not act except incidentally and by mere mechanical impact with
another electron. The principle of like acting on like, a corollary
of the principle of causality, which the science of being is com­
petent to discuss, does not appear in the empiriological technique.
In friendship, for instance, the love of like for like is the very
highest type, since each party is not interested in the other for
what he can get; they are alike in the first place, and so in a sense,
nothing is to be gotten by either. The love of concupiscence, on
the other hand, is not a relation between two acts but more be­
tween potency and act. One party loves the other for what the
second party can confer on him.
Mutatis mutandis, there is something of these relationships ex­
isting analogically in all material being because interiorly all
creatures are alike, imitations of God. An electron will not seek
another thing like it but will seek what can confer something on
it. It will seek a proton, for example. Empiriologically speaking,
it cannot be said to produce what is like itself (in the sense of
omne agens agit sibi simile) namely, another being distinct from
itself. An electron has such a feeble and univalent reality, almost
unipropertied reality, that what it causes or produces is, as might
be expected from the law of inertia, something unlike itself—
hydrogen for instance, if it unites with a single proton. Nothing
that is in hydrogen as such, no hydrogeneity that is, can be found
in the electron as such. Empiriological physics has a preference

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

201

for the categorical. Like, for the empiriological vision, never pro­
duces like in the original association of nature with the reproduc­
tive. An electron physically is in the hydrogen it "causes.” That
is why empiriological physics as such does not study causes, and
another discipline is needed to explore the causal relations of em­
piriological entities.
The action of an electron—and the proton and neutron could
be treated similarly—depends in slavish obedience on the condi­
tions existing outside it. It will not act with another electron and,
as far as empiriological physics has disclosed, with a neutron. It
will not act except in a context that is eventually qualitative and
formal. It will act, for instance, between the electrodes of an
electroscope or between the iron, copper, or aluminum plates of
a condenser or in an inductance coil of this or that material. Even
in the free electrons which are credited with determining the
conductivity of various metals, the number present depends upon
the kind of material in question. An electron’s action depends on
a qualitative context to make its action possible at all, depends on
a principle that gives being a degree of independence and intrin­
sicness as in atoms, on a principle that holds things together and
makes them orderly, on a principle that resists inertia and is called
nature. This simply means that if the electron acts in a multi­
plicity of ways there must be a multiplicity of different non-inertial factors in the world since the electron’s nearly total inertia
does not allow it to differentiate itself to account for the multi­
plicity.
These non-inertial factors may be called forms, and it should
be insisted that the proton and neutron would bear the same anal­
ysis as the electron. Inertia cannot account for differences, and
the deeper empiriological physics digs, the more inertia it un­
covers; and the more and more inertia, the more and more the
world becomes indifferent. Empiriological physics cannot arrest
the non-inert, the informed, the natural. This is available only to
the intelligence and is discerned and discussed in the philosophi­
cal science of nature.

202

Philosophical Physics

The more independent, stable, versatile, and active reality of
the atoms cannot be achieved by adding together passivities and
inertias. Activity is not just a sum of passivities, any more than a
sum of dependent beings will yield the independent.
THE NEUTRON IS POWERFUL BECAUSE POTENTIAL

It will be objected, of course, that the above arguments are in
contradiction to facts. What about the tremendous power of the
neutron? After all, this little entity, smashing into the uranium
nucleus and splitting it, was responsible for the havoc at Hiro­
shima and Nagasaki. Does not the empiriological physicist boast
that his triumphs over the nucleus have armed him with the ba­
sic power of the universe?
But however powerful it may be to the atomic engineer, the
neutron is powerful only in the general and inertial sense com­
parable to the poverty found in the logical category. Its stature is
not great enough to exist and operate in a natural stability; its
action depends on the nucleus which it assaults; it behaves dif­
ferently depending on the material which it bombards, just as an
electron acts differently in a vacuum tube depending on the ma­
terial and structure of the electrodes. The neutron’s speed can
and must be regulated in atom smashing, a fact that was one of
the knotty problems in the Manhattan project and was untied by
the development of a so-called moderator.
Relatively inert, the neutron, as the empiriological physicist
discloses it, must be acted on from the outside; inert in its own
actions, its work is strictly proportioned to the subject (deter­
mined to one) on which it operates. The only reason why the
empiriological physicist can employ and direct the neutron in his
services is because it is so general, undifferentiated, indetermi­
nate, inert, and potential. If it were powerful of its own, he could
not gain a hold on it, commanding it to fulfill his designs. The
empiriological physics of today is more powerful than its nine­
teenth-century forebear because it has pierced to realities more
inert, potential, and controllable by man. Empiriological physics

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

203

moves toward prime matter more than to form, to what is passive,
indeterminate, undisposed to independent existence.
The neutron, according to present views, is responsible for the
existence of isotopes, elements with different masses but with the
same chemical properties. The general logic that the subatomic
particles, pointing as they do in the direction of prime matter, are
much too inert to account for the stable, active, independent
character of atoms, must naturally include isotopes as distinct
substances also. Neon, for example, has three different isotopes.
The same chemical properties are associated with three different
masses, each differing solely by the number of neutrons in the
nucleus. In one, there are ten neutrons, in another eleven, in the
third twelve. That the neutron is long only on potency and in­
ertia and is short on act is supported by evidence that it can alter
only the massive or potentiality-principle within the atomic struc­
ture. It does not have sufficient intrinsic, qualitative, and natural
endowments to change the more active, spontaneous, and origi­
nal powers of the atom in question. In this connection, the pro­
ton seems a higher type of entity than the neutron, and in the
latest advances of empiriological physics, there is evidence that
despite the neutral character of the neutron, the proton is prob­
ably the stablest of the nuclear particles. When a proton is driven
out of a nucleus, a radical change occurs in the chemical prop­
erties of the element. When the neutron goes, the change in an
atom’s policy is only minor.
RADIOACTIVITY DISPLAYS NATURE’S STABILITIES

Another objection might be launched from the viewpoint of ra­
dioactivity. Here apparently is an instability in nature itself, an
argument against the thesis that “everything tends to preserve
itself in being,” a challenge to the idea that atoms are more inde­
pendent and self-centered than subatomic particles, a preference
in nature for chance . . . and indeterminism and inertia.
But the dualism of matter and form does not argue to a static
stability in the world of atoms. On the contrary, it emphasizes and

204

Philosophical Physics

explains their motions. It is maintained only that the stability and
independence of atoms is not comparable to that of the subatomic
particles, and that instability added to instability cannot yield
stability, any more than potency plus potency can equal more act.
But are we not off on the wrong mental track, since a team of
horses, for instance, might pull a wagon up a hill where one
alone would fail? Two of the same kind seem more powerful
than one. If, however, you put the horses in the wagon, as the
empiriological physicist puts his particles into atoms, the wagon
would roll back down the hill rather than upward and would do
so with a greater momentum when two horses were in it than
when only one was taking the ride. The horses would be riding
in the wagon mechanically and by way of art. Here, granted a
plurality of natures, the question becomes what the subatomic
particles can do by their natural power and whether they can
form the wagons of atoms. And before considering radioactivity,
the general principle should be repeated that stability cannot be
gained by adding instabilities.
Now of the thirty-six isotopes of elements in the uranium, ac­
tinium, and thorium radioactive series, only five have a half life
which is less than a second—a half life being defined as the time
required for half the atoms present in a given aggregate to decay.
But in a quiescent period, a radioactive atom persists stably and
as a natural entity. Even in the case of Thorium-C' which has a
half life of a tenth of a microsecond (ICO sec), the element is
stable in its short span of independence, and no force, even the
case of chemical combination, can accelerate or retard its half life.
Now this stability is a tremendous fact that cannot be brushed
lightly away in the arguments against chance and a mechanistic
universe. An electron, on the other hand—-let us envision it as
the beta particle emitted by a radioactive element—does not per­
sist stably and independently. It immediately seeks the nearest
substance that will take it in. On this point, the empiriological
physicist might well argue that the electron has a drag that would
indicate its desire to remain independent, a drag appearing for

Motion, Dualism, and Modem Physics

205

example in the phenomenon of "transit time.” The counterargu­
ment would hold that the electron need not travel instantane­
ously to another substance when it is freed from an atom but
simply that it immediately tends to do so. It does not thrive on
freedom. The atoms tend more to independence.
The half-life period of radioactive elements, on the other hand,
is independent, of the environment. It persists even in com­
pounds, lifeless as well as living, and for that reason radioactive
elements have been used to trace and time the process of food as­
similation even in man. Radioactive elements occur in nature,
and their natura] independence, even if their lives are fractions
of seconds, is not duplicated by the neutron, proton, or electron
which are defined, related, and determined practically in entirety
by what lies outside of them.
SIMPLER FORMS ARE SOMEHOW IN COMPOUNDS

But the continuance of an element’s radioactivity even when in
combination with other elements and with the body of man poses
the question of the manner in which elements are present in com­
pounds and, if the atom is analogously a compound of subatomic
particles, of the manner in which the particles are present within
it. Aquinas declared that it was a matter of virtual presence and
Scotus that it was a case of the formal-eminent status of the lower
in the higher, like the presence of vegetation in man. Not wish­
ing to labor a technicality but more to define and defend the gen­
eral character of philosophical physics, virtual presence will be
taken below in a wide sense, preserving the note of unity in com­
pounds which Thomas stresses and at the same time doing jus­
tice to the diversity so ably emphasized by Scotus.
Virtual presence is a form of potential presence, but it is not a
matter of raw potency, like the capacity of a tennis ball to be
batted across the net. In a compound, the forms of the elements
have actually vanished into a new unity, but the activities of
these original forms, their virtue or their strength as the word
originally meant, remains in some way since it has not been al­

206

Philosophical Physics

together nullified. Virtual presence may be said to imply a mix­
ture of act potency, and its nature for that reason can only be ex­
plained through matter and form. The lower degrees of mobility
in nature are always apparent in the higher, but in their more
elevated form they are dominated by the higher reality in which
they are, expressing its nature and cooperating in its actions.
They are not expelled from existence in their adopted homes,
but they are, as shown by the unity of the whole in which they
reside, more indeterminately and subordinately present than
when they existed in isolation.
In the wide sense of the word which has been adopted here,
the most striking example of virtual presence that occurs in na­
ture is the reality of man. His soul is a rational one, the form of
his body. Yet it includes not only intelligence and will since it
also is the source of sensitive and vegetative action as shown by
man’s unity. At the human level, sensation is thus present vir­
tually, like vegetation—reliable psychology reports that there is
no such thing as pure sensation in man; vegetation is also present
virtually in animals; and the plants like the other living things
are marked by the presence of the chemicals detected by the bio­
chemist.
It is the office of that part of the philosophical science of na­
ture which is called psychology to discuss the body-soul union
and the way in which sensation is related to intellection. But if
the conclusion of psychology is accepted that man is only vir­
tually a creature of sensation, vegetation, and mineral matter, the
solution of the present problem in the more general philosophy
of nature becomes easier to exemplify. Sensation, at first glance,
seems to be an actual and almost isolated part of man rather than
a virtuality. If the rational soul, the greatest unifying element in
nature, cannot transcend it any more than it does, it should not
be surprising that compounds fail to obliterate the vestiges of the
elements comprising them. Consistently, it should be expected
that the ingredient elemental forms should be, in their new vir­
tual presence within compounds, even more actually residual

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

207

than the virtualities in man where the integrating force of form
is greater. Compounds bear certain traces of the elemental forms
in a greater or less degree, as sensation remains in the composite
that is man.
The matter-form account does not declare that the subatomic
particles melt into a homogeneous mass by their combination. If
the atom is ever directly observed, it is quite likely that a certain
granulated and differential structure will be disclosed. But this is
true of living things from the amoeba to man and does not con­
travene the substantial unity of the composite. The unity may
be looser in matter because the integrative force of the form is
less than in animals and much less than in man. But a minimal
form is still a form, and a virtual presence is still virtual even
though the act might be stronger than the potency.
Rutherford showed in the early twentieth century that the
atom is differentiated in structure, but this does not deny its for­
mal unity. Nor does it establish that electrons, protons, and neu­
trons are absolutely the same inside the atom as out. Sensation
looks about the same in the animal as in man, especially when at­
tention is turned upon the appearance and structure of organs.
But how a thing looks and how much it measures are not the
standards for proving matter and form. Whitehead objected to
reliance on “visual immediacy” and pleaded for attention to
“causal efficacy.” It is the operation, the action, the motion that
counts; for it is motion that philosophical physics must explain. A
human arm, seen for the first time while a man was wearing his
coat, might give the appearance of being mechanically attached
to the body. But its motion, apart from its static appearance
which might just as well be the arm of a clothes’ model in a win­
dow, discloses the unity of the arm with the whole man. It is not
how the atom looks that counts or even how it is measured as
impulses are measured in the human nerve. It is the motion that
matters.
Radioactive elements retain their radioactivity when united in
chemical compounds, but the other features of the element are

208

Philosophical Physics

transformed. In speaking of the presence of the element in the
new substance, its radioactive features are not the only factors
that matter. Melting point, specific gravity, magnetic properties,
and other such identifying marks are not the same in radium as
in a radium salt, showing that the element has undergone a sub­
stantial change. If the radioactivity remains, it can only be re­
membered that sensation remains in man but in its deeper as­
pects is found to be only virtually there.
THE LAW OF CONSERVATION ATTESTS TO NATURES

The discussion of radioactive decay leads into the more general
discussion of thermodynamics, which will clarify in a more tech­
nical way what has been argued thus far about the relative in­
crease of inertia as matter is smashed, and which will likewise
lead toward a basic framework in which matter-form dualism can
now be confirmed.
The first law of thermodynamics, an expression of nature’s sta­
bility, states the principle of conservation of matter and energy,
or, if one is a stickler, of matter-energy. The second law states the
instability of nature: entropy is always increasing, unusable en­
ergy is constandy being produced, the universe is running down­
hill.
These two laws are rather radical in present-day empiriological
physics, if they are not indeed the two most basic ideas in its
world picture. From the days of Galileo and Descartes through
Newton to Einstein and Heisenberg, empiriological physics re­
quires two general facts to set up its equations. One is the quan­
tities involved, the other their direction of movement. Empirio­
logical physics is still true to Descartes’ reduction of matter to
quantity and local motion.
Now it is the first law of thermodynamics that has to do with
the quantity in a given problem, and the second law with its di­
rection. These two laws are something vital in empiriological
physics. It may also be parenthetically remarked that the statisti­
cal treatment of thermodynamics, to be discussed in Chapter 8,

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

209

has raised certain difficulties against these laws. However, in sta­
tistical thermodynamics, the averages are in accord with macro­
scopic thermodynamics, and so the laws of thermodynamics still
remain something fundamental, if not the most fundamental
ideas in empiriological physics, as descriptive.
The universe is the aggregate of the beings which make it up,
and if the laws of thermodynamics apply to the universe as a
whole, they must have their basis in the individual parts. The
parts must be both conservative and entropie.
By recognizing such realities as natures, matter-form dualism
argues to the existence of conservative principles amid the
changes of mobile being. But empiriological physics alone, forced
to a pluralistic view of things, can give no account of nature’s
conservatism. What is doing the conserving? There must be a
multiplicity of conservative principles, for if only inertia reigned
in nature, movement from the outside, then Aquinas’ judgment
may be here reinvoked that everything would be moving with an
infinite velocity. The facts of difference and the denial of mon­
ism, argued in the opening pages of this chapter, pointed to a
multiplicity of non-inertial beings, braking the inertia. The same
argument may be reapplied, or simply restated, to establish in the
material world a plurality of braking and conservative principles.
Atomic and subatomic units differ in their conservatism. An
electron is not conservative in the way in which an atom, say, is
conservative. An electron is much more inert and can therefore
be influenced by many different contexts. It is true that atoms
can combine with other atoms as every chemist knows, and they
can do so rather easily. But the facility and readiness of combina­
tion is not on the same level with that found on the subatomic
scale. Any element can be made radioactive by the addition or
subtraction of relatively inert particles, like the neutron or pro­
ton, but not every element can be combined, say, with neon, sil­
ver, or zinc. What makes an element radioactive is therefore
much more general in the sense in which generality has been
previously defined, by reference to the logical categories, than

210

Philosophical Physics

what makes an element neon, silver, or zinc. The radioactivating
particles are thus much less conservative than the realities of
neon, zinc, or silver. Such particles more easily surrender them­
selves and are less and less self-centered, less and less moved from
within and by natures.
What is more general is less and less conservative, where gen­
erality is again taken not in the ontological sense which applies
to all being but in the logical sense where it applies to categories.
What is more general is less and less capable of remaining itself
and assuming outside relation, i.e., less capable of remaining it­
self and becoming something else. The abiding of the agent is
realized in all action and to an eminent degree in that immanent
form of action which is called knowledge. This is the highest type
of action, cognition; it is most conservative because the subject
remains itself and becomes other, as other.
Aquinas, it was shown, based one explanation of the hierarchy
of being on the number of forms which a given thing can sub­
sume at a time. Man can become all things in knowledge because
he is so conservative. If the electron, neutron, proton, and meson
can, while remaining themselves as separate substantial units, as­
sume relations to all material things, indeed become all material
things (and become them as other) they must have a degree of
immanence like that of knowledge itself. Moreover, if their com­
binations are explored from the viewpoint of striving rather than
of becoming, then as substantial units, existing only as an aggre­
gate in the atom, their lack of “determination to one,” their ver­
satility, would be as the self-determination that is freedom itself.
If they could interact dynamically and tendentially in so many
ways of their own natures, then these natures would virtually
have no determination from within in the sense of immanence
rather than a tyrannical determination from without which in­
creases progressively from the animal downward.
An electron is general not because it is so rich but because it is
so poor in reality. A neutron is general not because it is so imma­
nent but because it is so tremendously inert. A proton is so uni-

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

211

versal in its action not because of what it has but because of what
it does not have. The philosophical science of nature can provide
ultimate reasons for the fact of conservatism in nature. Empirio­
logical physics can make no such claim. Conservatism and sta­
bility, like form, do not exist in nature as separate entities, and
the empiriological physicist, as a man, would never know them
unless he abstracted their meaning from his measurements. Phil­
osophical physics finds that if conservatism and stability are ab­
stracted from a nature, they must be principled not by a logical
or Kantian apriorism but by a factor called form which they ex­
emplify and which is knowable only by intellection never by
number.
The empiriological physicist today has so much power through
his atomic successes only because he has come to grips with en­
tities much more potential and yielding than the ultimates in
nineteenth-century experiment. They conserve less and yield
more. Their act is little, their passivity much. The contemporary
empiriological physicist thus grows not more versed in natures,
what things have from within, but less. Though prime matter
will never be isolated, thus opening an indefinite progress to the
future of empiriological physics, the physicist is moving more
and more in matter’s direction than toward the reality of form. It
is this latter road, not toward the potentialities of matter but its
actualities—the principles and causes of motion—that the philo­
sophical science of nature truly treads; just as matter and form
are one in being, so empiriological physics and philosophical
physics can settle their frequent blockade of each other if each
decides and remembers what it is about. As Aquinas says, analy­
sis goes from form to matter, and empiriological physics is, in
Kant’s language, dominantly analytic; Alexander’s space-time
naturalism is, he claims, “analytical to the death.”
Stability, dependence, and conservatism are philosophical con­
cepts. They cannot be measured by empiriological techniques.
The conservatism on the level of the atom cannot be explained
by inertia in the dominion of the subatomic particles, any more

212

Philosophical Physics

than we can explain what is positive by simply adding negations.
If the inertial movements are the only forces in nature, then ah
is moving with a flux and a flow at an infinite velocity, and no
differences or distinctions, no brakes, no conservatisms, could oc­
cur anywhere in nature and experience.
THE LAW OF ENTROPY ATTESTS TO NATURES

The second law of thermodynamics states the instability of na­
ture. It does not say that energy is destroyed but that it is being
transformed constantly into an unusable state. The clock of the
universe, to borrow a Newtonian figure, not being self-wound, is
running down, and since all movement depends upon a differ­
ence in energy levels, movement will no longer be possible when
the sum total of the world’s potential energy falls to the level of
the amount of kinetic. There will be a heat death of the universe
as we now know it. So at least is the most popular theory.
This second law of thermodynamics must also be considered in
the line of the present discussion of matter and form. The whole
universe is here considered as an unstable system. The sun, pow­
erhouse of the material world, is gradually losing its power. The
locomotive, steaming along the tracks, costs the universe an en­
ergy that once spent will never come again. The atom and the
molecule, dimly and imperceptibly, discharge something of their
being that makes them less atom and less molecule. The entropie
cycle cannot be avoided by the living or the lifeless.
It remains now to examine whether the instability argued by
this entropie process contravenes the dualism of the atom and fa­
vors pluralism and mechanism, as a satisfactory account. On
closer view, it will be found that matter-form dualism is not only
satisfactory but is necessary to account for the facts of thermo­
dynamics. No matter what imperceptible changes may be taking
place in an iron door knob, it still remains the iron that it was
long before a prospector might have found, fifty years ago, the
mine from which it came. But what would happen to an almost
perfectly free electron in the same geometrical position with re-

Motion, Dualism, and Modem Physics

213

spect to the door? It would immediately seek a substantial home
in which to reside. In its search, it might not remain itself for
more than a few seconds by contrast to the enduring stability of
the iron. Unlike even the short-lived thorium C', which is almost
stillborn into nature, it would immediately seek union with an
element forming an ion or neutralizing an already ionized atom.
It would lodge itself into a metal or in the air as a vehicle to con­
duct their electricity. It does not have the centricity, independ­
ence, and originality of the atoms of iron. The same is true of
other fundamental particles.
Let the empiriological physicist counter that the atom is emit­
ting radiation or even heat; but it still remains an atom. An elec­
tron could emit neither radiation nor heat. It simply does not
have sufficient being to accomplish what the atom can do or to
hold itself in a separate existence. It is much more inert than the
atom, much more determined to its one task, having its charge
and bearing a rather small mass. By a simple tripartite union with
protons and neutrons, this little entity could not manufacture the
atom. If there is pure energy with no carrier, and the electron is
virtually thus, then when the electron acts transeuntly, there
would be a discontinuity or leap in its combinations. If its mass
is so small that it is practically energy alone, then it has nothing
to surrender when it enters into combination and into system ex­
cept to surrender its whole self. Its being is so inert as to be able
to individuate not more than perhaps one accident or at most
only a few. The discontinuity involved in its action of combina­
tion amounts to a virtual annihilation of the electron, since it has
so little to surrender that the surrender of anything means the
surrender of its whole electron-ness. This means that it cannot
enter into combination unless it loses its nature, at least virtually,
and this is exactly what matter-form says. The other fundamen­
tal particles could be treated similarly.
Interesting confirmatory evidence for all this might be culled
from current quantum theory where a leap is associated with all
forms of microscopic action and lies at the root of the Heisenberg

214

Philosophical Physics

principle. Matter-form dualism would expect that as beings be­
come more and more impoverished and unable to hold on to their
natures while acting toward the outside, this discrete character of
action, which is dualistically described as a virtual annihilation
of the agent, would become more and more apparent. But fur­
ther probing of this point must be reserved to a more advanced
and technical discussion than this broad introduction.
An atom, by comparison with the electron and other subatomic
building blocks, is incomparably less inert. It is much more sta­
ble, more conservative, much more capable of acting without de­
stroying its whole nature in the action. It may hold its own more
when combined. It could be objected, of course, that the electron
can act without losing its nature. The empiriological physicist
might point up the phenomenon of resonance radiation, already
mentioned, which explains the color of a substance by the fact
that photons (light particles) for a certain wave length strike the
natural frequency of the electrons vibrating in the outer orbit of
the atom, and the corresponding color is emitted. But the elec­
tron has not obtained the vibrating frequency of its own nature.
This frequency is determined by the type of atom in question,
and hence atoms of different elements yield light of different col­
ors. The electron is so general in the sense defined by reference
to the categories, its being is so weak, unstable in independence,
and inert in obedience to outside forces, that it cannot act apart
from abject dictation coming from its environment. The relation
of the electron to the emission of color, where the atom itself
tunes the electrons to its own frequency, is but another sign of
the virtual way in which simpler things are present in the com­
pounded.
As a general entity, the electron—and what is said here ap­
plies also to the other fundamental particles—is largely deter­
mined by the context in which it is. Here lies the positive insight
of so-called objective relativism, advocated by Samuel Alexander,
Arthur E. Murphy, and more recently embraced by Charles
Morris. In this view, oftentimes called contextualism or perspec-

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

215

tivism, meaning and ultimately being are referred to a system
and do not apply beyond it. Thus a penny may look oval when it
is lying on the floor and viewed from an angle but would look
circular to an observer directly overhead. Both views, the rela­
tivists say, are correct with reference to the viewpoints involved.
They form a system, and individual entities within it take their
reality and meaning from the whole. Now such a view would
stand up if scientism reached its goal of proving all things inert
and endowed with no reality from within, and objective relativ­
ism is much more successful as empiriological physics continues
to approximate (never reaching) its ideal. The more inertia in­
creases as the shafts of experimental physics descend into the
subatomic wells the more relative beings become to their context.
Objective relativism is correct in seeing that the more general is
the more inert. Its failure is not on this point but rather in view­
ing all wholes, say atoms, as mere mechanical sums of their parts.
Its failure is to neglect true conservatisms.
Now an atom is also subject to outside influences. It may be,
it is, thermodynamically unstable, responding to the entropie cy­
cle in its own way. But the atom has something much more of
being and of nature in it. The point is not that the atom is stable
and its components are not, but that more stability can not be ob­
tained by adding lesser ones, more act cannot be obtained by jux­
taposing potencies.
Even the radioactive elements of short biography are relatively
stable by comparison with subatomic particles. This stability
must be explained. This centricity and originality of the atom
cannot be accounted for by only eccentric and inertial forces in
the universe. Atoms occur in nature independently, and they live
to a relatively ripe old age; isolated electrons immediately seek
abode in some substance. The universe may be running down­
hill, but it is not doing so violently, inertially, and with an infi­
nite velocity. There are conservative factors at work amid the
“liberalizing” tendencies.
Theories have been proposed by men like Poincaré, for exam­

216

Philosophical Physics

pie, to avoid the concept, and hence the law, of entropy. But
such theories must always recognize the factor of directionality
in chemical and physical action. The law of conservation deter­
mines the quantities involved in work, and both sides of chemical
and nuclear equations must be balanced for this reason. Entropy
determines directionality, and was aptly dubbed by Bergson the
most metaphysical of empirical laws. Entropie physicists estab­
lish that a reaction will always tend in such a direction that en­
tropy will increase. If a non-entropic theory is substituted, the
factors of instability and direction are not avoided but simply ap­
pear in a new dress. For present purposes then, where the only
matter in question is the instability and imbalance that action
tries to overcome, the non-entropic theories which are very much
in the minority can be analyzed like the notion of entropy.
Thermodynamics informs us that the universe is running
downhill. But there must be braking principles in the process.
Otherwise, there is no reason why this downhill drive should not
attain infinite speed and crush out all determination and distinc­
tion, even in appearances. The multiplicity of determinations is
an index of a multiplicity of such resistive principles. The resist­
ance movement of the atom cannot be accounted for except by
its independent stature, incomparably greater than the corre­
sponding reality on the subatomic level where the resistance is
less because the inertia is greater. Inertia added to inertia can no
more provide additional act, added instabilities give no more sta­
bilities, than darkness added to darkness will yield light.
Empedocles advanced a cosmogony based on a law of love and
a law of hate which he detected in the universe. This is like the
two laws of thermodynamics discussed above. On the modern
scene, Hegel and Marx view realities as containing their own dis­
solutions. D’Alembert attempted to found all mechanics on the
notion of forces tending to move and forces tending to constrain.
Newton’s law of action and reaction, philosophically interpreted,
presents the spectacle of a similar dualism. Santayana saw pat­
terns in mobility and called them tropes. For Lalande, there is

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

217

both “evolution” and “involution” in the cosmos. Alexander dif­
ferentiated space and time in some fashion, or he could not have
said “space-time continuum.” Whitehead broke the world into
units called “actual entities” which are essentially dynamic and
creative, and yet he also insisted that there was discrimination
and selectivity in their action, which he called “prehension.”
Spencer's world contained “an integration of matter and a con­
comitant dissipation of motion.” Bergson painted a world charged
with a vital impetus (élan vital) that in turn was characterized
by associative (conservative) tendencies and dissociative (spend­
ing) tendencies. Holt stroked out a view of the world in terms
of neutral entities differing in velocity. More recently L. L.
Whyte has advanced a cosmology in which symmetry is in con­
trast with asymmetry. But it is only in terms of matter-form
dualism that the contrary tendencies which all these men de­
tected in the universe receive full justice.
THERMODYNAMICS CONFIRMS MATTER AND FORM

Two broad conclusions may now be stated from the discussion of
thermodynamics: (1) only in terms of a nature existing, hence
substance, as the subject of contraries, can that which is conserv­
ative be the very same thing that is entropie; the empiriological
physicist would account for this opposition by a reduction to dif­
ferent principles, but basically there must be an identifying sub­
strate in which both principles are rooted, otherwise there would
be realities that obey the first law and escape the second, and
vice versa; (2) only in traditional matter-form dualism can the
bifurcated character of the atom be explained, its conservative
principle flowing from its form and its divisive and destructive
principle, from its matter. A subatomic particle instanced by an
electron, does not have ample interiority and nature to unite so
many contraries as are seen on the atomic level. The entropy and
hence conservatism of the individual electron are thus meaning­
less. Both entropy and conservatism fall together, showing that
the opposites must be rooted in a common principle of reality.

218

Philosophical Physics

The subatomic particles almost contradict Spinoza’s maxim.
They do not relish freedom. They seek refuge in the quickest
possible way, even when neutral, in the nearest substance that
will harbor them. Or else they break down.
It is significant that modern thermodynamics so radiantly con­
firms the philosophical account of motion’s principles. Thermo­
dynamics marks a point where empiriological physics is more
alive, than it usually can be, to motion and to motion in general
and hence to the generalities which motion involves. Here in­
deed, where empiriological physics drives deepest into motion, it
turns up with an account that is almost a restatement of matter­
form dualism.
The latest advances in empiriological physics tend to suggest,
at least by way of timely illustration, what matter-form dualism
has long claimed as the true account of matter. According to the
Heisenberg principle of indeterminism, all the factors necessary
to understand a material being cannot be simultaneously known.
Position and velocity cannot be exactly specified at the same time.
If, as Russell says, one were exactly known, the error in the other
would be infinite.
Position and velocity are bifurcated qualities. Though both
properties of the composite, position stems more from quantity or
matter and velocity more from form. One originates more in the
inertial principle; the other is more varied and dynamic. The
philosophical physicist insists that all factors necessary to specify
a material being can be truly known in his approach to reality,
because he has never mechanically dissected its unity, which is,
as Aquinas says, the way an artifact is understood. The philoso­
pher of nature transcends the bifurcated categorical contraries of
matter and apprehends, if only as a limited mode of changing
being and not in a genus-species way, that underlying nature
which unites opposites and when existing is called first sub­
stance. Philosophical physics has insisted on what empiriological
physics is now confirming by a type of empirical metaphor: that
matter and form, taken separately, as their fate requires in the

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

219

categorical approach of the empiriological physicist, are meaning­
less sport, and that mechanism, like that found in the categories
of logic, delivers itself into discrete parts that never merge into
an entitative unity.
The finer instruments become, or the smaller are the particles
to be measured, the more importantly there looms the error in
position and velocity. There is less of a unitive force, i.e., less of
a nature to effect their union. Here the more and more a-natural,
the more and more the inertial, has its say. Since error becomes
appreciable in what is small, according to Heisenberg and his in­
terpreters, what is small is not comparable to what is greater: an
electron, for instance, is not comparable to the macroscopic
world. In the limit, position and velocity for the empiriological
physicist never get together, and the universe becomes plural.
There is so little of being left in this quasi-logical universe of em­
piriological physics that the physicist is inclined, like Hegel, after
impoverishing being of all of its attributes to deny that being is.
Following the empiriological physicist, the philosophical physi­
cist is inclined to say that the subatomic entities are poorer in
their reality than atoms. But if they exist at all, they are beings.
However poor and dependent they may be, the limit of nothing­
ness is never reached by dividing them. Dualism explains the
union of position and velocity by its thesis that matter and form
are immediately united.
In the subways beneath the atom, there is considerably more
inert and hence less unitive nature than what is found at higher
levels. Though plural, as Simon emphasizes, and potential, this
nature is still a something that has both position and velocity, a
something that exists but, so grossly inert and material, is almost
too weak to “be become” by the knowledge act. As Aquinas real­
istically puts it, the knowability of a thing follows upon its im­
materiality. The subatomic entities are so steeped in matter that
they are hardly cognizable. According to the empiriological phys­
icist, they have no taste, smell, sound, color, or tangible proper­
ties. Yet this impoverished world has a mobile being, however

220

Philosophical Physics

feebly. If, for example, an electron did not have position and
velocity and have them together, then no matter how many elec­
tronless, contentless positions and velocities were wedded to­
gether, the simultaneous appearance of position and velocity
as noted on the higher levels of the real could never be achieved.
By adding mere position and mere velocity together, one could
no more get a thing that had position and velocity than he could
reach a positive quantity by stringing together an infinite number
of zeros.
An incursion into the account of structure sketched by the
general theory of relativity reveals likewise the fact of bifurcated
and contrary qualities in matter that must eventually be com­
bined into a substrate called nature where nature in turn is dual­
istic. Relativity physics presents the spectacle of a space-time con­
tinuum, but it insists that the continuum is anisotropic and
hence heterogeneous. Homogeneity must prevail in a continuum,
and yet apparently in the Einstein-Minkowski picture of things,
anistropy in space introduces the fact of discontinuity. Only in
terms of an underlying nature whose bifurcated principles are
immediately united can homogeneity and heterogeneity in Spen­
cer’s language, or continuum and anisotropy to keep Einstein’s
thoughts, be reconciled and applied under different aspects to the
very same things.
The new generalized theory of gravitation advanced by Ein­
stein is another testimony to the dualism in our world. It was
previously shown that the fundamental equation contains a sym­
metrical part and an anti-symmetrical part, the first being an
analogue to matter and the second to form. The generalized
theory attempts to tie them together, as Aristotle did when he
argued that the immediate union of matter and form constitute
one being.
Aquinas felt that pre-Aristotelian cosmologists like Pythagoras
with his duality of odd and even, Plato in his notion of great and
small, and Anaximander who posited the condensation and rare­
faction of an original indeterminate stuff as the basis of cosmic

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

221

differentiation—all these were groping toward that basic prin­
ciple of contrariety in nature which Aristotle discovered and
branded matter and form. The very existence of these contrary
principles in the philosophies before Aristotle simply showed,
Aquinas felt, that shadow of truth which even false philosophies
catch from the light of being. A similar estimate might hold of
the rather Ionian atmosphere of contemporary thought. The facts
and theories of empiriological physics bear a weak witness to the
fundamental contrariety in nature which the Aristotelian does
not ask to be formally adopted by the empiriological method but
simply to be acknowledged as attained in another approach to
reality that is called philosophy.
As a matter of fact, the amount of thought which the empirio­
logical physicist lavishes on matter even with an eye toward its
controllable aspects would be hardly possible unless there were
scorched into his mind at least a weak analogue of what the mo­
bile world really is. He tends, of course, to play down the real
mobility of matter and to consider only the ghosts of motion. But
the ghosts turn his physics into a haunted house, where theories
are ever unsteadied by their provisional character, where crises
are a normal state, and where there are always oppositions and
questions, and new data that do not nestle neatly into the older
forms of measurement.
OBJECTIONS TO MATTER-FORM ARE INADEQUATE

It now remains to examine some principal objections to matter­
form dualism. If the planetary model of the atom is denied as
being a mechanical aggregate, why not make the same statement
about the solar system? Why is it acknowledged that the solar
system is an aggregate but insisted that an atom is a substance?
A house can also exist by virtue of its parts since it is not sub­
stantially one. Why cannot the same thing be said about the
atom?
The answer ought to emphasize that, in the case of the solar
system, bodies can exist independently within the system only

222

Philosophical Physics

because they own natures with such inferiority, versatility, and
originality that macroscopic reality, comprised of atoms and mole­
cules, is seen to bear. Such atomic and molecular unities can and
do have all the relations which experience discloses and experi­
ment measures because their natures are great enough to enjoy a
relative independence and to own many contraries. The sub­
atomic units, mechanically systemized, decline to hold proper­
ties like those of atoms and molecules. They are much more
passive and inert, more extrinsically determined and potential. As
far as empiriological physics can disclose, their substances each
individuate only one or two detectable properties. Atoms are dif­
ferent. They can be and can remain themselves while they as­
sume relations, engage in motion, and possess qualities. They
tend to exist independently; they are more conservative; they do
not almost wholly abdicate their existence when they operate.
The example of a house could be treated in a similar fashion.
The parts can remain themselves, combining only accidentally,
simply because they have enough inferiority of being to exist and
operate independently. A house is not made of electrons, protons,
mesons, and neutrons. It is made of bricks, wood, iron, and the
silicon compounds which form glass. It has the unity of art.
As another objection, it is sometimes urged that crystallography
shows a versatility of appearance on the part of a single element
which would seem to show that the same chemical substance can
assume a variety of relations without changing its nature. Carbon
in coal and in a diamond is the same element, differing only in
crystalline form, an example of what is called dimorphism. Other
substances, like phosphorus, present an even greater variety of
crystalline appearance and are called polymorphic.
But this does not explain away the fundamental inertias of the
material universe, great on the level of the atom and greater in its
component parts. Crystal structure and its variations depend bas­
ically on the geometrical shapes of the atoms in an aggregate and
on their alignments to each other. Each substance has a small
number of crystalline forms that it readily takes, and the patterns

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

223

depend on the type of substance which it is. Thus, potassium un­
der the same conditions crystallizes differently from silicon, and
each is limited sharply as to the variety of patterns. It is the atoms
which explain the crystals and limit their range of versatility.
Patterns are specific to atoms, much like weight, specific gravity,
and combustibility.
Most importantly, the standard for deciding the differences of
nature is, to recall Whitehead, not how a thing looks but how it
operates under the same external conditions as some other sub­
stance. Under the same conditions, carbon acts in one specific
way, forming one type of crystal, and phosphorus another.
Change the conditions, and another form of phosphorus will re­
sult. But the carbon will also show its own specific reaction to
the change.
This standard is of the utmost importance in dealing with the
changes of physical states induced by different thermodynamical
conditions. Water in extremes of hot and cold no longer is liquid.
It vaporizes or freezes, depending on the temperature. But subject
other elements to the same extremes, and they will act differ­
ently, showing their differences in inner nature. Hydrogen, at
the same temperature of the water vapor, will burn, aluminum
would melt if the temperature were sufficiently intense, oxygen
would more readily support combustion. The criterion to dif­
ferentiate natures is not how they look to the eye or record their
quantity on a visual instrument or even how they vary under
varying conditions. It is their action and operation that count,
and two different substances subjected to the same thermal ex­
tremes will be moved differently. They will also act differently
when subjected to the same process of crystal growing. The prin­
ciple determining the activity of the atom is within it.
Chemical compounds can be subjected to the same analysis
as in the case of elements, and they yield the same evidence for
matter and form. They will turn out to be substances because
they show an inner principle of operation, called nature, which
cannot be accounted for by the mechanical linkage of their com-

Philosophical Physics

224

ponent elements. In their limited modes of combination, atoms
are not great enough to achieve such variety as the manifold of
chemical compounds presents. In “testing” for the existence of
substantial forms, distinct from the ingredients which they vir­
tually contain and dominating them as rationality dominates
man’s sensory operations, the yardstick again must not be how a
thing looks but how it is moved. Otherwise, water vapor might
seem like hydrogen. It is combustibility, specific gravity, con­
ductivity, magnetic permeability, and other such exhibitions of
mobility rather than looks which enable the philosophical science
of nature to discern and distinguish substances. In biology, the
anatomist, impressed with the similarity in looks between man
and the animal, when he studies their structures and measures
mere quantity, is often tempted likewise to identify the two be­
cause he disregards the differences in their motions. Physiology
ought to be more emphasized than it is.
THAT

E = me2 DOES NOT REFUTE MATTER-FORM

A major difficulty in the reaffirming of the matter-form account
of nature emerges from the so-called equivalence of matter and
energy. This formula was developed by Einstein, reasoning from
his theory that mass varies with motion. E = me2, where E repre­
sents energy, m mass, and c the velocity of light. According to
this view, about two pounds of coal, completely turned into en­
ergy, could run the entire electric power industry in the United
States, as of 1939, for two months.
This interesting principle lay largely unexplored and unex­
ploited until 1939, when two German scientists, Hahn and
Strassmann, bombarding the heavy element uranium with neu­
trons, discovered that they could produce barium, a much lighter
element. It was quickly speculated by Lise Meitner that this
uranium breakdown was accompanied by the extraction of tre­
mendous amounts of energy, from the original raw material, and
it was this idea that started the American experimentalists on the
march to Hiroshima.

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

225

The relation between energy and mass measured by weight
near the earth’s surface can be discussed in round nuclear figures.
In terms of standard atomic mass units where the oxygen atom is
roughly 16, the mass of a proton is 1.00758 and that of the neu­
tron is 1.00893. A helium nucleus contains two of each kind of
particle, and calculating its weight from the component parts
leads to an expected value of 4.03302. Surprisingly enough, the
weight is actually 4.00280, a difference of about 0.030 mass
units. Why does the helium nucleus weigh less than the sum of
its component parts?
This is only a simple example. Phosphorus weighs 0.280 units
less than the sum of the thirty-one particles comprising its nu­
cleus, and the weight difference between the sixteen components
of the oxygen nucleus inside and outside the atom is 0.1328. But
what makes this difference in energy? Has matter been annihi­
lated by the combination? Has mass been turned into energy?
Has matter been converted into a property of matter? Can ex­
tended reality be reduced to the inextended?
A fuller explanation for all these puzzling events lies in the
concept of “binding energy.” This term is almost self-explanatory,
the energy binding the parts of a nucleus together. It is obviously
equal to the energy required to disrupt the nucleus, and since the
bombarding energy just enough to cause the nuclear breakdown
can be measured, the binding energy of every type of nucleus can
be accurately computed. It turns out that Einstein’s equation is
satisfied by such calculation. The reason why the helium nu­
cleus is lighter than the sum of its component parts is that 0.030
mass units have been converted into energy, when the parts are
assembled. Some nuclei are more strongly bound within them­
selves than others. There are two types of nuclear reactions, those
which absorb and those which release energy. Any nuclear re­
action that results in particles more strongly bound inside their
nuclei than those of the fissionable element will make energy
available. The atom bomb exploits this principle.
The explanation of the Einsteinean formula requires attention

226

Philosophical Physics

to the way in which the empiriological physicist proceeds. In ac­
tual fact, empiriological physics measures reality without discern­
ing its nature, and in a very genuine sense the equivalence of
matter and energy was employed long before Einstein. A body on
a high mountain weighs less than the same body at the surface
of the earth since the pull of the earth decreases with remotion
into outer space. Such a relation was known in Newtonian me­
chanics. Has an airplane at 30,000 feet of altitude lost some of the
mass which it had on the runway?
Closer inspection shows that empiriological physics has always
measured mass in terms of energy and energy in terms of mass.
Mass is usually computed in terms of weight, and weight, no mat­
ter how we measure it, is reduced to the pull exerted by the
earth. When a man steps on a scale, what is actually measured is
the force of attraction which the earth exerts on his body. The
spring has been properly calibrated to read, say, in terms of
pounds and ounces, and what is actually measured is the amount
by which the object weighed overcomes the resisting forces in
the spring. It is true that empiriological physics now weighs par­
ticles by much more refined techniques, like the mass spectro­
graph which sends charged particles into a narrow beam through
a magnetic or electrostatic field and by controlling the force of the
field, thus deflecting the charged particles up or down, can reg­
ister the amount of energy just necessary to overcome the pull of
gravity. But such realities as pull, force, tension with its stress
and strain, field—all are phenomena of energy rather than mass.
Mass is thus measured by energy, and this is true of any measure­
ment of inertia in general.
In kindred fashion, energy is measured by mass. The familiar
unit of energy is the foot-pound, the work done in raising a
pound of matter a distance of one foot. But matter is a mass con­
cept. Distance involves extension, likewise a mass property.
When the empiriological physicist measures current in an am­
meter, he measures the amount of energy which overcomes the
inertia (a mass property) in a mechanical instrument, say the ap-

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

1T1

paratus of the deflection needle. In actual fact, both in the meas­
urement of mass and in the register of energy, massive and ener­
getic concepts play a part in all instruments, but the point here
is that the dichotomy of mass and energy in classical physics was
artificially made, and the more scrupulous empiriological physics
of today has wisely corrected the situation.
It sounds like a vicious circle to measure mass in terms of en­
ergy and energy in terms of mass. Such a begging of the ques­
tion is characteristic of pure empiriological method, left to its own
devices, unsupplemented by the mind of the physicist thinking
not only as an empiriological physicist but also as a man. Empirio­
logical method therefore cannot solve the question of the equiva­
lence of matter and energy. It has accepted a method which
equates these realities from the beginning and forbids judgment,
empirically, on their real character apart from the measures.
But the question of the real relation of matter and energy re­
mains to vex the philosophical science of nature. Can matter be
annihilated? It was said above that the helium nucleus weighs
less when its parts are combined than the sum of the weights of
its components outside their home. The difference is 0.030 mass
units. But since the four particles must be held together by forces
of attraction, it is apparent that the energy hitherto available for
the pull toward the earth has now been turned to a new task. If
this energy could be retrieved and directed downward toward the
earth, it would show that nothing was really lost or gained in the
process. Energy, with the modification to be made below, has at
most been changed from one form to another, but in view of the
commonplace conversions of energy from, say, mechanical to
electrical or from kinematic to magnetic states, this conversion
should not be startling. It is responsible for the lighting in our
homes.
Although in a more correct formulation, Einstein’s equation is
really the problem of converting energy from one form to another
rather than the conversion of mass to energy, taking mass as sub­
stance and energy as an accident, there may nevertheless be

228

Philosophical Physics

changes in the extension of the fission fragments by comparison
with the original substance. But similar changes in extension or
volume are commonplace events. The hydrogen and oxygen in
water can occupy much less space than the same quantity of the
component elements in a gaseous form when the pressure on the
gas and liquid is the same.
Thus, the so-called conversion, of mass into energy stands in no
contradiction to previously known philosophical principles. The
whole problem is the grossness of classical physics, the physics of
Galileo, Newton, and even of Descartes. According to this view,
matter is defined by mass, weight; in the Cartesian approach, by
quantity. Any changes like those produced by uranium fission
cannot fit into such a system. The quarrel of contemporary em­
piriological physics is really with its predecessors in the post­
Cartesian world rather than with the philosophical science of
nature.
Aquinas, for instance, does not define a natural body in terms
of mass, quantity, or weight. He defines it in terms of its mo­
bility and the dualism of principle which motion discloses. In an
empiriological physics of quantity the Einstein equation appears
as an atom bombshell. In the philosophical science of nature, a
body is not defined in terms of mass, and there is thus no require­
ment that so-called mass be constant. Privation, form, and matter
are involved in change, prime matter alone being constant. Since
Einstein’s contribution consists in displaying that energy also
has inertia, it is obvious that the inertia in the fissionable ma­
teria] has not been lost (or gained) but appears in the massive and
energetic properties of the products. The inertia in the results
is balanced in an equation with the inertia of the raw materials,
and so this aspect of relativity mechanics illustrates rather than
refutes matter-form dualism by showing the constancy of prime
matter amid the nuclear changes that philosophy insists are
changes in the substantial forms of the atoms.
In reality, the whole concept of binding energy illustrates
matter-form dualism. If it is true that the atom is a substantial

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

229

unit composed of matter and form and not simply an aggregate
of subatomic particles, it would not be expected that the particles
would preserve in the composite nucleus the properties that they
bear in isolation; they rather would be virtually present in the
atom. The transformation of so-called massive property into bind­
ing energy (or vice versa) tends to show that there are profound
changes in the subatomic particles themselves when they enter
into atomic constitutions—changes that the philosophical science
of nature calls substantial. Reflecting on present-day empiriolog­
ical physics tends to require rather than refute matter-form dual­
ism. The very same being that has inertia, more of a material
property, also has activity, more of a formal property.
A dead fish weighs more than a living one. This might suggest
the notion that certain energies of the compounded substantial
being are consumed in the binding of part to part but, when de­
composition occurs, are available for interaction with the earth
to produce more “weight” than was previously present.
The so-called equivalence of mass and energy, far from contra­
dicting the philosophical science of nature has simply made em­
piriological physics aware of the inadequacy of its older concepts
and the danger of erecting a science on mere uninterrupted meas­
urements. The Einstein equation has simply corrected certain of
these measurements. What things are in their natures is known
by intellection or abstraction, and this insight is the work of the
philosophical physics to probe. As far as such a science is con­
cerned, what could be more typical of matter-form dualism than
to find in nature changes in the very being of things with a con­
stancy of their so-called inertia?
But what is matter and what is energy? This is a logical se­
quence to the foregoing discussion.
A twofold answer must be given here, depending on the view­
point assumed. For the empiriological physicist, mass and energy
are two different ways of looking at the same thing since the
physicist, precisely as such, cannot transcend his measurements
to discuss the realities behind them. Their difference is purely

230

Philosophical Physics

logical in nature since mechanism does not entitle its adherents to
pronounce on the nature of the stuff that is mechanized nor does
dynamism on the nature of what is dynamized.
Truly philosophically considered, mass and energy are irrele­
vant questions. The philosophical student of matter speaks rather
of substantial form and prime matter, or of accidental form and
second matter. He would deny that energy itself is transformed
but would hold that a natural agent, acting on another nature,
evokes its potentialities into act when the apparent energy trans­
formations occur.
This may be illustrated by an electric generator in which the
electric current is induced into a loop of wire as it turns through
a magnetic Geld and cuts the magnetic lines of force. The electric
energy induced in the wire depends on the mechanical dimen­
sions of the loop, the number of magnets present, the degree to
which each is magnetized, the speed of revolution on the part of
the loop, and its temperature. Electricity can thus be increased or
decreased by mechanical, magnetic, kinematic, and thermal fac­
tors called “energies.” Are these ingredient energies transformed
into electric energies?
The empiriological physicist says, yes. But the philosophical
physicist has a different answer. The causal agents through
powers peculiar to their natures act upon the effect producing in
it an act that depends upon its own natural potencies. Only thus
can transformations, as they result in differences, be accounted
for. Difference cannot be reduced to inertia, and the response of a
body, which is said to be energy, transformed, is merely the ac­
tualization of the potencies original to its nature. Kinetic energy
corresponds in general to the activities of things and potential en­
ergy, to their potentialities for reacting. Kinetic energy is ex­
hibited differently, depending on the substance which is sub­
jected to excitation, and the potential energy stored in it is also a
mark of its inner nature and its capacities. If this explanation
were not true, differences could not be explained, and the impos-

Motion, Dualism, and Modern Physics

231

sible universe moving with a violent and infinite speed would
again be the alternative.
Every empiriological physicist, as far as he is a man, goes be­
yond his pointer readings to a knowledge, true or false, of what
the being and the motion are that metrical numbers only repre­
sent, like a locust shell that has been shed. Since this transcend­
ence of measurement is necessary to make even physically pos­
sible the operations of the empiriological physicist, he is abso­
lutely compelled to adopt a philosophy that he cannot verify with
his instruments. Even his differentiation of mass and energy or
his identification of them is a philosophical judgment if he at­
tributes its content to the real world.
Now it is on this metaexperimental ground that the philosoph­
ical physicist has as much right to be heard as the empiriological
physicist who is always philosophizing. There is no more pure
empiriological physics than there is pure art. Truly the genuine
philosophical physics is at a higher reach into reality than the em­
piriological physicist and the debate is a metaempirical, philo­
sophical one between the two. Philosophy is like being. It is im­
possible to avoid it, impossible to avoid knowing being and being
a philosopher. In this light the contemporary mind formed and
fed so largely by empiriological method must meet Aristotelian
philosophy in its own territory. That it refuses to do so, dismissing
this philosophy as a meaningless net of mere verbalism, is the
fruit of sheer prejudice, and this judgment itself constitutes a
metempirical philosophy.
Modern researches into the atomic wonderland have not con­
tradicted the genuine philosophical science of nature but rather
reinforced it. Instead of beginning the hierarchy of being now
with the elements and then working up through compounds,
plants, animals, and man, empiriological physics has unearthed
realities in nature more potential and inert than the atom. In so
doing, it has simply dug a new basement under an old mansion.
And a better basement means a better structure upstairs.

232

Philosophical Physics

Suggested Readings

Darwin, C. G., New Conceptions of Matter (New York, 1931).
Riezler, Kurt, Physics and Reality (New Haven, 1940).
Millikan, Robert Andrews, Electrons (+ and — ), Protons, Photons,
Mesotrons, and Cosmic Rays, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1947).

7
The Motor Cause and the
Modern Mind
A SCIENCE MUST BE CAUSAL

Thinking, especially with a scientific rigor, would have no perma­
nent address in an indeterminate universe. When a car is in
neutral, it can be pushed and pulled in any direction and at any
speed, and if the universe were equally indifferent, man could
make of it what he wishes.
Without extrinsic causes, the world would be indeterminate,
and all science would drown in the flux. If a motor cause were
not needed for every motion, a moving thing could pop up out of
nowhere at any time and any place. A similar spree of chance
would unsteady a non-final universe, where moving things were
not angled to given ends and hence could do any kind of maneu­
vering when set in motion.
A genuine science has both the courage and also the courtesy
to weigh any objections against its statements, and the doctrine of
causality, introduced in Chapter 3, bears a comparison with its
substitutes. This chapter will sift the more important ideas on the
motor causes of nature, while final causality will be the burden
of Chapter 8.
Broadly, the present chapter falls into three parts: a glance at
the notion of causes introduced by Hume; a survey of opinions
that make cause and effect too extrinsic to each other, too in­
trinsic, or equal; and a summary of opinions that would counter233

234

Philosophical Physics

act mechanism, like Hegelianism on the one hand and emergent
evolutionism on the other.
The first of these three parts is subdivided into an outline of
Hume, a rejection of him, a sketch of his applications in em­
piriological physics, and a brief discussion of Kant, who was
Hume’s descendant.
The second large theme will show first that a motor cause is
not absolutely extrinsic to the effect, nor absolutely intrinsic, but
moves its effect by contact, which is a medium position between
the extremes. But this contact is not an identity, as the law of ac­
tion and reaction would have it, and entropy does not resolve the
dilemma to which scientism is forced by the spirit of Newton’s
third law. Only nature and only a distinction of action and pas­
sion can account for innovation.
The final broad division of this chapter will discuss Hegel,
Marxism, and emergent evolutionism, and show at last that dual­
ism accounts for the truth in both modern dynamism and mod­
ern inertialism.
HUME VIEWED CAUSALITY AS SUCCESSION

Causality has been one of the big battlefields of modern thought.
If empiriological physics as a science still survives the denial of
motor causality, it is only because the haze of the battle has not
yet cleared enough to let the corpses be counted. Hume rejected
a motor cause as really influencing an effect and affirmed instead
a causality that is simply temporal succession. One thing follows
another as the light goes on after the throwing of a switch. But
the switching is simply prior to the lighting, Hume would say; it
does not influence it.
So far this idea to a mind meeting it for the first time seems as
wrong as, in genuine science, it is naive. But it is a conclusion,
rather than a starting point in Hume’s philosophy, which is as a
whole more critical than positive in nature and has won the
plaudits of modern sensate man. Hume came upon the world
through Cartesianism. In him was fulfilled the seed of skepticism

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

235

which Descartes had planted and especially a denial of all na­
tures and substances which are stabilities in the real world and
the anchors of our certitude about it.
Instead of interacting natures and substances, the Humean
world is speckled only by phenomena, appearances, brute sense
data. Instead of grasping causes by intelligence, Hume stubbornly
refused to go beyond sensations and took the simple successions of
things which the senses present as the farthest fling of human
knowledge.
In psychology, having fastened upon his universal denial of
substance, Hume reduced mind to a series of mental states, not
united intrinsically to each other but merely heaped together
like flakes in a snow drift. According to Hume, the recurrence of
a sequence like the moistening of the earth during a rain gen­
erates a mental association, or in a more modern terminology,
grooves a reflex, which leads man to expect a moistening of the
earth after the rainfalls in the future. But men are not aware,
Hume goes on, that the rigor they ascribe to causality is only this
rut in the mind. They dupe themselves into thinking that the
rain causes the moistening whereas in reality, according to Hume,
the two events have nothing more than a temporal regularity
which our habits of association misread into a causa] interplay.
According to Humean views, the alarm clock would not awaken
man in the morning; it goes off at one moment, and uninfluenced
by it, man gets up in the next.
Hume’s ideas are continued in John Stuart Mill, and the
reader may verify the fact by a glance at Mill’s canons of induc­
tion, especially the method of concomitant variations.
HUME CONTRADICTS REASON

But if causality is nothing but temporal sequence which leads the
mind to associate two states so that the second member of the
sequence will always be expected whenever the first occurs, man
ought to say that every example of succession is causal. In point
of fact, man does not say so or think so or act as if Hume were

236

Philosophical Physics

right. Shine a flashlight in a man’s eye, in an example from
Whitehead, and the man will not say that his blinking merely fol­
lowed the light. He knows that the light made him blink. Thomas
Reid refuted Hume with his classic example that night follows
day and day the night, but no one says that one is the cause of the
other. If Hume were right, this conclusion ought to have been
reached and reached long ago since nothing is more regular and
rudike in the sense world than this procession of day and night.
Reason does not agree with Chanticleer that his crowing causes
the sunrise. Why do men say that the engine pulls the caboose
rather than the caboose pushes the engine? Because they clearly
distinguish between successions that are merely temporal and
those which are causal. By intelligence, they are able to examine
the motions of nature, defining them and tracing out their rela­
tions until, with self-motion impossible, a mover is known to op­
erate and to exist whenever and wherever motion occurs. Deny
the power of intelligence and Hume is almost right—almost, it
should be stressed, for the skepticism which follows upon the
denial of intelligence would not allow a man to expound a philos­
ophy, as Hume has done, and to discover and discuss such things
as succession and association which are known by intelligence.
Hume’s idea finds a counterpart in the modern reduction of
causality to a functional relationship, under the powerful dynasty
of Newton and Leibniz, fathers of the calculus. Functionality
exists where one thing varies as another thing varies without the
necessity of a causal intercourse between them (Chapter 1). That
in less precise form is what Hume said two centuries ago and
what Mill says in his method of concomitant variations.
But though valid at the empiriological level, functionality does
not substitute for the necessity of causal knowledge. If function­
ality were adequate to a truly scientific system, one could say, to
use Russell’s language (though not his philosophy), "The barom­
eter has ceased to have any effect upon the weather.” For the
barometer varies when the weather varies, and since barometric
fluctuations forecast the weather and hence precede it, Hume, if

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

237

not sheer functionality, ought to compel us to say that the barom­
eter is the cause of the subsequent weather rather than just an
index of what it will be.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS FINDS A PLACE FOR HUME

There is of course, something to be said for Hume in the terri­
tory of empiriological physics which, in its pure form, cannot
mount outside the sense world and is descriptive, rather than
causal and explanatory, in nature. Einstein, who admits the in­
fluence of Hume, purified empiriological physics in accordance
with Hume’s counsel.
The use of functions to express law in empiriological physics
shows that Hume, if a dwarf in genuine philosophy, was a goad
to the maturing empiriological methods.
Empiriological physics is more loyal to itself by ignoring
causes. Causality is not mensurable, and when the empiriolog­
ical extremist denies true causality, it is to be remembered that
he is less prejudiced against causes than obsessed by measurement
which alone has meaning in his precinct. For empiriological
physics, causality obtains where events can be predicted in time,
an analogue of Hume’s doctrine on expectation. What is pre­
dictable is causal, for the empiriologist, and what is causal is pre­
dictable. This is not true causality, however adequate it may be
in a merely descriptive enterprise.
True causality implies a break between cause and effect; the
two are not identical because the effect is distinct from the cause.
The hiatus puts causality in its genuine sense beyond the pale of
empiriological physics which prospers best on a subject matter
that is a continuum (and is treated by continuous functions).
For empiriological physics, then, the temporal continuum is
fruitful as a substitute for causality since it eliminates the breaks
in being, the hierarchies, natures, inferiorities, and originalities
in the objective w’orld which experiment can neither detect nor
manipulate. Hence, Hume was a stimulus to sheer empiriological
physics by mooring it to “the observable,” by furthering its views

238

Philosophical Physics

of the world as continuous, and by emphasizing the successive
continuum which is time. But his skeptical sensism, if allowed to
carry weight outside of the purest empiriological method, would
break the back of all thinking.
KANT MADE CAUSALITY AN APRIORISM

Another rather unhappy warrior against the traditional notion of
motor causality was Kant. In many respects, his notion of a cause
is simply a plagiarism of Hume’s. Where Hume reduced the
causal relation to mere succession, so did Kant. Where Hume
shrank the idea of cause to the association of mental states, Kant
painted it as an a priori category. The chief difference between
the two is that Hume held the association of so-called causal
events to be a product of habit, while Kant, rejoining Leibniz,
enthroned the idea of cause as a priori, hence innate.
As in the case of Hume, the burden of refuting Kant belongs
to the metaphysics of knowledge. But though fatally inadequate
in philosophy, Kant, an empiriological physicist himself, paved
the way, as Hume did, for the greater purity in empiriological
methods. Such consciousness of itself has given empiriological
physics a mastery over matter in proportion as it has retreated
from the realities that can be probed and proved only in a specu­
lative science of nature.
But Kant had the effect of saying that because the empiriolog­
ical physicist cannot recognize causality, therefore causality can­
not be recognized at all. It is as though a carpenter should decide
that there are no other tools but his own type. Kant thus seared
into the modern mind the impression that ontological realities
are simply anthropomorphisms, projected by man’s mind, and
that the real world is that of the empiriological disciplines. He
helped to isolate empiriological from philosophical physics, but he
inflated the first into a true science and deflated the second so
that it could not survive.
From at least one viewpoint, there is today a general alarm in
the empiriological physics that tried to get along on Humean and

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

239

Kantian premises, turning them into a philosophy. Quantum
mechanics has urged upon the empiriological physicist that there
is no such thing as the determined regularity and sequence in
nature which Hume and Kant took blissfully for granted; the
uncertainty principle declares that the universe is not ordered but
random, if many of its interpreters are to be believed. Relativity
theory, by denying that absolute motion and absolute time and
absolute space_ can be detected and by suggesting reversibility in
the temporal order, would likewise have to challenge the dogma
of Hume and Kant.
But it is a matter of historical fact that Hume and Kant re­
moved causality from philosophy and persuaded scientism to con­
fine itself to a purely descriptive analysis of temporal order instead
of searching after causes.
A CAUSE IS NOT ABSOLUTELY EXTRINSIC

Hume shades off into another problem. Motor causality implies
a contact between the mover and the moved. It also requires a
relation between them that is not simply equalitarian. A discus­
sion of these two principles will lead into a more precise knowl­
edge of what a mover is and does. It will show how philosophical
—not empiriological—physics yields the only true science of
motion.
By definition, the Humean notion of a cause denies a causal
influx into the effect while sound reason affirms it. Now if Hume
is right and if the parade of events is simply a matter of serial or­
der with no causal interlocks, every moment gives birth to events
that are rankly spontaneous and irrelational. If posterior events
are undetermined from the causal viewpoint, then every event is
a creature of chance and even an order in time would be impos­
sible. Uncaused by a prior reality, every event would simply burst
out of nothingness in an unpredictable fashion, self-caused and
self-moved and abandoned to itself.
Forced to its logical doom, the Humean philosophy which
wants only prediction out of empiriological physics melts away

240

Philosophical Physics

the axis of predictability by constructing a universe where all is
self-motion and chance, hence unpredictable. The indeterminists
in the empiriological physics of today have realized this philo­
sophical conclusion in the concrete. All thinking would suffocate
if there were no other atmosphere than this.
A realistic analysis of motion (Chapter 3) has shown that self­
motion is impossible. In the foregoing remarks, there is a kind
of confirmatory argument for this truth in the fact that the radical
self-motion, a way of defining chance and the logical exodus of
Humeanism, would devastate all thinking about the material
world by reducing that world to an utter disorder. Somehow, the
modern mind in its acceptance of Hume has been holding a
candle that turns out to be a firecracker, and the explosions are
beginning to be heard. If this self-motion, the issue of Hume’s
thought, is impossible because it would deny order and plow the
world into chaos, there is additional proof that whatever is moved
is moved by another. Order requires it, and order exists.
The cause exerts an influence upon the effect, and influx
which means an inflow ought to be taken in a stricter sense than
is sometimes accorded it. Self-motion having been rejected by
the rigor of traditional scientific reasoning and by the absurdities
of following Hume, there must be an outside motor for every
movement and something more than an extrinsic juxtaposition
between them. To put it crudely, it is not enough for a mover
merely to touch the surface of the mobile, as though a tree could
be felled by tapping its bark or as though a piano key would move
downward by a light touch rather than by pressure. Such a pic­
ture of causality would be one of juxtaposition, and the Humean
impasse shows that juxtaposition is not enough.
Motion implies a type of inner penetration by the motor into
its subject. The whole mobile being, rather than merely its outer
skin, is set in motion by the motor cause which must somehow
spill over into the inner reality of what it moves.
This does not mean, of course, that motion involves physical
compénétration, the presence of two bodies in the same place

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

241

(Chapter 12). What it does mean is that there is something more
than a mere extrinsic presence of a motor when a thing is moved.
The motor contributes something to the effect. There is thus
ruled out the famous Leibnizian view that A, a mover, and B, the
mobile, act without an interflow and by the preëstablished har­
mony of the universe. Much more realistic was Aquinas when
he wrote: “The mover and the mobile are together” (Motos et
mavens sunt simuT). Leibniz, like Hume, would make A extrinsic
to B, for his monadic units of the world have no windows or
doors and not even keyholes to relate them to each other. His
philosophy, like that of Hume, leads to functionality rather than
causality as an approach to nature. Leibniz’ view denies the origi­
nality of creatures and prompts a pantheistic view of the universe.
A CAUSE IS NOT ABSOLUTELY INTRINSIC

So far, it has been said that the mover contributes something
intrinsically to the mobile rather than stands off, extrinsically,
to witness a motion that it did not produce. But this view raises
a question about the other extreme: Does the motor contribute
something of its own being to the effect, imparting an electron for
instance, if it is an atom moving through a positive field, or a
photon if it is a source of radiation?
In this context, there arises another key figure in modem
thought, Descartes, and his curious doctrine of cosmic change.
For Descartes, local motion is the sole kind of movement in the
universe, and such motion together with quantity which is taken
as the essence of matter forms the only real dualism in the Car­
tesian system of physics. When modern empiriological physics
explains the smashing of atoms by the motion of its component
parts (quantities) to other regions of the universe and when
Einstein reduces matter to mere space-time (quantity-local move­
ment), there is evidence that Descartes is not dead, but, like
Hume, more alive than ever. Whitehead also makes the cause
too intrinsic to the effect in his “causal efficacy.”
Nothing really occurs in the universe, Cartesian physics says,

242

Philosophical Physics

except rearrangements, so that motion becomes not the product
of a motor outside the mobile but a merely physical transfer of
parts. When motion is completed, the part of the mover that ac­
complished the motion is physically inside the thing moved.
Though differing in temperament, Descartes and Hume are
very much alike in their outlook on nature, and their linkage
affords a deeper view of the empiriological mentality, especially
how it parts company with philosophy. Where Descartes reduced
structure to quantity, Hume saw only phenomena. And quantity
and phenomena, taken alone, mean basically the same thing—an
indeterminate and featureless universe with neither substance
nor causes. Cartesian physics denied final causality, as the next
chapter will show, and Hume carried on by rejecting even motor
causes.
If all cosmic motion is of the local type, a shift of position
rather than an affecting of things, there is no relation between
mover and moved like that which experience and reason demand.
In Cartesianism, the motor would not be outside the mobile as an
extrinsic cause. A physical change like those, for example, in a
radioactive series would be simply a migration of particles from
the nucleus. Radium, when it emits an alpha particle, becomes
radon.
But is an ejection of such a particle the cause or effect of the
radioactivity? Empiriological physics equates cause and effect
and calls their whole pattern of action spontaneous. Moved and
mover become physically the same thing. There is a preference
for the chance universe which Hume’s system also inspires. The
actual transfer of parts as an account of motion, where moved and
mover are the same, turns nature into a chaos of self-moving and
hence utterly spontaneous things. Such a view cannot differen­
tiate between cause and effect. It must reduce empiriological
physics, in its strict sense, to the problem of describing succes­
sions, which is exactly what Hume would want it to be. The
meanings of Descartes, the rationalist, and Hume, the sensist,

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

243

meet in the contemporary view of nature and have been married
after several centuries of courtship.
The physical identity of the motor and the mobile which Car­
tesianism ultimately requires is as mistaken as their physical
isolation from each other which Humean premises suggest. One
makes the mover too extrinsic, and the other too intrinsic, with
respect to the moved. If they eventually intersect, where extremes
meet, it is only because true causality alone can account for order,
and without such a causality the world plunges into a chaos, a
self-moving and chance universe which is the issue of Hume and
Descartes alike.
CAUSES MOVE BY CONTACT

From what has thus far been said on the relation of the mover to
the moved, the following conclusion can be authorized; the mover
and moved can neither be absolutely distant or absolutely identi­
fied with each other. There is a middle course which is called
movement by contact. Moved and mover are together but not
the same, different but not distant. Motion requires an extrinsic
mover, but this mover, because it affects the thing moved, must
somehow be united with it without that physical transfer of itself
that Descartes’ physics demands. The motor must remain itself,
extrinsic to the moving thing, even during the motion which it is
causing. The agent does not destroy itself by acting; the patient
does not absorb the agent, like a sponge taking in water. The
agent remains even after the process, and as the next chapter will
argue, it exists even more fully and perfectly in this aftertime
than if it had not acted.
Though the realistic mean, of movement by contact, can be
guaranteed by the rejection of the two extremes, a positive anal­
ogy might be helpful. The point at issue can be illustrated by
the nature of knowledge which is not something preternatural in
the universe but the highest form of action. Knowledge cannot
change the subject, like food that is digested or like acid poured

244

Philosophical Physics

on a metal. It involves that the subject, remaining itself, become
the object in that intentional way which psychology more fully
depicts. Knowledge, be it repeated, is simply the highest type of
action, and the becoming of other as other which it implies is
weakly whispered even on the inorganic level since action, like
being, is not equivocal. There is of course a great danger of
forcing the analogy too far. But somehow it does serve to suggest
that the motor and the moving thing can, in a sense, be one and
together without the absurdities of the Cartesian and Humean
universe of modern thought.
The Neoplatonic idea of emanation yields another analogy that
helps to hint at the important unity between mover and moved.
Motor causality is a communication of form, where the agent,
without destroying itself, confers something of its own inner
being upon the subject moved. This is the only way in which the
gain of a new form can be explained, if the mobile reality cannot
account for its own form by moving itself. The poet leaves some­
thing of himself in his poetry. A good leader impresses something
of his own mettle upon his subordinates. Floods leave their water­
marks, and forest fires their trail of destruction. The motor com­
municates something to the moved. It is one with it, moving
every part of it that moves and somehow showing that it pene­
trates to interiority in the effect.
The philosophical science of nature must leave the further
development of this subject to the science of being which shows
how an effect can participate in its cause without being physically
and Cartesianly identified with it. In the metaphysical account,
immanence and trancendence, the intrinsic penetration of an
effect by a cause that yet remains extrinsic to it are reconciled in
a way that leads to neither pluralism nor monism.
EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS EQUATES CAUSE AND EFFECT

Motion has two poles which have forced philosophy to distin­
guish between action and passion and have given rise to delicate
problems in both traditional and modern thought. What the

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

245

agent does is characterized by Aristotle as action. It is a kind of
making, a doing of something to something else. The yielding in
the subject acted upon is called passion or patience, which both
indicate passivity and reception. Passion is the receipt of some­
thing from something else.
But if the motor and moved are one, how can action and
passion be called different? So impressed with this intimacy be­
tween the agent and patient, Suarez held that action is formally
in the patient. But this would tend to deny the extrinsic character
of the extrinsic cause and lead to a mobile universe of self-motion.
It is realism to affirm with Aristotle and Aquinas that action is in
the agent and passion is in the patient but that they somehow
communicate in the unity of motion—a dim analogy to the unity
between subject and object in knowledge. Proof of all this can
be made even more pointed if it is prefaced by the empiriological
solution of the problem which emphasizes even more the need for
the answer of Aristotle.
In a wide way, action and passion in their traditional meanings
are mated by the pair, action and reaction, in the modern em­
piriological vocabulary. A more minute account of this parallelism
would have to show that reaction, in its Aristotelian sense, is not
the same as passion but involves a type of rebound from the pa­
tient into the original agent itself, with the patient being itself
an agent when actualized. An axe that cuts is also dulled in
the process. The modern view puts the reaction into the effect
and makes it akin to what Aristotle meant by passion. In the
following broad discussion, passion and reaction can tem­
porarily be taken as the same, and reaction, in its Aristotelian
sense, will be by-passed. Action will mean what happens in the
cause and passion or reaction what happens in the effect. For
after showing that the cause is neither completely transcendent
to the effect as Humeanism would say or completely immanent
as Cartesian physics says, the following discussion will use a
more empiriological backdrop to show that they are not equal.
The equivalence of action and reaction was stated actually by

246

Philosophical Physics

Galileo (in his parallelogram law) and formulated by Newton
into one of his three principles that classical physics turned into
its charter. Action and reaction are equal, says the GalileanNewtonian methodology, where equality is taken of course in its
mathematical sense. Ernst Mach brings out the full force of this
equivalence:

A body that presses or pulls another body is, according to New­
ton, pressed or pulled in exactly the same degree by that other
body. Pressure and counter-pressure, force and counter-force,
are always equal to each other.1
The law of equivalence here can be described as the principle
of conservation of momentum.
This equating of action and reaction is perhaps the central
peak of seventeenth-century method from which the whole of
modern empiriological physics has descended. When Newton
was abandoned, his basic principle remained as the aim of em­
piriological research and as the norm for deciding when a state­
ment is meaningful. What acts and what reacts and the manner
of measuring each, true enough, no longer loom the same today
as on the horizons of Galileo and Newton. But relativity and
quantum mechanics are still bent on equating things, with all
else deemed indeterminate and unmeaning. Equalities or equa­
tions form the only language that the strict empiriological phys­
icist will bother to learn.
In the effect, Newton’s third law amplifies his first one, which
is the well-known law of inertia. Convoyed to its ultimate destiny,
this law, as these pages have frequently inferred, requires em­
piriological method to view all reality as completely determined
from the outside. It implies the equivalence of cause and effect
which the law of action and reaction simply files into pointed
form.
It has already been shown in the discussion of Descartes and
Hume that the modern idea of cause tends to equate mover and
1 The Science of Mechanics, 3d ed. (Chicago, 1902), p. 199.

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

247

moved and to make for a world of self-motion. Descartes’ quanti­
tative world easily submits to the mathematics of equality.
Hume’s world is the continuum. Alexander, in the progeny of
Hume, could write: “Causality is thus the relation of continuity
between one substance and another . . .”2 This notion of con­
tinuity, drawn from Hume, means identity or equivalence and
rejoins the Cartesian effort. Descartes and Hume plowed the
philosophical soil that modern empiriological physics has planted.
THE CAUSE-EFFECT EQUATION FAILS TO EXPLAIN NOVELTY

The equivalence of action and reaction is loaded with vast prob­
lems that empiriological physics must pass unanswered or, if they
are to be faced at all, appeal for their solutions to the philosophi­
cal science of nature. If this equivalence holds, then how can
there be any motion at all? The Galilean-Newtonian equivalence,
which empiriological physics still adopts as the test of meaning
and determinacy, implies the well-known case of an irresistible
force meeting up with an immovable object. From such a clash,
no motion could result.
Suppose a horse were attempting to pull a wagon up a hill
(action) but that the opposing forces (reaction) were just suffi­
cient to balance out the puU on the horse. The wagon and the
horse would never move.
This is of course, a familiar freshman difficulty, and empiri­
ological physics answers it by holding that the reaction is the
motion. But this is really not an answer. For if the motion, as
a reaction, is equated to the motor forces, there is no difference
between them, and without that element of difference, the mover
is the same as the moved; no effect has occurred at all. On the
premises of empiriological physics which denies everything but
quantity and local motion, this ought to be a static universe,
with empiriological method prospering in the logical order only
by ignoring the data of experience, which discloses cosmic motion
2 Space, Time, and Deity, I, 281.

248

Philosophical Physics

at every turn. There is no true hierarchy in formal logic and there
is none on the flatlands of empiriological methods.
Another way of expressing that important fact of difference
between the motor and the moved, a difference that the law of
action and reaction sweeps to equivalence, is the element of
novelty which motions breeds. Motion delivers to the universe
something more than was there before. There is no static tug of
war between the acting and reacting things of experience. As
Aquinas says, “every new reality needs an innovating principle.”
There is progress in nature, states that characterize its today that
were not in existence yesterday.
This element of novelty cannot be wholly explained by equat­
ing action and reaction or by equating anything else. The propul­
sive forces in nature, what Boodin calls the plus factors, somehow
win out over the contrary powers which tend to cancel them. In
human life, for instance, if each man gave back to the world only
what he got out of it, there would be no progress in philosophy,
science, politics, economics, industry, farming, in fact, in the
whole of individual and social life. Progress depends on man’s
giving to the world more than he finds when he comes into it. If
an incipient mover in nature were immediately stalemated by
forces opposing it, nothing would ever occur. There is something
more in nature than a mere mathematical balance.
ENTROPY FAILS TO EXPLAIN CAUSATION

Empiriological physics, of course, would attempt to explain mo­
tion as the result of entropy, pounding the universe on to death
by tending to balance kinetic and potential energies or, more
precisely, by a slow exhaustion of usable energy: some day the
temperature of the universe will be so uniform, its motions so
balanced among themselves, that the thermal equality of all
bodies and hence their motions would forbid further exchange of
energy.
The inadequacies of this law, as a philosophical conclusion,
will be examined in the following chapter on finality and chance.

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

249

But for present purposes, it may simply be stated that if all bodies
are subject to the law of entropy and there are no canceling
antientropic forces even in the mineral world, the equalization of
energies and the cessation of motion should be accomplished with
an infinite speed and in an instant.
Entropy still leaves the novel element in experience unac­
counted for. It leaves unrepealed the law of action and reaction
by which the constant and finite character of energy is estab­
lished and entropy is made meaningful. For entropy would have
no meaning in an infinite universe or, if the supply of energy in
the world were not constant but augmented by new creations.
Entropy alone would imply the downhill infinity of the uni­
verse, but the infinity of the universe would imply the unmean­
ing of entropy. So with entropy ruled out as a means of explain­
ing the fertility of matter and with the law of action and reaction
ruled in as basic to the idea of entropy at the empiriological level,
the element of novelty in motion still remains empiriologically
unexplained and on empiriological premises even impossible.
Because the universe is in constant motion, it is moving un­
ceasingly from a potential to an actual state. There is a hierarchy
between potency and act which cannot be explained by an equal­
ity sign and becomes in fact a focal point for showing that action
and passion are really different. A pile of potencies is no more
actual than the weakest of them. There must be more to act than
there is to potency in order to avoid the embarrassment of the
equational universe of empiriological physics and to account for
the fact that there is something new in the universe today that
yesterday was not here.
NATURE IS AN INNOVATING PRINCIPLE

To understand all this, it is imperative to return to the concept
of nature which is the only subject of philosophical physics. Na­
ture is an intrinsic source and principle in things, unexplained
by, because unequated to, the transeunt forces and inertial factors
acting from without. Every nature bears something original

250

Philosophical Physics

within its bosom. As a source and principle, it is a kind of spon­
taneity; it is fertile, as the original etymological notion of nature
even suggests. It is not a featureless puff of inertia. Aquinas, it
may be repeated, referred to any nature as a prime mover, and
it is nature, as a source and principle rather than as a hollow
inertia, that again melts away the icy formalism of empiriological
physics and illuminates experience like the sun.
Nature spills out over the constraining forces that would dam
it up. Movement is not the result of equality but of the originality
of the nature that moves and the nature that is moved. Truly
enough, a nature acts when acted upon and only to that extent.
Its motions all trace their origins to an absolute Prime Mover.
But when it acts, in that chain of movers where it is a link, it
acts in an original way. It is an inner principle of original tend­
encies. Spontaneity that it is, it explains why motion is not for­
ever fettered by cancelling forces and why reactions in matter are
different from the actions which touch them off. It requires a dis­
cussion of final causality to round out this science of cosmic re­
action. Hence the present theme must be interrupted until the
following chapter.
This outline has established the difference between mover and
moved, action and, in the wide sense, passion, action and reac­
tion, cause and effect. Movement always involves a spontaneity,
or it would be stopped by the veto of an equalitarian universe.
Things that are moved transform the motion that they receive
before passing it along to another recipient, and they thus give
the transmitted motion something of their own originality. They
do not simply pipe on a mathematical equivalence. Form is a
principle of motion. If this principle were itself only pure motion,
the motion which it imparts would not bear its own specific seal
but would be general or indifferentiated, the continuum of Hera­
clitus and Hume and Descartes. The recipient also received ac­
cording to its own mode of being, as salt and pepper present
different colors when illuminated by the same light.
Making a distinction between action and passion, action and

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

251

reaction, can be cast into the general difference between what a
thing has from within itself and what it has from the outside.
Both internal and external causal influences are at work in mobile
beings. But in their relations to each other the intrinsic does not
explain the extrinsic, for in that case matter would be perfectly
immanent. Neither does the extrinsic explain the intrinsic for
in that case matter would be perfectly passive and wholly plural.
In the middle lies the dualism of differentiating cause and effect.
ACTION IS DIFFERENT FROM PASSION

Moreover, action and passion involve a difference in directionality
within a movement. Action is an initiative, while passion is first
and, in the strict philosophical sense, a receipt. And reaction, in
the proper sense, is owed to the initiative of the receiver as an
agent with its own nature. Action and passion are opposed like
selling and buying, teaching and learning. Giving is not just a
special kind of getting in the material world. Resistance is not
the same as yielding.
Equating action and reaction or even action and passion would
beckon on the self-moving universe of Descartes and Hume. If
mover and moved were the same, self-motion and chance would
ground our world.
If action and reaction (passion) were equal, then every nature
could act on its own self. But nature is the cause and source of
actions, not their end. Progress requires that things tend outside
themselves. The equivalence of action and passion, of the ex­
trinsic and the intrinsic, would yield complete self-motion where
the end and agent are identified and where chance and degenera­
tion would replace the progressive grounds of a universe that is
progressing in fact.
Man of course can think about himself and determine himself.
By this total reflection and by freedom, he makes himself in some
way the subject and object, agent and patient of his own actions,
weakly imitating that complete immanence which is found only
in God. But the world below man progressively falls away from

252

Philosophical Physics

this apex of immanence because the cleavage between action and
passion becomes proportionately greater from man downward.
Furthermore, in the efficient order, the cause is always greater
than the effect, though progress is made possible by final causality
as the next chapter will show. Action is thus always higher than
passion, at the level of motor causality. Otherwise, the greater
would come from the less; or, in the event that action and passion
were identified, there would be no sufficient reason why anything
at all should follow from their union.
Motion cannot be the result of the mere algebraic sum of
forces from without. If these forces are constant, they would tend
to be indifferent to motion rather than to produce it, since the
moved thing would give back exactly what it received. There
would be an irresistible forcé versus an immovable object. The
moving hand could never even write, let alone having writ,
move on.
HEGEL DOES NOT LEAD TO TRUE HIERARCHY

There have been and there still are very definite reactions against
the equalitarian account of motion which would really strangle
the universe into a standstill.
The most striking example of this attempt to reconstruct a
hierarchy of being is found in Hegel, who had the dubious honor
of going astray on his fundamental principle but reasoning with
a most acute logic thereafter. Hegel parted company with the
algebraic constructions of Descartes and Kant by insisting that
the universe is pure becoming. In this respect, a new Heraclitus
was arising to oppose Parmenides, reborn into the static flesh of
the empiriological enterprise. Though extremely critical of Hera­
clitus, Aristotle stood more with him in his Physics than he did
with Parmenides and Plato. Hence, Hegelianism, with its em­
phasis on process, was a healthy thing by way of reaction toward
a moderate and dualistic dynamism like that of Aristotle. But it
lost its health by catching the same fatal germs that Aristotle

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

253

diagnosed in Heraclitus. Hegel not only saw process in the world;
he saw nothing else.
To explain the dynamism of the universe, Hegel introduced
the so-called dialectical triad. Whatever exists (thesis) calls its
opposite into being (antithesis), and from the star-crossed tension
between these foes, a third and higher thing is born (synthesis)
which includes both of its elements by transcending them. If
there is slavery in the social order, for instance, there must be a
master; for otherwise slavery would be unmeaning. From the
friction between these two classes, there arises a new man bearing
something of the master and something of the slave within him
but surpassing both in his higher unity. This famous master-slave
dialectic is only one example of the fundamental mold of all
cosmic process. There is a growth and a progress and a fertility
about the Hegelian universe which is choked off by the equalitarian premises of empiriological physics.
But the price of progress in the Hegelian scheme is too great
for realism to pay. It is pegged by denying the principle of non­
contradiction. Instead of discerning the truth that a thing ex­
cludes its opposite, Hegel declared that a thing implied it. Instead
of accepting the principle of non-contradiction which he had to
use in order to think and to write, Hegel rejected it, equating
being and non-being in a way that is even more serious than the
empiriological equation of cause and effect. Though aware that
a mere inertialism could not explain the real, Hegel affirmed that
a thing is wholly determined from within and from without
simultaneously—another concerto on the meeting of contradic­
tories.
Yet there is a fertility about the universe that may be salvaged
from the broader meanings of Hegel, and this mobility stands in
contrast to the static death which scientism portrays. Flegel did
not equate the effect, the synthesis, with the causes conspiring to
produce it. Like Aristotle, he was aware that the effect is no mere
mechanical sum of its causal elements. But Aristotle would ve-

254

Philosophical Physics

hemently disagree with the character of the opposition that Hegel
sees in matter. He would say that the basic principles of motion
are not contradictories but contraries and that action and passion,
which analogate in the accidental order of operation, the matter­
form dualism in the order of substance, are likewise contrary
rather than contradictory in character.
MARXIAN DYNAMISM IS IMPOSSIBLE

Marx and Engels took over the dialectical method of Hegel and
poured material cement into its molds. They felt that the Hege­
lian contradictories, as principles of nature, enabled them to do
away with the need for an extrinsic Prime Mover.
Hegel had always insisted on the Absolute. It exteriorized
itself to start cosmic motion, he said, and the same motion is but
a mirror of the tendencies in mobile beings to return to this
Absolute as their ends. Hegel had inherited through Fichte the
pantheistic view of nature which Spinoza had proposed, and far
from accepting the purposeless, mechanical, and deistic universe
which the scientism of his time was constructing, he went to the
other extreme of absorbing the world into God.
This theocentric orientation of Hegelianism Marx and Engels
flatly rejected. In accepting the dialectic of contradictories, they
could, they felt, explain motion without recourse to a Prime
Mover. Motion, they presumed, was the explosion of matter, set
off by the inner tensions of its contradictory structures. It was
viewed as lightning which results when two clouds collide or as
the dynamism in a magnet because of its positive and negative
poles. Obsessed likewise with the meeting of opposites, Lenin
called the principle of identity, A is A, “an intolerable vacuity.”
Matter according to Communism is self-moved and hence selfexplanatory.
Marx and Engels were not deep enough to discern that a thing
which contradicted itself would result not in a mobile universe
but would be precisely “an intolerable vacuity.” Contradictories
like a circle that is not a circle, a rose that is not a rose, an elec-

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

255

tron that is not an electron do not fertilize the universe by an in­
trinsic cross-pollination. They simply cancel each other out, leav­
ing the zero of a vacuum rather than a moving world.
The Marxist arguments that matter is constituted of two con­
tradictory principles turn out to be spurious when they are rea­
soned out. There is opposition in the universe truly enough. But
one thing does not contain its contradictory at the same time as
it is what it is. The opposition, which the Marxians emphasize,
comes from outside the thing in question, like floor boards resist­
ing weight or like contrary winds blowing into the sails. Nega­
tive electric particles are outside the positive ones; the two charges
do not contain each other.
The Marxian oppositions in matter would tend to balance out
each other, as in the equational universe of strict empiriological
physics. The oppositions would not promote motion but rest and
even vacuity.
EMERGENT EVOLUTION DENIES CAUSE-EFFECT EQUALITY

Another view of nature which in a way repeats scientism and in
a way forsakes it is the emergent evolutionism of men like San­
tayana, Alexander, Whitehead, Bergson, Lloyd Morgan, Mac­
Dougall, Smuts, and Sellars. These men, despite differences of
intellectual temperament and philosophical premises, all agree in
rejecting the mechanical profile of matter and in holding to the
spontaneous and even chancelike character of its development.
They tend, overtly or not, to vitalize matter as in the case of
Bergson’s vital elan which affects not only organisms but the en­
tire universe. They view the production of novelty as one of mat­
ter’s essential characteristics that does not require further expla­
nation. What is called chance is, in general, not a rarity but the
law or rather lawlessness that matter follows.
Motion thus becomes unpredictable. It is uncaused by extrin­
sic agencies and is but the natural outbreak of matter itself.
Pressed to explain what moves matter to act in the way it does,
the typical emergent evolutionist would answer that it is matter

256

Philosophical Physics

itself. Such is its nature. Matter requires no extrinsic mover. This
is counter to orthodox empiriological physics and to strict empi­
riological method. But in a way, it is ultraempiriological since it
forces the Cartesian and Humean premises until the self-motion
of matter, already deduced in theory, is actually wrung out of
them.
Emergent evolutionism is also accepted more or less by con­
temporary naturalism, floating today largely on the current which
Dewey has stirred and accepting as gospel truth the fact of a
thoroughgoing cosmic evolution. Such a group speaks of an “or­
ganic imbalance,” produced by the developing tensions in matter,
and naturalism as a philosophy is designed principally to help
man counteract that disturbance by getting into stride with his
environment. The naturalists of today adopt a dynamism wholly
at variance with the empiriological method which they otherwise
claim as the sole tool of knowledge and which in fact decrees not
a moving but a static world.
Emergent evolutionism—and the phases of naturalism which
imply it—requires the impossible premise of self-motion and
stands condemned before the bar of reason for thus making mat­
ter potential and non-potential, actual and not-actual, under the
same aspect. Most of its adherents are loose thinkers, drenched
with Darwinism, prone to mistake mere theory for settled fact,
misty with a sentimental faith about the dignity and future of
man, and inclined to settle for descriptions of the world rather
than causal inquests. The principle of non-contradiction which
they apply in thinking, writing, living, and teaching they fail to
recognize as perishing in their philosophies of self-motion.
DUALISM HARMONIZES MODERN OPPOSITIONS

But with all the criticism leveled at strict empiricism, when it
poses as philosophy, and at emergent evolutionism, which exalts
chance, there is something to be said for both of them. They lie
at the extreme ends of a spectrum whose only full and reasonable
light is in the brightness at the center. Philosophers, biased to-

The Motor Cause and the Modern Mind

257

ward the empiriological method, are right in their insistence that
the cause determines the effect, the motor the moved, the agent
the patient, but they make this determination so complete that
cause and effect become synonyms. Emergent evolutionism is
right in its thick accent on the spontaneity of nature and on the
inequalities in motion that make for a universe, prospering and
progressive. The error lies in twisting motion so far out of the
equalitarian forms of classical determinism that the universe
buckles into the self-motion of chance.
The full report on reality lies between these views with nature
seen as an interior principle, and hence emerging source, while
at the same time moved only by extrinsic agents and only as long
as these agents act. Realism can live again in philosophy only
when and if men, forsaking the limits of sensation which grasps
only one thing at a time, recognize their intelligence which they
use in practice to deny itself in theory. Until then, philosophy
will oscillate between the extremisms that only a dualistic science
can reconcile by transcending.
Motion is in many ways the leading problem in contemporary
philosophy. Empiriological method tends to ignore it, and the
philosophies of emergence incline to deny that there is anything
else. Heraclitus is once again at odds with Parmenides, and a re­
thinking of Aristotle would help men to arbitrate the dispute.
Now as in the time of Aristotle and whenever there is motion,
form and matter are its principles, and their union requires an
extrinsic motor which is called an efficient cause.

Suggested Readings
de Finance, Joseph, Être et agir (Paris, 1945).
Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald, God, His Existence and Hiature,
transi. B. Rose (London, 1934), Vol. I.

8
Progress and Purpose
FINALITY ORGANIZES MOTION

In a genuine sense, this is a progressive, open, and expanding uni­
verse.
But progress without purpose, openness without order, and ex­
pansion that is merely mechanical would forge a world that was
static, closed, and utterly exploded. If there is order in nature
there is a final cause, and if there is a final cause there is order.
Although not always able to tidy the order into measured law,
man can rest assured that a nature could never produce anything
in its motions unless their order toward an end were fundamen­
tal. If a moving thing did not tend to this end rather than that
there would be no reason why one effect should flow from
given action rather than another. This would be a vacant world
—indifferent, indeterminate, immobile, and chancelike.
The assault upon the mobile world lost a basic explanatory
weapon when it rearmed itself in the seventeenth century with­
out the steel of final causality. It is the reality of ends that alone
explains the regularity, progress, and hierarchy in the cosmos,
and without these goals beyond the natures that seek them, all
the secrets of things become locked in their own limits and there
is no reason for motion toward the outside. Sufficient unto itself,
a moving becomes self-explanatory if it has no final cause, and as
self-explanatory it becomes actual and non-actual, potential and
non-potential, under the same aspect. Undetermined by an end,
it can do anything when set in motion, and chance once again
stampedes the universe.
A universe without finality would not provide the progressive
258

Progress and Purpose

259

and evolutionary march in which modern man has fixed his
faith. It would be just the opposite, and one of the aims of this
chapter will be to show why.
There are three overall parts to the chapter. The first argues to
the progressive character of the universe; the second is an outline
of tendencies that should deny progress; and the third is an evalu­
ation of such trends and a defense of the realism of progress and
of purposes.
In particular, the first large bundle of argument shows that
finality explains progress without divinizing it.
The second broad division outlines modern views on chance,
from the philosophical premises which construct a chance world
to the inertial and indeterminate universe actually brushed out
by empiriological physics. Getting down to cases, it is then shown
that statistics is used in classical physics and for more complicated
reasons in quantum physics. Getting down to details of cases,
arguments for so-called indeterminism are instanced from thermo­
dynamics, statistically examined.
The remainder of the chapter weighs the arguments just set
forth. First it is shown that randomness is not the same as chance
and that statistics in general and the Heisenberg principle in par­
ticular require rather than reject order. It is then argued that
true chance is real, while empiriological physics emphasizes a
chance that is methodological. Then the cases from thermody­
namics are examined, and it is shown why empiriological physics
tends to such indeterminism as these cases argue. The law of en­
tropy is then examined in a more general fashion, first criticized
for being extreme and then shown to have a counterpart in na­
ture. The last theme restates the differences between philosoph­
ical and empiriological physics in their attitudes toward nature
and chance.
FINALITY MAKES FOR PROGRESS

In the discussion of the efficient cause, there was a question about
the true direction in motion. Does progress imply that there is
more to the effect than to the cause?

260

Philosophical Physics

Bradley hammered at this difficulty until he concluded with
the Eleatics that motion can be only an illusion. Truly, if there is
more perfection and greater progress in the finite world because
of motion, the greater and the more might seem at first sight to
come from the less, since the motion starts with potency and is
completed by act.
An answer, of course, might be to deny all motion except that
of the Prime Mover, but this solution would march with Malebranche on the road to ontologism which snatches all originality
from creatures. And if creatures are not original, pantheism must
be the logical conclusion. Evidently ontologism is not correct.
In the philosophical science of nature, there is indeed an ascen­
sion to a Prime Mover as a necessity demanded by reason when­
ever and wherever it finds motion and for every moment that the
motion lasts. But when a creature is moved by God, its own orig­
inality is not thereby denied or impeded. God does not move
things contrary to their natures. He moves them naturally. And
since the seeds of progress are also in nature, the question still
remains how there is apparently more in the universe after a mo­
tion than there was when it began.
This higher rung which things naturally attain from a lower
one can be clarified by final causality. In the efficient order, it
would seem as though progress in a finite world would make the
effect greater than the cause. In the final order, balance is re­
stored. The goal sought is greater than the thing going after it to
the extent that the end completes and fulfills the nature of the
seeker.
The final cause draws the agent onward and outward. Aquinas
rightly termed it the cause of causes since it explains why the
motor acts to effect this or that union of matter and form. The
realistic cosmos is dominated by finality, which is an attracting
cause and not one of merely mechanical pushes and pulls by
agents on the same level with the objects they affect. Things are
not sealed off in themselves but are angled to definite ends out­
side. Nature is the seat of these tensions toward a beyond, mak­

Progress and Purpose

261

ing progress not a riddle but the normal issue of natural motion.
The efficient cause cannot wholly explain progress, and it was
a logical conclusion, with nature robbed of thrusts toward out­
side goals, to decide that the universe is not progressing but run­
ning down as the law of entropy states. Mechanism in general
resembles the Aristotelian doctrine of material and motor causes
without the complement of finality and form.
In the realistic universe, natures are charged with inner tend­
encies; finality and betterment and striving are in the heart of
them. The original and goalward dispositions upset the static bal­
ance that a mechanical universe would have to be, and this tip­
ping of the scale by natural tendencies to ends enables cosmic
progress to be unreeled. A nature is endowed not only with a
passivity to be moved but with a pattern to be realized. It is not
only pushed from the rear but poised for action, drawn forward
by something that is causally in front of it, something greater
than it, something that is not itself in motion but is motion’s goal.
All these truths are mustered by the metaphysician into his proof
of a Supreme Designer.
Natures seek what is good. Prodded into action, they do what
is best for them, which is another way of saying that they do
what is natural to their being. A piece of iron will resist efforts to
move it, in order to conserve itself. Paper will bleach near strong
heat because such a motion accords with its nature and is best
for it. Natures do what they should do, what they must do, what
is good and natural for them to do. Having fulfilled their ap­
pointed ends, they are greater, stabler, better for having had their
potencies reduced to act. Natural act is better than natural
potency.
GOD IS THE GOAL OF NATURE’S MOTIONS

Some contemporary systems, in the watery footsteps of Hegel,
think that God is not the finalizing goal of the process but the ef­
fected product.
Whitehead felt a gust of the final causality in the world. Flis

262

Philosophical Physics

actual entities select their mutual organizations by what are called
“prehensions” or “feelings.” He envisioned the realities of the
world as seeking “satisfaction.” But God is not the goal of cosmic
motion. God, in his “consequent nature,” is the product.
In Alexander, God is a “nisus,” ever the next highest stage in
evolution to the one that is presently realized.
Hartshorne calls God “the self-surpassing surpasser of all” and
holds Divine being to be affected, and hence effected in some
way, by the processes in the world.
But all of these systems are inadequate, though laudably con­
cerned about a grave and neglected problem in philosophy. God
must exist as the goal of the process, and is not the result of it. If
He were not the ultimate actually existing Being toward which
creation strives, then motion would tend to nothing and the prin­
ciple of sufficient reason would again be violated. From an even
more swaying viewpoint, God is the Designer of the world, and
if He did not exist independently of cosmic processes, He would
be fashioning a world that in turn brings Him into existence. He
would be designing before He existed.
At the other extreme, some philosophers, including scholastics
like Marc de Munnynck, have held that the order of the universe
cannot be a premise in proving God’s existence but rather a con­
clusion that can only be established in the light of God’s Provi­
dence. But the principle of finality does not have to await the
study of theodicy before it can be stated and established. The
tendencies of moving things to certain ends are simply other ways
of defining their natures. The ultimate probing of ends and of
tendencies to ends points to a Supreme Designer, just as the pur­
suit of motor causality leads to the reality of a Prime Mover.
The philosophy of nature is a preamble to metaphysics. It is
not an appendix.
MODERN PREMISES CONCLUDE TO CHANCE WORLD

A world without finality would not be progressive. It would not
even move.
The modern mind has abandoned a study of nature in terms

Progress and Purpose

263

of final causality, and it has quite logically settled into the view
that basically the universe is governed by chance and by chance
alone. This course was charted out when Descartes’ physics put to
sea denying true final causes. He persuaded the study of nature
to look within bodies rather than outside of them for the full story
of their causes and reasons, as scientifically known.
Without a final cause, matter becomes aimless. With all its
mysteries wrapped inside it, matter becomes self-moved. Shorn
of its native tendencies to ends, a thing becomes indeterminate, a
creature of the inertial forces impinging on it and of them alone.
With no intentional thrust to an outside goal, it becomes legiti­
mate to study matter by simply looking inside it and breaking it
up. Chance, spontaneity, indeterminism, and atomism are good
descriptions of present-day accounts of the world in empiriolog­
ical physics, and they owe their origins in great measure to
Descartes.
By way of preface to the scope of chance in modern thinking,
it should be pointed out that a study which seems only to meas­
ure cannot possibly grasp tendencies to ends. It deals only vnth
the quantified or plural aspect of things. It lacks depth perception
into the dynamism which tendencies toward ends involve—a
dynamism that is the result of such tendencies and also their
revelation.
The quantitative approach which empiriological physics has
chosen to pursue ignores all but the plural, whereas a nature in
the world of motion has interiority or unity and acts toward a
unified goal, toward one goal rather than another. A triangle has
no tendencies, and neither does a number like 1 or tt. Neither
does inertia have tendencies. It is indeterminate, awaiting de­
termination from the outside.
Finally, a tendency to a given end cannot be controlled. It is
altered only by altering the nature which bears it, and hence a
discipline that seeks to explore nature by control and to control
nature for man must necessarily allow tendencies to pass un­
noticed.
This experimental approach is, of course, the proper thing in

264

Philosophical Physics

its proper place. But like anything that gets out of place, it is
wrong.
INERTIALISM SUGGESTS CHANCE

In Chapter 3 it was seen that inertialism must breed a chance
universe since even an infinite series of inertial movers could
never generate a true cause of motion. In such a setting, motion,
when it occurs, must be considered as uncaused or as chance in
origin. It has also been argued in Chapter 7 that as causation is
defined in empiriological physics, since there is no causal influx
into the effect, and since there is only a Humean succession
in the world of motion, the posterior stage of a moving thing is
independent of the prior one. Anything can follow anything else.
It arises independently and fortuitously.
Chance is a rare deviation from the order established by final
causality (Chapter 3). It is not an absolute disorder, for in such
a case it would be nothing. It is a disorder resulting when two
causal sequences intersect. Chance thus originates from outside
the nature which it affects and which has somehow become em­
broiled in another causal series outside its own. This origin of
chance, as extrinsic to the nature which is impeded by it, pro­
vides another way of relating chance to the principle of inertia.
If all things are completely determined by transeunt forces from
outside them, then this is a completely chance universe. Bradley
detected this when he wrote of a completely chance event:
It would have to stand without a relation, or rather with all its
relations outside. But, since a thing must be determined by the
relations in which it stands, the absolutely contingent would
thus be utterly determined from the outside. And so, by conse­
quence, chance would involve complete internal dissipation.1

By a similar line of reasoning it could be shown that whatever is
“utterly determined from the outside” would be “absolutely con­
tingent.”
1 Appearance and Reality (London, 1893), p. 392.

Progress and Purpose

265

From another angle, it could be shown that since the cause of
chance is not unified but plural, a world of utter pluralism would
be chance, and chance would involve an utter pluralism.
A chance event Aristotle called an automaton, meaning “by na­
ture vain” and the parent of our English word automatic, mean­
ing self-operating or self-caused. Either word is an apt term for
describing chance. The principle of finality affirms that nature
does nothing in vain, and so the a-final or the vain is outside of
nature and is chance. This meaning is matched by the modern
English word automatic. In the last chapter, it was seen that
scientism constructs a universe which can be pictured in terms
either of self-motion or of complete inertia, where the entire
reality of a thing comes from outside it. Chance is something ex­
trinsic to a natural agent. It is spontaneous, self-moved, beyond
nature, automatic. An automaton is another word for a machine,
and a mechanical world would be one of utter chance.
From many directions then, it is logical for the empiriological
physicist to coast from his premises to the easy conclusion that
this is entirely a chance universe. Dewey, a proponent of the em­
piriological method, shows this in a more obvious form by bring­
ing the indifferentism of empiriological physics along with him
into the moral order. He stoutly rejects the notion of “fixed ends”
in genuine philosophy. His universe is one of means only, a cos­
mic kit of tools, where an end is nothing but a means that an
agent sets up locally as an aim for a project that socio-biological
factors force upon him. Ends are called “ends in view,” and they
are different from means, only because of this temporary ambi­
tion of the moral agent solving a particular problem. They are
logically different from means. For the philosophy of genuine and
objective ends has been thoroughly extinguished in the dark
world of naturalism.
An indifferent and featureless world would, of course, be more
controllable because devoid of tendencies, and control is what
naturalism glorifies. But to control is to get at the lowest level of
things and not at what they are apart from man.

266

Philosophical Physics

EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS EMPHASIZES THE STATISTICAL

Dewey’s error was to lift into a higher and philosophical realm
methods that are designed only for the lower levels where in the
strict sense knowing things as they are is neither an aim nor a
possibility. A chance world was germinating in empiriological
physics from the time that Galileo emphasized inertia and Des­
cartes, plurality and quantity. That this indeterminism has ma­
tured in empiriological physics can be seen from the frequent
allusions to chance in the microscopic world and to the purely
statistical character imputed to physical law.
Chance had its say even in the classical arena, and the work of
men like Laplace, Bernoulli, Boltzmann, and Maxwell led finally
to a statistical approach to molecular movement according to the
kinetic-molecular theory of chemistry. Statistics is in general a
way of measuring large quantities of individuals which single
measurements would make too complicated. If, for example,
white and black beans are thoroughly mixed in an urn and then
withdrawn one by one, the statistician can conclude after the first
hundred beans are drawn and their colors compared what the
proportion of the white and black beans will be after the whole
urnful has been sorted.
Statistics may be considered here as a movement from the part
to the whole. Knowing the percentage of one factor to another in
the part and knowing that the whole is homogeneous, it can be
concluded that the two factors occur in the whole by the same
ratio. For instance, in tossing a coin at random, the chances are
1 in 2 that heads will occur. It is so simple that it does not even
require any paper work to show that if a coin were tossed at ran­
dom 10,000 times, the number of cases of heads will tend to be
5,000. Statistics gives an accurate picture of the whole, often
called collection, aggregate, or ensemble, represented by the
10,000 throws.
But this accuracy cannot be transferred to the individuals
which comprise the whole. For example, after tails appears on

Progress and Purpose

267

the first throw, it is not certain that the next throw will be heads.
The chance of heads is still 1 in 2. Even after two or three or n
throws of tails, the probability of heads on the next toss remains
1/2. In a statistical aggregate, the fate of an individual can only
be described in terms of probability. Here too, however, it is the
interpretation of the figures rather than the mathematics which
is inaccurate. The probability is expressed in numerical form
(like the 1/2 above), and to that extent, it is precisely known.
Statistics differs from other mathematical sciences less by its
form than by its subject matter which is probability, but when it
is called a science of probabilities, it is oftentimes thought that
everything about it is only probable. Where no distinction is
made between matter and form, confusion is bound to occur
about such a relation of mathematics to a physical subject matter.
Already it is easy to see how the use of statistics often prompts
the verdict that there is only probability in nature and in knowl­
edge.
In the foregoing examples, the accent was laid on statistics as
developed inductively, moving from the part to the whole as all
induction does. But there is another approach, perhaps the more
common one in empiriological physics, which begins with knowl­
edge not of the part but of the whole, working deductively down­
ward to the average character of the individual part. Knowing, for
instance, the pressure exerted by a gas on its chamber walls and
that the parts are homogeneously distributed through the whole,
the average energy of the individual particle can be carefully
computed. Here again, statistics is exact in its account of the av­
erage, which is its subject matter. Moreover, it can state in nu­
merical form the probability that any particle chosen at random
will have this average energy, but it cannot guarantee that a
particle randomly chosen will actually represent the average.
In a practical way, statistics was applied to problems in em­
piriological physics and chemistry in the classical period of the
nineteenth century—problems such as the average velocity of
particles in a gas chamber, how far on the average a particle will

268

Philosophical Physics

travel before colliding with another one (mean free path), and
the number of particles striking a chamber wall. Another famous
field for the application of statistics is the flow of heat.
Radioactivity was likewise discovered in the classical system
to be a statistical process. To give the framework, the half fife of
an element is defined as the time required for half of the atoms
present in a given aggregate to decay. Radon, for instance, has a
half life of 3.825 days, which means that no matter when an ob­
servation is begun on this element half of the atoms initially pres­
ent will have decayed 3.825 days later.
Statistics does not say which of the atoms in an aggregate will
actually decay. Suppose for instance that the decay went on un­
til finally two atoms of radon remained. The empiriological physi­
cist is sure that within 3.825 days after he begins his observation
of the pair one of the atoms will disintegrate, but he does not
know which one it will be. Hence as in all statistical problems, he
must refrain from pronouncing on the fate of individuals.
The philosophical physicist should like to ask, for instance,
what the empiriological method can say about the lone radon
atom of an original pair, and the empiriological physicist is power­
less to reply. For all he knows, the radon atom might last a thou­
sand years or decay in the next microsecond. He cannot forecast
the fate of the individuals. He considers the behavior of a single
radon atom as indeterminate.
QUANTUM MECHANICS TENDS TO INDETERMINISM

Classical physics used statistics because it was too complex an op­
eration to determine the initial condition of, say, every molecule
in a liter of gas. It is simply too difficult to investigate singly the
tremendous number of particles which an appreciable quantity
of gas contains.
Quantum physics has other reasons for introducing statistics.
According to Heisenberg, the measurement of individual parti­
cles is not only complex. It is impossible. In trying to measure the
position of a particle, Heisenberg shows, its velocity is always

Progress and Purpose

269

disturbed, and in trying to measure its velocity, there is an inter­
ference with its position.
Empiriological physics, standing at this impasse, has relaxed
its nineteenth-century ambitions. It has decided to settle for a
probable knowledge of position and velocity, and from a given
probability of these two characters in an initial measurement, it
infers their probability at any later time of interest. Empirio­
logical physics concludes that there is an indetermination in na­
ture itself, and that its attack upon matter must stop short with
probable values in its premises and with corresponding proba­
bilities in the outcome of its predictions.
But Heisenberg did not pioneer this expansion of statistical
physics in the contemporary world. Max Planck had shown early
in the twentieth century that energy was not emitted continu­
ously like an electromagnetic wave of light but spurted out in
discrete and unpredictable packets which came to be called
quanta. Enough has been said in previous chapters to indicate
that empiriological physics cannot handle what is discrete but pre­
fers to knead its subject matter into a continuum. From Planck’s
theory on, small energies like those involved in ordinary radia­
tion or in microscopic processes have not been treated at the in­
dividual level but as a statistical aggregate. Quantum physics,
stymied by discrete and “indeterminate” individuals, retrieves its
accuracy through a statistical whole which is a form of the con­
tinuum and which yields a knowledge not of individuals but
simply of averages.
After the wave theory of matter was advanced by Louis de
Broglie to continue the quantum idea, Schroedinger devised a
system of equations which combined the wave and particle as­
pects of matter and put matter and energy together into a single
system of quantum “statistical” mechanics. On Schroedinger’s
reasoning, a wave becomes a mathematical curve, representing by
its amplitudes that vary with time the probabilities of finding a
matter or energy particle (in a single-particle system), whose ini­
tial position and velocity were known with probability. For in­

270

Philosophical Physics

stance, at the peak of such a mathematical curve or wave, the
probability of finding the particle in a given position would be
high and, at the trough, would be low.
Schroedinger's mathematics are thus said to describe proba­
bility amplitudes. It is not so much a real wave that varies in
height but probability ratios. Planck, Heisenberg, de Broglie,
Born, and Schroedinger are responsible for bringing statistics into
a domain that classical physics expected, at least theoretically, to
conquer by ordinary non.-statistical mechanics.
Such developments have favored the belief that all the laws
in nature are statistical in character and that, in the deeply sub­
terranean jungles of experienced events, chance and chaos reign
supreme. Individual particles and energies which Victorian re­
searchers dreamed of measuring in exact terms have been sur­
rendered by present-day methods to the realm of the indeter­
minate.
In their fervor over the new quantum systems, some empirio­
logical physicists began to talk about free will in atoms, vitalism
in nature, daily miracles in a universe once believed so rigidly
ordered as to exclude even Divine intervention. Far from leaning
tower of nineteenth-century studies which had hoped to reduce
the universe to the precision of a single, all-embracing law, quan­
tum physicists incline to say that nothing can ever be certain any
more. Efforts to account for the uniformity of nature have been
replaced by the denial that nature is uniform.
It is a long distance back to teleology and to the concept of na­
ture as an ordered cause and principle. But it is a straight road
over which contemporary thought come. Without finality, the
cosmos becomes a chaos, a decision abetted by Descartes in his de­
nial of true teleology in physics and by Galileo in his preference
to study only inertia.
THERMODYNAMICS IS ALLEGEDLY INDETERMINISTIC

The laws of thermodynamics lurk in the background of the em­
piriological universe, and the view of scientism that the universe

Progress and Purpose

271

is only a statistical aggregate is reinforced by the statistical treat­
ment of entropy which Schroedinger has called the prototype of
statistical law.
Treated on the macroscopic plane, the law of entropy does not
vary but applies with the rigor that its authors saw in it. Yet in
the microscopic world, the determinism weakens. There, accord­
ing to the empiriological report, a random series of events is dis­
covered.
For instance, when electrons flow in a vacuum tube from the
cathode (negative plate) to the anode (positive plate), they carry
out their migration in great numbers, too great sometimes to be
absorbed by the anode as fast as they arrive in its vicinity. There
is, after a time at least, a disordered flow of electrons. Their sur­
plus numbers form a kind of cloud where electrons move in
somewhat random fashion, unable to be attracted to the positive
plate in the straight-line path that the first few of them were
able to follow. In this somewhat random cloud, occasional elec­
trons will be found moving not to the anode but back to the cath­
ode, apparently contrary to what entropy would require. In a
random aggregate of electrons, is it not possible that by the laws
of mathematical probability all of them might at some future mo­
ment flow back to the cathode, reversing the normal direction of
current flow? If an occasional electron can move backward to the
cathode, it is apparently possible for all of them to do so.
This reasoning of empiriological method can be dressed up in
other examples where there is no electric force to attract or repel
the particles, and where the idea of randomness emerges more
lucidly. But a further discussion ought to be prefaced by a men­
tion of the three contemperar}' systems for dealing with the
movements of large masses of particles on a statistical basis. These
systems differ from each other not so much in general method as ■
in the initial assumptions which they make about their materials.
They start with different “mechanical” models of their aggregates
which all illustrate the crucial notion of randomness.
1. The Boltzmann system, which is the culmination of classical

272

Philosophical Physics

statistics, assumes that all particles in a collection have average
values and that the value of the whole is equal to their sum.
Each molecule in a gas, for example, is assumed to possess av­
erage energies obtained when dividing the total energy by the
number of particles present.
2. The Einstein-Bose statistics of quantum mechanics would as­
sume that each particle can occupy all the positions in a given
volume with equal likelihood. It therefore assumes that ran­
dom distributions of the whole are equally probable, rather
than starting with assumptions about the parts. The EinsteinBose system applies to nuclei and atoms having an even num­
ber of particles and to photons.
3. The Fermi-Dirac system, also quantum mechanical, assumes
that all the particles occupy different positions. Where the
Einstein-Bose system holds that all the particles may have the
same energies, the Fermi-Dirac approach makes the energies
of all the particles different. It applies to nuclei and atoms
having an odd number of particles and to protons, neutrons,
and electrons.
All three systems work with averages: the Boltzmann system
assuming that a particle is in an average state with respect to the
system as a whole; the Einstein-Bose system holding that a whole
is the average of many different possibilities of wholes; and the
Fermi-Dirac system assuming that a whole is the average of dif­
ferences. Classical physics treated a whole as an average because
initial knowledge was difficult and the computational machiner}7
complex. Quantum mechanics introduces the further factor that,
in addition to being difficult and complex, the study of individua]
particles permits only average values to be assigned to them by
their nature. They are indeterminate.
It will be noted from the foregoing outline that the three
statistical systems, apart from their different presuppositions of
a physical nature, all make a postulate of randomness. The Boltz­
mann system holds that there is a random distribution of parts

Progress and Purpose

273

in a gaseous aggregate; the Einstein-Bose system holds that there
is a random distribution of wholes; and the Fermi-Dirac system
declares that there is an equal repartition of differences. The
empiriological physicist always insists on this random character
of his subject matter if he is to apply statistical techniques, and
because such methods work so well, he is often led to believe
that nature at her subatomic roots is a random thing.
But why is it, empiriological physics is queried, that such ran­
dom activity does not show up in macroscopic experience? And
the answer is advanced that such a random behavior on a larger
scale is actually possible but that the odds are so great against
macroscopic disorders that they are next to impossible.
To close this parenthesis on the three systems and to return
to an example which is even more eloquent that the swarm in
the electron cloud, let us assume the molecules in an ordinary
gas to be in random motion. With this premise of random­
ness, the empiriological physicist feels empowered to conclude
that given a long enough time, the particles in, say, a cubical
chamber might at some future moment all be directed to one side
of the chamber, leaving zero pressure on the other five sides. Such
a state of affairs would be called a disorder if it ever happened,
and the empiriological physicist admits that the mathematical
chances for its occurrence are very slim. But he still thinks that
he must allow for it.
To take a third example of how statistical mechanics has af­
fected the older acceptance of the uniformity of nature, heat is
the random movement of molecules according to the empiriologi­
cal report. It is a disordered movement, and the more and more
energy is converted into heat the greater and greater becomes the
disorder and randomness in the universe; the more the universe
makes the statisticians’ dream come closer to the truly random
whole.
Now if the movements in boiling water are simply molecules
in random agitation, their randomness might at some moment

274

Philosophical Physics

point them all in the same direction, say toward the center of the
volume. When and if this ever happens, water would tend to
freeze on fire instead of boiling.
In a similar way, the molecules in a desk are in random motion,
and if random, might permit the desk some day to rise from the
floor when all its molecules happen to be vectored upward. In
the case of both the water and the desk, the odds are almost
infinitely against the variation of their normal behaviors. But
so long as their basic movements are random in character, the
freezing of the water or the ascension of the desk must be deemed
at least mathematically possible.
The treatment of thermodynamics by statistical techniques
thus leads to results at variance with the law of entropy. This
law, for many an empiriological physicist, no longer states the
direction of energy flow with the rigor of classical thermodynam­
ics. The law is most frequently viewed now, at least in theory, as
stating only probable direction.
In a sense, a very important one, statistical mechanics elimi­
nates the notion of heat from thermodynamics and tends to
eliminate thermodynamics itself. There is no heat in a single
atom. Heat results from the random movement in an aggregate
and it is not a property of single particles.
But there is another way in which statistical mechanics re­
covers the idea of heat if not the formal laws of thermodynamics.
Heat is defined as a disordered motion of particles, and disorder
is the law of the atomic underworld, statistically explored.
The law of entropy states that all exchanges of energy involve
a certain loss of heat which is no longer usable to do work. The
quantity of heat thus increases with every cosmic process. But
heat is a disorder, and where the Aristotelian universe was angled
to order, the modern universe is said to be rampaging toward the
opposite. Entropy or disorder, the empiriological physicist says,
is always on the increase. The universe, he goes on, is becoming
more random and hence moving from a less probable state to a
more probable one.

Progress and Purpose

275

RANDOMNESS IS NOT A CHANCE

It is possible now to evaluate the notions of chance which have
been sketched. In tempering the extreme views which the devo­
tees of scientism adopt, recourse might be had to the proofs earlier
set down that finality is operative in nature but that mere meas­
urement cannot come to a full and formal appreciation of its
reality and force. It could also be shown that the empiriological
physicist, as such, cannot possibly speak of order and disorder,
chance and antichance, because such factors are recognized not
by yardsticks and chronometers in the realm of quantity but by
insight into motion. This would all be sufficient to turn back the
indeterminism by which the empiriological physicist challenges
the philosophical science of nature.
But the approach of philosophical physics can be toughened
by pitting some of the modern views on chance against it, using
reality to arbitrate the dispute and to show the strong points in
the contemporary views and also the weaknesses.
It is important to note at the very beginning that chance is an
equivocal word and that philosophical and empiriological physics
are talking about two quite different things. Chance, in its phys­
ical and real implications, can be defined only in terms of final
causality. It involves motion and in this setting was seen to be
an aberration from a motion’s natural destiny. Chance on the
modern scene is not primarily of motion but of quantity, and re­
moved from the world of tendency and teleology it is not properly
chance at all.
This might be made clear by distinguishing chance from ran­
domness. A random distribution of units forming a collection
means that the whole is homogeneous and is a form of order
where the parts are scattered equally throughout the aggregate.
Such an aggregate is mathematically treated. The order which it
reflects is defined by reference to a mathematical system, and
mathematics, unconcerned with final causes, does not deal with
chance.

276

Philosophical Physics

True chance, on the other hand, is something physical. If the
random collection is set in motion, then it is subject to the ele­
ment of chance. Its random character, its homogeneity, might be
disturbed by an extrinsic causal series, and the disturbance of
the random order would be a chance event. A dice game can be
studied mathematically. The statistician can predict how many
sixes will occur in, say, 2000 random throws. But he supposes
the random order which chance, the disorder factor, might dis­
turb. What is random follows law, as the concept of an average
can show; what is chance is lawless, unpredictable. What is ran­
dom has a type of order; what is chance is disordered.
STATISTICS IMPLIES DETERMINISM

It is obvious that a statistical whole composed of elements that
are apparently disordered is in reality an ordered whole, like the
ratio of heads to tails over a great many throws of the coin. But
such a whole is nothing but the sum of its parts, and if the whole
is ordered, the parts must likewise be ordered in ways perhaps
that man is unable to follow and record. If the units forming a
collection were utter chaos, following the laws or rather the
lawlessness of chance, no order like averages, radioactive half
life, and thermal equilibrium would occur in the whole. Sci­
entism, mistaking its own ignorance for nature’s blunders, prides
itself on apparent proofs that nature is disordered, but the exist­
ence of evident law in an aggregate argues that the parts com­
prising the whole are law-abiding too.
Order does not depend for its existence on our ability to meas­
ure it. To acknowledge as order only what man can measure
with quantity and vary with instruments is anthropomorphic in
the extreme. In fact, order as such has nothing to do with quan­
tity; it is woven from the tendencies of natures to their ends and
cannot be detected where reality is approached as something in­
determinate and inert. If the small particles, believed in empiri­
ological physics to be governed by chance, had no tendencies of
their own and hence no order to ends, they would be wholly

Progress and Purpose

277

indeterminate, not only unable to act but unable even to exist.
The occurrence of order in the statistical whole is a confirmatory
argument for the order that the particles must obey individually
to operate at all and even to exist in the world of mobile things.
This general rejection of a universe as governed only by chance
applies alike to the classical and the quantum applications of
statistics.
In regard to quantum methods, the wave equations of Schroedinger start with the probability of positions and energies and
predict the ordered variation of that probability as time goes on
and the positions and energies change. The probability in the
premises is connected with the probability in the conclusions
by order and by law. The difficulty in quantum physics is not the
connections of the present with the future, which is order, but
the inability to get exact knowledge of the present as leverage for
prediction.
THE HEISENBERG PRINCIPLE IMPLIES ORDER

The Heisenberg principle sharpens this conclusion. In scientism,
the principle tends to transfer a difficulty in measurement to a
disorder in nature, leading to the verdict that nature is indetermi­
nate. To drum home the truth that the uncertainty relation rep­
resents a subjective or logical indetermination, meaning of course
an inaccuracy in measurement, and to show that it does not mean
a disorder in nature, the philosophical physicist may propose the
following argument:
A standard must be chosen with respect to which the indeter­
minism is said to exist. If it is said that a thing is disordered, there
must be an order as a standard for deciding that there is disorder.
Now this standard must be either subjective or objective. If the
standard is subjective, so is the indeterminism which it defines,
and this is what the philosophical science of nature would hold,
a subjective and logical indeterminism as the issue of the Heisen­
berg principle. On the other hand, if the standard is objective,
then all is not indeterminate in the world. At least this standard

TIZ

Philosophical Physics

of order, with respect to which disorder is defined, is determinate
and law-abiding.
Bergson and Bradley could be applied here in their agreement
that “chance” is not disorder but order of a different type from
the one expected. This “relative chance,” as both Bergson and
Bradley term it, is what the empiriological physicist, in classical
or quantum garb, really means by disorders, and “chance” is thus
objectively an order of a different type from the one that is of
interest in a problem. The definition of “chance” in quantum
physics rests on a prior definition of order and is real or not,
depending on whether the norm of order is real or not.
TRUE CHANCE IS REAL

Chance, as Francis Bacon said, reflects man’s ignorance more
than nature’s aberrations. And that ignorance, removable com­
pletely only by a knowledge of all possible fact and its combina­
tions, which can also be called facts, cannot be overcome. With
Chapter 4 for a background, it can now be stated that fact is as
infinite as prime matter, i.e., potentially or privatively infinite.
This can be shown, to take a telling example, by the divisibility
of matter ad infinitum, and the tendencies of empiriological phys­
ics to pursue this infinite road by dividing matter, subdividing
the divisions and then the subdivisions, without end. Each pace
along the road of dividing matter yields a new fact that is some­
how capable of altering the mobile world and of being experi­
enced by man. But though man, in principle, can know the basic
character of a nature at a single glance, he can never know all
possible fact except through the impossible task of traversing the
infinite series. Hence, the growth of knowledge cannot overcome
true chance, a disorder arising from the crisscross of causal series.
Man’s knowledge is of universals. He can never know all there
is to know about individuals. God has such knowledge, and for
Him nothing happens by chance. To this extent, Bacon is right.
But man lives in a mobile world where individuals are in motion,

Progress and Purpose

279

and though knowing the general features of the individuals that
move and knowing even their species, man can have a certain
knowledge only of law; his knowledge does not exhaust all possi­
ble fact—let alone its combinations—which can be multiplied
as much as individuals can be divided, hence multiplied indefi­
nitely.
Ignorance in matters of physical chance, which is what Aris­
totle described, may be called negative ignorance, as opposed to
the privative type. If a book cannot speak, it might be called
dumb in a negative sense since speech is not owed to the nature
of a book. But for a man to lack speech is privative dumbness, the
lack of a perfection that man ought to have. It is in the sense
of this contrast that ignorance in cases of true physical chance
may be called negative.
But ignorance of molecular movement, for example, because
it is difficult to measure individual particles, is a privative igno­
rance. It is possible to remove it but extremely hard to do so.
Removing it is theoretically but not practically possible. Since
the smallest atom is at least 1800 times as large as an electron
which would be used in an electron microscope to “see” it, a
single electron would not appreciably disturb a hydrogen atom
or molecule, and it is theoretically possible to chart the course of
any molecule presently said to move in random fashion because
exact measurement of its path is so difficult. But it is not theoreti­
cally possible to overcome our negative ignorance in cases of true
chance. Empiriological physics, by its concept of randomness,
stresses a new and negative type of ignorance overlaid upon the
natural and privative type which true chance involves. Random­
ness is methodological chance, but true chance is real.
EMPIRIOLOGY RIGHTLY TENDS TOWARD THE CHANCELIKE

Empiriological physicists are usually concerned with theories as
tools to predict their experiments, and they should not, the good
ones insist on this, impute an ontal value to theoretical construe-

280

Philosophical Physics

tions. Do not try to picture reality, they enjoin their students;
accept as fact only the laboratory data which theories predict.
If scientism followed this counsel more carefully, it ought to
conclude that the supposition of random partition which lies at
the bedrock of its statistical superstructures does not imply that
reality is really a jungle.
There is, however, a realistic backdrop for the empiriological
belief in the randomness of microscopic events, which increases
the more matter is divided. Simon has sketched the idea that the
more an atom is divided the more parts there are and the more
likelihood there is of interferences among causal series.2 Besides,
the more plural the world becomes, the more inert it is, and the
more inert or extrinsic to itself, the more chancelike, according
to the reasoning which Bradley suggested earlier in this chapter.
Moreover, the success of empiriological physics in exploiting
the universe by taking its atomic rhythms as random tends anew
to confirm rather than deny an Aristotelian version of what em­
piriological method is about. A random distribution is continuous
and homogeneous and indeterminate, and the mineral world
which is so little under the dominion of form and hence so much
under the sway of matter tends to approximate this the more mat­
ter is broken up.
It was a thesis in Chapter 6 that the more matter is sundered,
into subatomic particles for example, the more the inertial factor
increases and the less form the units have. Empiriological physics,
it was said, tends more and more to prime matter. But if atoms,
and subatomic particles even more so, are almost random, almost
inert, almost indeterminate, the almost is too important to neglect
since the structures and substructures of atoms still have a mini­
mal form necessary to keep them in existence as mobile beings
when in a free state. The philosophical physicist can explain the
success of the empiriological itinerary when it assumes that mi­
croscopic particles and their movements are random and indeter2 Prévoir et savoir, pp. 60—61.

Progress and Purpose

281

minate. That is almost what such realities and such events truly
are. Their form is poor and their final cause is weak. That is why
they are so controllable.
They are logically general.
THE ALLEGED EXAMPLES OF DISORDER INVOLVE ORDER

But there is still enough form and finality left, wherever an
entity like an electron or a meson exists even momentarily in
isolation, to make for the order that obtains between tendency
and end; otherwise, there would be the indeterminacy and chaos
of prime matter. This minimum of form, attracted by its end,
insures that the boiling of a kettle on fire which normally takes
place will continue to occur when external conditions are the
same. It could guarantee the stenographer that her desk will not
suddenly leap up at her when she is writing a letter.
Perfect randomness can exist only in mathematics with its
equalities but not in nature with its hierarchies, nature where
there is something more than quantity and its distribution,
namely, motion and its laws. Each molecule of water in the
kettle and each cellulose molecule in the desk is endowed with
definite tendencies, and the sorting of the tendencies into the
one that a motion actualizes in preference to the others is the
work of the end. The motors, responsible for the motions of
things, are likewise governed by final causes. The tendencies are
weak it is true, and the ends are feeble, as evidenced by the con­
trol man clamps upon the mineral world. But there are still tend­
encies and still ends. Changing them means changing the thing
that they affect.
An electron in the example of the vacuum tube will not turn
backward to the cathode unless something changes it, and it will
then respond by seeking the end which is natural to it under the
changed circumstances. An electron is not self-moved or chance­
like. When a cloud of electrons collects around the anode to
which they were originally directed, it has the effect of generating
a negative plate because the electrons are negative in charge. This

282

Philosophical Physics

negative cloud thus acts to repel electrons and to drive them
backward toward the cathode from which they came.
Is it possible for all the molecules in a gas to line up some
day in a direction toward one side only of a cubical container,
exerting zero pressure on the other five walls? No, not unless an
external motor coerces them from their three-directional move­
ment into a one-directional path. If a zig is changed to a zag,
there must be a cause for the change, and there must likewise be
a final cause to explain why the particle took this direction rather
than another.
Whatever is moved is moved by an external mover. Whatever
changes motion is changed from the outside. Obeying final
causes, the molecules are not spontaneous and self-moved entities,
capable of picking and choosing the tendencies that they will
favor in response to a causal impact. If they are in random mo­
tion, random in the mathematical sense of being homogeneous in
partition and tridirectional in their paths, they will always so
remain until they are changed from the outside and follow their
final causes in the new set of circumstances. Once in zigzag
motion, they will continue in it, unless external conditions
change.
Will the desk take off from the floor and hit the stenographer
in the face as it moves upward? It will do this only if an external
agent moves it thus, changing the present tridirectional motions
of the molecules into a direction entirely upward; and the mole­
cules, obeying their final causes, will respond to the mover.
In other words, where conditions in matter are the same the re­
sults will be alike also.
NATURE HAS A COUNTERPART TO RANDOMNESS

Where final causality is outlawed and matter is viewed as self­
directed, anything can happen, and the empiriological physicist,
who ignores causes and prefers descriptions, is justified in his
conclusions about the disorder in things and their basic unpre­
dictability. If Descartes is right, so are the indeterminists. If

Progress and Purpose

283

Hume prevails and things arise spontaneously without a causal
dependence on something preceding, then any motion or change
in motion can occur at any time or any place. It is causality that
makes for order, and causal knowledge that makes for certitude.
But if there is sufficient form in even the frailest mobile entity
to save it from the chaos which a purely passive universe would
become, and if there is a sufficient end to assure that any move­
ment must be somehow ordered and directed to a goal, empiri­
ological physics must forge its passport to make its way into a
philosophical science of nature with such doctrines as the indeterminists propose.
The empiriological physicist, if he only recognized his aim to
control nature rather than to contemplate it, is so close to being
right that he mistakes his proximity to a truth as the final and
whole science about the material world. There is something in
nature corresponding to his enthusiasm. It is primordial matter,
indeterminate, purely passive, inert, chaotic, indifferent, and
chancelike. And the more the empiriological physicist descends
through the lower stories of matter the closer he gets to this
primordial substrate which the philosophical physicist joins in
recognizing to be real. There is so much room for philosophical
physics in the world which experiment explores that there is a
whole skyscraper above that basement where empiriological phys­
ics works so well.
ENTROPY WOULD FORBID MOTION

The law of entropy states the directionality of movement in the
universe. If there is any substitute for final causality in contem­
porary thought, this law fills the bill. Bergson called it the most
metaphysical of physical laws because it plots the course which
the universe is traveling. It views the world as tumbling from less
disorder to more disorder, from a less probable state to a more
probable one, from thermal differences to thermal homogeneity.
But if motion is determined only by the condition that entropy
increase, there are some serious difficulties that must be faced.

284

Philosophical Physics

If entropy tells the whole story of movement, the universe would
be tending to destruction rather than perfection. Entropy is the
opposite of evolution, and if the two theories exist side by side,
it is only because the empiriological physicist has not worried too
much about consistency of concept so long as he is able to control
and predict matter’s activities.
Cosmic evolution and entropy truly exclude each other. The
one implies a tendency to order, differentiation, and life; the
other bespeaks disorder, degeneration, and death. One of these
theories must be cast off if empiriological physics is to become
at peace with itself. Once again, Aristotle’s dualism of matter
and form rises up to reconcile the opposition between entropy
and cosmic progress.
But there is more to be said about entropy besides its variance
with the evolutionary temper inside scientism. If cosmic motion
is governed by entropy, movement is not from potency to act as
in realism, but from act to potency. Act would seek to potentialize
itself, order to disorganize itself, on entropie premises.
Such a view is not only inadequate as a definition of motion.
It would flag motion to a complete stop. The perfect does not
tend toward the imperfect but to the more perfect. A thing moves
in order to acquire what it does not possess, and it would not
move if all that it could seek it already owned. A cow seeks food,
something that it does not have and to which it is in potency. It
does not seek to be a plant since it is already a vegetative creature
in so far as it is an animal. It does not seek to be a plant but to
eat one. Act does not seek potency; potency seeks act. Causality
on entropie premises would always be a degeneration. If em­
piriological physics is a science of nature, it has the world shifted
into reverse, the difference between logic and ontology.
NATURE HAS A COUNTERPART TO ENTROPY

Though denying that entropy alone can account for the direction
of cosmic motion, replacing final causality, the philosophy of

Progress and Purpose

285

nature is alert to the fact that there is something like entropy in
a universe that is finite. It would be strange indeed if empiriologi­
cal physics, with all of its dealings in matter, did not have a dim
and at least indirect grasp of truths in the speculative science of
nature.
All things seek equilibrium. Unfortunately, the study of place
must be reserved until Chapter 10, and it must here be taken
with only promissory proof, that a body moving locally tends to
its natural place and natural rest as the term of its local motion.
Such an equilibrium in place, which things seek by local motion
and where they tend to remain resisting outer disturbances, is
viewed as disorder by the empiriological physicist. He defines
equilibrium as randomness.
But in philosophical physics, as will be shown, this equilibrium
in place which a nature seeks is the perfection of the moving
thing. The nature asserts itself from within by preserving its
identity as, say, a molecule of oxygen, against contrary forces
acting from the outside. A progressively realized equilibrium
would be expected if Aristotle is in general correct.
Defining order in terms of a group of particles in their interre­
lations rather than in terms of a nature and the fulfillment of its
tendencies, the empiriological physicist inclines to conclude that
equilibrium is disorder or randomness, without thinking that the
individuals that make up the balance have been perfected from
within by reaching a place where they can better retain their
identities.
The empiriological physicist, to borrow a term from Boutroux,
attains to a “mechanical equivalent” of the order which the
philosophy of nature sees as the end of motion. The purpose of
local movement is not disorder but the equilibrium of a moving
thing with its environment. This balance is order for the nature
which enjoys it since the nature can better survive and express
itself. But the balance is randomness when the aggregate is
viewed as a whole, without regard to the individual and intrinsic
natures which only the philosophy of nature can explore.

286

Philosophical Physics
CONTROL IS ART, NOT A SCIENCE OF NATURE

Chance, or more appropriately randomness, plays a tremendous
role in empiriological physics. The empiriological physicist uses
mathematics as his tool and tends to reduce nature to sheer quan­
tity. But quantity prescinds from motion, and that is why evolu­
tion, cosmic and biological alike, is so alien to the strict equalitarian universe of experimentalism. Unable to account for origins
and purposes mathematically, empiriological method goes to the
concept of chance in the form of an evolutionary theory to ex­
plain the beginnings of things and to chance in the form of
entropy to explain their ends. Fertility and progress, which are of
nature, become impossible where sheer quantity is involved, and
are attributed to disorder, since whatever is orderly must be
mathematical.
Fertility and progress, the reasons which prompt empiriological
method to posit chance as the ultimate are the very issues that
receive a rational and realistic treatment in the philosophical
science of nature, nature that is an inner principle and a source of
motion. Without a philosophical science of nature, gazing on
motion at its own level and not as quantity, the really big ques­
tions that fret the mind will forever remain unanswered.
All of this criticism does not deny the efficacy of empiriological
physics. It only restricts the empiriological method by showing
that motion, the most obvious and most important fact of direct
experience, really eludes it and will continue to elude it forever.
If chance is defined as the result of factors extrinsic to a given
nature, it draws up alongside art, and if empiriological physics is
primarily an art, it would be logical to seek a world of chance as
its ideal subject matter. Both chance and art are extrinsic to na­
ture in origin.
It ought to be expected that a discipline like empiriological
physics which views matter as inert and as extrinsically deter­
mined should have hit upon chance as its foundations. The ran­
dom, the indeterminate, the undifferentiated, the inert, is the

Progress and Purpose

287

controllable, and a complete control of nature would require that
nature be perfectly extrinsic to itself, that natural tendencies and
natural ends be repudiated, that chance be introduced as the
only natural substitute for final causality, and that this chaotic
world should be a nothingness so man could fashion it, creator­
like, according to his own image and likeness.
The empiriological physicist may well ignore final causality to
gain control of nature, and this necessarily results in putting
chance at the roots of things. Once more the difference between
the intrinsic and the extrinsic, finality and chance, philosophical
and empiriological physics, tends to suggest the familiar distinc­
tion between art and nature. That distinction is like a master
switch which beams a powerful light into many of the otherwise
darkened rooms in modern methods. Philosophy does not intend
to move the furniture which it sees there. It only wants to ap­
praise it.

Suggested Readings

Aquinas, Thomas, Summa contra gentiles, Bk. Ill, chs. 1-24.
von Mises, Robert, Probability, Statistics, and Truth (New York,
1932).

9
Mathematics and the Infinite
NUMBER IS DEFINED BY CORRESPONDENCE

Aristotle frequently pointed out that the philosophy of nature
ought to stay clear of the realm of pure mathematics. Unlike a
vast contemporary aspiration, Aristotle did not erect a special
method as the filter for ah knowledge and insist that whatever
failed to get through the meshes was not validly known. The
feats of a method in one field do not mean that it is valid every­
where, any more than the worth of a razor in shaving a man at­
tests to its excellence as a carpenter’s plane. Aristotle kept his
sciences distinct, and when in his philosophical physics he dis­
cussed mathematical reality, it was always applied mathematics
that he had in view. In the twilight zone between mathematical
and physical daylight Aristotle discerned the so-called intermedi­
ate sciences where such studies as perspective, the rainbow, and
even astronomy are located. Because the applied mathematician
pronounces on physical reality, philosophical physics has a right
to debate with him.
But the theory of number does not directly touch the world of
motion. It is pure mathematics. It belongs to the second order of
abstraction which the philosophical science of nature does not
scale. Yet there are two reasons why it should be discussed in
these pages. One is that the mathematical theory of one age often
seeps down into practice later on, and in an age which makes no
distinction between its various disciplines and their methods, the
discussion of mathematics puts empiriological physics itself into
the forum. The second reason which invites treatment of modern
number theory here is to ask if the actually infinite is mathemati288

Mathematics and the Infinite

289

cally possible. IF it is, then it might be realized in the physical
world. The case against actual infinity cannot rest when the
philosophical physicist simply shows that it is not a fact. He
must show that it is impossible. He must answer the objections
from the gallery of modern mathematics. By an insight into
Cantor’s notion of transfinite numbers, Russell’s logicalism, Hilbert’s formalism, and Brouwer’s intuitionism, the notion of po­
tential infinity defended in philosophical physics will be tough­
ened, like a soldier gaining strength and experience with each
test. As Aquinas says, the solving of a doubt is the confirming of
a truth.
Number, according to Aristotle, is multitude, organized and
identified and measured by unity. Multitude is plurality, simple
and pure and hence disorganized. Unknowable in itself like
prime matter or potency, it is known only when measured by
unity. To reduce it to unity is to number it, and our material
world can accordingly be organized into units. On the Supreme
Court bench there are nine of those units of quantity which we
call men, enabling the mind to abstract the concept of nine.
Adding or subtracting a unit varies the species of the number, so
that there is a gap between the numbers. There is not just an
infinite series of fractions which the imagination devises to mend
the break.
But the contemporary account of number is much different.
The key to it is the notion of correspondence which might be
illustrated by the following example: Imagine two barrels of
beans, the one filled with white ones and the other with red ones.
As the first white bean Wx is drawn from the one barrel, let the
first red bean R1 be taken from the other. W2 may then be drawn
together with R2, and W3 can be matched by R3, and so on in­
definitely. To each and every white bean there corresponds one
and only one red one, and vice versa, a relation of mutual match­
ing that the following scheme can represent:

Wj w2 w3 w4 WB w6 w7 w8 w9... wn
$$$$$$$$$
$
Rx R2 R3
R4 Rb
Re
R7 Rs
R9 . . . R„

290

Philosophical Physics

It should be noted that in the relation between the aggregates,
called sets, of Ws and the aggregates or sets of R’s, a member of
one set is matched by only one member of another. Thus R7 can­
not correspond to Wr and then be used again to match, say
W12S9- One member of one set corresponds to only one member
of the other, and vice versa.
The relation of equivalence is technically termed biunique
(biunivocal) correspondence. But how far can this correspond­
ence be carried on between the aggregate or set of W’s and the
aggregate or set of R’s?
The general answer of modern number theory can be given by
another example: To each and every point on a line there corre­
sponds a real number, just as to each and every one of the twelve
major subdivisions of a foot rule there corresponds one and only
one inch, 1, 2, 3, . . . , 12. Now let the line be subdivided just
as the scale of inches is splintered into fractions. To each and
every subdividing point on the line there corresponds a number
different from the first but still a real number, just as fractions of
an inch are still numbers. Moreover, declares modern number
theory, since the number of points on a straight line is infinite,
this correspondence of points with the number sequence can be
carried out infinitely. If the decimal system is used, smaller and
smaller decimal fractions are attained with each subdivision on
the line. Whether the line be long or short, it contains an infinite
number of decimals because on its continuous extension there
is an infinite number of points. Any straight and unbroken line,
for instance, represents a set to which all the real numbers cor­
respond.
NUMBERS ARE FORMED FROM INFINITE DECIMALS

Real number is used in contrast to an imaginary number like
V—1 which cannot, to put it roughly, be reduced to countable
quantities. Real numbers in tum may be transcendental like or e
(the base of the natural logarithm), or they may be algebraic.

Mathematics and the Infinite

291

Algebraic numbers are subdivided into rational numbers, like
integers and ordinary fractions, and irrational numbers like V2,

V3, ^7. All of these real numbers can be put into correspond­
ence with the points on a line. On a continuous line the points
are everywhere dense, meaning that between any two points there
is another one. The line is continuous, and the quantities that it
represents are often called the continuum of real numbers.
The principles involved here can be illustrated by Dedekind’s
classic theory of defining irrationals. Through a straight line rep­
resenting the continuum of real numbers, let another line be
drawn (Fig. 1). This line will divide the number continuum into
two classes so that all those numbers greater than the number at

Fig. 1.

The Dedekind Cut.

the point of intersection will lie to the right of this point, and all
those less than the number will lie to the left. Let us say we are
looking for V2, which can be reduced to a long fraction begin­
ning with 1.414 . . . but which cannot be rationalized by arith­

metical means. The quantity, V2, may be found by drawing a
line through the number continuum, separating it into two
classes of numbers (Fig. I), one whose squares are less than two
and the other whose squares are more than two. The two classes
mark out a “cut” in the number continuum, and the “cut” here
defines V2.
Thus far no general definition has been given of number. Such
a definition involves a more precise picture of the continuum and

Philosophical Physics

292

a more generalized concept than the Dedekind “cut” which de­
fined the irrationals.
Let us return to our straight line representing the number con­
tinuum and divide it off into units at the points corresponding to
whole numbers, as shown in Fig. 2, where we want, say, to define
the transcendental number 77. In this figure, the interval between
lf lies !n this interval

r

----- 1_____ [_____ I_____ i

0 -<------

4

r

r_____ i_____ i_____ i_____ I__

----- >- co

Fig. 2.
y-ir lies in this interval

3.1
___ i_____ I

I,

3.2

—I_____ I_____ I—----- 1_____ I______ I--------- !--------- L_
----- >- «

0 -<------

Fig. 3.
TT lies in this interval

r

3.15

------ 1----------- 1----------- 1----------- 1----------- 1----------- 1----------- 1_______ i______ 1

0 •<-----

I

----- >• co

Fig. 4.

3 and 4 is divided into ten subintervals, and in the second of
these is the fraction, 0.14, greater than the quantity represented
by the first interval but less than the whole quantity represented
by the second. Now let us (Fig. 3) divide this second interval
into ten subintervals, corresponding to the ten 1/10’s of the orig­
inal 1/10 from 0.1 to 0.2 in Fig. 2. These units in Fig. 3 thus
correspond to 1/100 of the interval between 3 and 4. In Fig. 3,
the 0.14 of the 3.14 takes us to the fourth interval but -n- is greater
than 3.14. It is 3.141 . . . , so the space between 0.14 and 0.15
must again be subdivided into ten units (Fig. 4). So we go on
dividing and subdividing and subdividing again.

Mathematics and the Infinite

293

Each successive digit after the decimal point of 3.1416 . . .
is given in terms corresponding to 1/10" of the distance between
3 and 4. Thus the first digit 1 corresponds to 1/10 of that dis­
tance, the second digit 4 corresponds to 1/100 of that distance
and the third digit which is 1 again (3.1416) corresponds to
1/1000 of that distance. Like a folding cup, growing smaller the
more it is opened, each section comes closer to the exact interval
between 3 and 4 where tt is “nested.” In the limit this interval
would diminish to a point, and though knowing this point to be
on the linear continuum, we are unable to establish exactly
where.
This sequence might stop as in the case of 1.1000. ... It
might keep on going as in the case of irrationals like the tran­
scendental number tt or algebraic irrationals like V2. Such num­
bers as these two examples involve infinite decimals. Cantor
defined irrationals as an infinite sequence of rationals, arriving at
algebraic theory for what Dedekind, with his “cuts” had repre­
sented geometrically.
Yet a more elegant definition of number can be given by con­
sidering all numbers to be made up of infinite decimals. In a
decimal like 2.9999999999 . . . , it will be seen that there is a
certain ordered sequence which is eventually reached and re­
peated. Such a repetitive series is called an infinite periodic
decimal. Sometimes, on the other hand, there is no order in the
sequence, no matter how far decimals might be carried out. Such
infinite decimals are called non-periodic since they do not repeat.
Infinite periodic decimals are rational numbers. Infinite non­
periodic decimals are irrationals.
Number in general is an infinite decimal.
CANTOR DEFINED A TRANSFINITE NUMBER

In this broad outline of the theory of number the concept of
infinity has already appeared and may now be explored for its
own sake. Since Cantor’s ideas on the subject are now considered

294

Philosophical Physics

classical, his theory of transfinite numbers will be sketched.
Transfinitude is the same thing as mathematical infinity and is in
fact a better name since it does not involve the confusion with
philosophy where the word infinity, as shown by the division of
its senses in the Chapter 4, has many meanings.
Until the nineteenth century, it had been the common opin­
ions of mathematicians and philosophers alike that there is no
greatest cardinal number. As Leibniz said, the idea of a greatest
number involved a contradiction—an infinite number that was
definite would by that very definite character be finite. The num­
ber sequence was considered perpetually open and enlargeable.
But what if a point of view is taken that is outside the series
and a number is defined that is not obtained by prolonging, say,
the series of whole numbers but stands at a different level? Georg
Cantor took such a leap outside the series that is strung out by
counting, when he defined the transfinite number written here
a0 (alpha-zero, instead of Cantor’s Hebrew notation aleph-zero).
This number is the number of all finite numbers, or in a more
technical language, the number of ah denumerable sets, with
denumerability to be described below as a phenomenon of cor­
respondence. However, a0 is not a number in the ordinary sense
like 1, 2, 3, . . . , n, ... . It is a number in which these are,
so to speak, the objects numbered. It is the number of a number.
All odd and even integers have a0 for their cardinal number; the
same is true of all prime numbers—a number divisible only by
itself and one like 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, etc. The num­
ber of odd numbers or the number of primes, for example, is
equal to the number of even numbers. All are equal to a0Cantor goes much further than the simple definition of a0, as
a theoretical backdrop. It is well known that integers are de­
numerable, i.e., capable of being enumerated in an orderly way
so that there are no gaps in the series such as would occur in
setting down the succession from 1 to 1,000,000, omitting the
number 4. Invoking the tool of biunique correspondence between

. Mathematics and the Infinite

295

sets, Cantor shows that the set of rational numbers—all ordinary
fractions—is denumerable. AH the fractions can be put into one
to one correspondence with the integers, like the red beans put
into correspondence with the white ones. The display of how the
rationals can be denumerated will open the door to the conclu­
sion that there are numbers higher than a0> and that there is a
whole hierarchy of infinities. The rationals can be denumerated
if a formula is found for deriving them.
Let us take the whole number 4 and (a) break it down into all
possible pairs of integers x and y which form it as their sum, then
(b) arrange all the x’s and y’s, taking each pair separately into
fractions x/y and y/x, with the fractions to be written in the order
of their increasing magnitude. For instance, (a) four is equal to
3 + 1, 2 + 2; and (b) the possible fractions are 1/3, 3/1, 2/2,
taking each pair separately; this should be written 1/3, 2/2, and
3/1 to preserve the order of increasing magnitude. Six for ex­
ample can (a) be broken down into 3 + 3, 5 + 1, 4 + 2; and (b)
the corresponding fractions of each pair taken separately are 1/5,
2/4, 3/3, 4/2, and 5/1. Each of the so-called natural integers
can thus give rise to a class of fractions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

0/1
1/1
1/2, 2/1
1/3, 2/2, 3/1
1/4, 2/3, 3/2, 4/1
1/5, 2/4, 3/3, 4/2, 5/1

Now let all the classes be set down successively from 1 to 5/1,
and instead of stopping at 6, let the series be continued indefi­
nitely. Certain fractions like 2/4 and 4/2 can be reduced to 1/2
and 2/1 which have already occurred in the class of 3, and such
reducible fractions can be eliminated, counting the fraction only
the first time it appears. The resulting set can be put into cor­
respondence with the integers.

Philosophical Physics

296

0/1

1/1

1/2

2/1

1/3

3/1

1

2

3

4

5

6

1/4
$
7

2/3 .. .
$
8 . . .

Now all fractions will eventually occur in this procession, and
duplicates can be eliminated by counting a ratio only the first
time it appears. True enough, the fractions are not in the order
of increasing magnitude, except within the classes; 1/3, in the
sequence above is smaller than 2/1, its predecessor, and 1/4 in
turn is smaller than 3/1. The enumeration of the millionth class
would give a fraction 1/999,999, smaller than any of its predeces­
sors. But the order of magnitude makes no difference in this se­
quence. The enumeration is not of ordinals but of cardinals, and
Cantorians are interested not in the magnitude of individual
fractions but solely and simply in devising a way for deriving all
fractions, regardless of their order. To each and every fraction,
set down according to these genial rules, there corresponds one
and only one integer, exactly as in the correspondence of the
white and red beans. If the integers are denumerable, so there­
fore are the fractions. In other words, all rational numbers are
denumerable.
Cantorians hold that all algebraic numbers, rationals and irra­
tionals alike, are denumerable. The rules for this deduction are
too complex to be discussed here, but in broad principle, they
correspond amply enough with the foregoing procedure to allow
the conclusion to be asserted without proof that algebraic num­
bers are denumerable like the integers. The set of rationals, the
set of integers, the set of algebraic numbers—all have a0 for their
transfinite number.
CANTOR PROPOSED A HIERARCHY OF TRANSFINITES

Cantorians are now prepared to show that there is a transfinite
number higher than ct0- This number is c, the number of the
continuum, and it may be thought of as the number of points on
a continuous line of any length. It includes not only algebraic

Mathematics and the Infinite

297

numbers but transcendental ones. It thus extends to all real num­
bers. But the primary property that is of interest here is that c is
not denumerable.
It is this non-denumerable character of the continuum which
shows it to be in a higher order of infinity than the denumerable
domain of algebraic numbers. So, at least, argue the Cantorians.
That c is greater than a0, “an infinite greater than the infinite,"
is a conclusion they draw from proving that c, unlike a0, is nondenumerable.
On this point, there is an indirect proof of c’s non-denumerable
character that is considered classical. It consists in assuming that
all the real numbers in the continuum, say between 1 and 2,
have been enumerated and then proving that a new number
can always be added, thus contradicting the initial assumption.
In a more formal way, this proof is known as the diagonal process
and can be illustrated by the following example:
Between 0 and 1, let us say that all enumerated numbers can
be represented by the following scheme of decimal fractions in
which each letter, large or small makes no difference, stands for
a number between 0 and 9:
0. b1B2b3b4b5beb7bsb9
0. CjC^CgC^CgCçCyCgCj)
0.
0. e1e2e3e4E5e6e7ese9

• hn
• dn
■ en

Now the assumption is that all the real numbers can be enu­
merated in this fashion, where each of the above letters corre­
sponds to a whole number and where each line thus represents a
fraction between 0 and 1. But after this would-be enumeration is
complete, it is then possible to show that a number can be con­
structed whose first digit differs from Ai, whose second digit dif­
fers from B2, whose third digit differs from C3, and so on down
the diagonal which would result if a line were drawn to join all
the capital letters in the above scheme.

298

Philosophical Physics

The resulting number differs from every previous member of
the series of fractions by at least one digit. Thus to the real num­
bers between 0 and 1, a new number can always be added. The
same conclusions could be reached about the real numbers be­
tween 0 and 1/2, for instance, or between 0 and any fraction.
The real numbers which include all algebraic and transcenden­
tal numbers taken together are not denumerable.
Cantor’s achievement consists in being able to deduce the
existence of transcendental numbers which, before his time, had
been generally viewed as discoveries of induction, like the dis­
covery of ir from relating the circumference of a circle to its
diameter.
In addition to a0 and c, there is yet a higher transfinite cardinal
which may be illustrated in the following way:
In a finite class of objects, m, there are mn subclasses where n
denotes the number of the original entities which appear in each
subclass. For instance, the class of three letters abc can be formed
into 32 classes of two letters each: aa, bb, cc, ab, ac, ba, ca, be, cb.
A class of two letters ab can be arranged into eight subclasses
where there are three letters to a class, m = 2s: aaa, bbb, aba,
baa, aab, abb, bab, bba. Thus it is with finîtes.
But what happens when this formula is home to the level of
the transfinites? In how many ways can the numbers of c be
combined with each other? The answer is c, the transfinite ana­
logue of m", and the number of correspondences thus established
is called the functional transfinite f. It is even intuitively clear
that a0 < c <f.
There is a whole algebra of transfinite numbers, relating them
to each other and showing how they react to finite and infinite
exponents and coefficients. Such discussion can be by-passed
along with the outline of Cantor’s theory of ordinals which are
really secondary in importance to transfinite cardinals. As a con­
cluding remark, it can simply be pointed out that the hierarchy
of transfinites, begun by a0, c, and f can be carried on without
limit. There is an infinity of infinities, according to the direction

Mathematics and the Infinite

299

of Cantorian algebra. The number f can be transcended to a new
order by use of a process similar to the diagonal procedure for
determining the non-denumerable character of c.
Before putting Cantor’s ideas under the lens of realistic phi­
losophy, the three contemporary philosophies of mathematics and
hence philosophies of mathematical infinity must be passed in
review. They are the logicalism of Peano and Frege which reaches
its climax in Bertrand Russell, the formalism of David Hilbert
and his school, and the intuitionism of Brouwer, Weyl, and
Poincaré.
RUSSELL REDUCES INFINITY TO A LOGICAL HIERARCHY

The name logicalism was coined by Rudolf Carnap and repre­
sents the inner nature of the Russell school, the reduction of
mathematics to logic. Russell’s avowed intention is to derive the
whole science of number from merely logical constants. To do
this, he gives a definition of number in terms of classes. Specifi­
cally and in Russell’s techinal idiom of symbolic logic, number is
“the class of similar classes.”1 This means, in concrete terms, for
example, that all bipeds which are featherless form a class of
similar objects called men. Another class of objects are, say, the
particles found in a granite quarry after it has been dynamited,
and these are called stones. Now the most general characteristic
which these two classes, men and stones, have in common is
their various numbers. Both can be set into correspondence with
the integer series.
Number is hence the property of a class, because when things
are numbered they form a class. The typewriter and the eraser
are two objects, and their number is thus a member of the class
2. A pair of eyes, the hands of a man, the front wheels of an
automobile—all have the same number which belongs to the
class 2. They are all similar classes by their number which is the
class uniting (classifying) all of them.
1 Principles of Mathematics, 2d ed. (New York, 1938), p. 116.

300

Philosophical Physics

This definition of number rests on the principle of correspond­
ence which has threaded its way through the whole preceding
discussion of mathematics and tests whether a collection is de­
numerable or not. It was remarked that Cantor, when he defined
a0, did not reach the transfinite by simply extending the finite.
He went outside the series to define the number of a number. A
similar hierarchical structure is hoisted by Russell. Where num­
ber is the class of all similar classes, the first application of the
concept of class is on a different logical level from the classes of
which it is the class. No definitum, the logician rightly holds, can
occur in the definition of itself. Otherwise, he would chase his
objects into the nonsense of a vicious circle. The class (C) of
similar classes (c) involves a metaclass or a metalogic; for nothing
can be taken as intrinsically evident to a logician in the purest
air of his science. When he classifies, he does so in terms of genera
that lie beyond the thing classified, mounting in the branches of
the famous Porphyrian tree. (C) is at a higher Porphyrian
altitude than the (c)s which it organizes.
As long as finite classes are considered, Russell’s definition is
in general accord with the discursive character of modern
method. In the world of matter, the law of inertia dictates that
things are determined by forces and factors beyond them. In
empiriological physics, considered from the viewpoint of its
method, one concept is defined in terms of what is outside it,
with pure discursion, untempered by the intuitive, as an ideal.
Discursion is to method in empiriological physics what inertia
is to matter.
Russell’s whole philosophy has for its target to make the
modern method more discursive and, like matter, more control­
lable. To this end, he has suggested a metalanguage for talking
about languages, and his followers have proposed a metalogic
for the discussion of logic. A metalanguage can be in turn dis­
cussed by a metametalanguage and a metalogic by a metameta­
logic. To this hierarchy of languages and logics, Russell implies,
there can be no limit. Though apparently he does not employ the

Mathematics and the Infinite

301

term, it is perfectly in the spirit of his general outlook to call the
class of all similar classes a metaclass and to call a0 a metanumber.
But when discursion is applied to this metanumber and in
general to the whole hierarchy of the transfinites, the skies are
much more stormy than when the discursive method is applied to
the area of finite quantities. This is clear from the very fact that a
number which is truly infinite would have to include its own self
as a member. The train of examining modern philosophies of
mathematics has led to the so-called paradoxes of the infinite
which Russell turns into one of the crucial depots of his philoso­
phy.
A frequently cited example of a paradox is a statement by a
Cretan that all Cretans are liars. If the statement is true it is
false because a Cretan has uttered it. To rise above these contra­
dictions, Russell proposes his famous theory of types, suggested
by the work of Frege. A type is a rule which determines not the
inner meaning of a statement but the extent of its application.
All logical types, for instance, involve the principle that a state­
ment cannot apply to its own self, putting the Cretan who speaks
outside the Cretans spoken about.
In this way, the discursive temper of modern methods receives
a new application, and intrinsic meaning is once again sur­
rendered to the inertial view of things. In speaking of the num­
ber of an infinite number, which is to define ct0, the so-called
transfinite is on a higher landing in the logical hierarchy than
the finite numbers whose series it represents. It would appear,
then, that Russell has polished Cantor’s system by showing that
there is no contradiction in an infinite number that does not
include its own self as a member of the series which it represents.
One more facet of the many original principles which Russell
develops in his mathematics and his mathematical logic is his
conclusion that the infinite is intensional rather than extensional.
What these terms mean can be made clear by reference to the
meaning of comprehension (intension) and extension in classical
Aristotelian logic with the former standing for content and the

302

Philosophical Physics

latter the field of individuals to which the content applies. Sym­
bolic logic, and this naturally includes Russell’s own views, is
largely extensional. It is difficult to see with what right intension
can come in at all since it involves something more than sheer
logical form. But whatever inconsistency intension brings with
it into an ambition to treat the world by logic alone, it is a matter
of historical fact that Russell cloaks infinity in an intensional
dress.
The reason for this can be suggested by the paradoxes which
prompted Russell to his theory of types. The definition of infinity
would have to be infinitely complex, since an infinity would be
included in the definition. But this infinite complexity occurs
neither in the thought of the mathematician nor in his symbol­
isms. There is a finite structure to the definition. It is about some­
thing else, about content. And content, to put it roughly, is
in the intensional order. Thus a0 is finite in the structure of its
definition, but it represents something infinite, the series of all
algebraic numbers. Even intension and extension are harnessed
into a logical hierarchy.
FORMALISM MAKES INFINITY INTO A RULE

Russell is not optimistic enough to believe that the whole of
reality, even mathematical reality, can be coerced into his logical
conceits. Despite a discursive slope, Russell admits an empirical
world yielding sense data for logic to organize. With David Hil­
bert, the logicalism of Russell secedes from his sensism, and in
an island of pure logic, sets up a kingdom called formalism.
Formalism does not scruple over the origins of knowledge and
over the data of intuition with which the mathematician has
always been forced to begin his intellectual itinerary. Though it
admits at least verbally that mathematics does not derive from
logic but develops independently, it is pure logic that gets the
priority. A system of mathematics need not have meaning and be
configured to a real world; its only requirement is consistency.
Logic is charged with manipulating the mathematical symbols,

Mathematics and the Infinite

303

providing rules to derive and combine mathematical forms and
thus acting as a “directive science.” The chief aim of formalism
is to hammer out a complete and consistent mathematical system
from the fewest possible presuppositions. It is the purest kind of
postulational mathematics. Content is sacrificed to form, inner
meaning to mere rule. In the end, logic and mathematics.must
lose that difference between them to which formalists pay at
least lip service. In both it is form, rule, system, or consistency
that alone counts.
Hilbert’s pretensions create a grave critical problem. Formal­
ism forces mathematics and then its regulative logic to begin
with undefined terms and principles that lie outside the system
which they govern and can only be examined by a higher logic,
a metalogic, on formalistic premises. This metalogic in turn must
also begin with the undefined and undecided, if it is to be truly
formalistic, and so the process goes on and on. Kurt Gôdel showed
that mathematical logic by which both Hilbert and Russell ma­
nipulate the foundations of mathematics must always contain at
least a small number of undefined terms which cannot be treated
in the system which they organize. These undefined entities are
called “the undecidables,” and their presence forbids both logicalism and formalism from ever saying the final word about reality
or mathematics. The hierarchy of types, in which a higher ap­
plies to a lower but must in turn subject itself to a higher type
to be meaningful, is likewise a case of "the undecidables.” It is
a pyramid without an apex.
Like the majority of modern logicians, Hilbert had to accede
to Gôdel’s strictures. Mathematics need not be conformed to
reality, Hilbert held. His school aims only to lay down rules to
combine mathematical symbols, and when the rules fail, they
must be scrapped for a better logic which is more consistent in
itself and more adequate to the complete body of mathematical
entities. Hilbert searches for a minimum of concepts, guided by
the principle of economy, erroneously attributed to Ockham,
that “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.”

304

Philosophical Physics

In its search for mathematical consistency, formalism pushes
into logic. It wants no traffic in objects endowed with content, as
objects even in mathematics must always be. It is hard to see
how mathematics and logic can be essentially distinct. Thus “A
number is not an object in the proper sense but a property,”2
Hilbert says. Mathematics, independent perhaps in its discovery,
is here apparently crossing over into logic to ground itself. The
individuals to which number applies cannot be numbered things
because everyone is unique; so number is the property of a con­
cept or a predicate, the property of a universal, remembering that
a predicate designates something wider than the subject and is
attributed to the subject as membership in a class is attributed to
an individual. In the proposition, John is a man, man is wider
than John considering man in itself. Number is thus the func­
tion of a predicate for formalism, or, reminiscent of Russell’s
definition, number is the predicate of a predicate.
The matter of human experience is always finite, and when
the infinite comes in, says Hilbert, it does so in the manner of
an idea. Infinity is thus discussed in an ideal proposition and
designates an ideal object. In the so-called inductive side of
mathematics, concrete objects are inspected and related to each
other. One formula is conceived and derived from another.
“When we generalize this situation,” Hilbert writes,
then mathematics arrives at a number of formulas, first those
which correspond to the matter expressed in finite propositions,
in essentially numbered equalities and inequalities, and second
at broader formulae that in themselves have no meaning and
form the ideal representations of our theory.3

Infinity thus exists in thought and thought alone. It is a crea­
tion of logic, working over a mathematical material. And it is an
affair of formulae or rules. Such a notion of the infinite enables
2 D. Hilbert and W. Ackermann, Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik
(Berlin, 1928), p. 86.
3 Grundlagen der Geometrie (Leipzig, 1930), p. 281.

Mathematics and the Infinite

305

the mathematician to withdraw from reality in the manipulations
of transfinite numbers, and this retreat from content in favor of
a system whose only requirement is freedom from contradiction
is exactly what formalism wants. “The infinite divisibility of the
continuum,” Hilbert declares, “is an operation which exists in
thought only, is just an idea, an idea which is refuted by our
observations of nature, as well as by physical and chemical ex­
periments.”4 Infinity here exists only logically.
INTUITIONISM DENIES HIERARCHY OF INFINITES

Another way of describing formalism is as a non-constructive
mathematics. This means simply that the formalists seek release
from the curves and tables, the pictures and the graspable quan­
tities which the senses apprehend; formalism desiderates purity
of form, without regard for the construction of an object in the
imagination.
The directly opposite direction is trodden by the so-called
intuitionists led by L. E. J. Brouwer and Hermann Weyl and
suggested by the earlier doctrines of Leopold Kronecker and
Henri Poincaré. Intuitionism in fact claims a descent from the
Kantian notion of synthetic a priori judgments which attempted
to validate Euclidian geometry because the space presented to
mans senses is judged Euclidian. If formalism is non-construc­
tive, intuitionism is constructive.
As a first approximation, intuitionism can be thought of as a
swing from the vacuous forms of Hilbert into the direction of
the empirical. It holds, as its name implies, that mathematics
must begin with the intuitive, and that as a matter of fact, the
mind is born with such intuitive richness which passing time
forces it to use. The primary intuition, the bedrock of all mathe­
matics, is the “intuitions of the bare two-oneness,”0 Brouwer
argues.
4 Cited by T. Dantzig, Number, The Language of Science (New York,
1930), p. 238.
5 “Intuitionism and Formalism,” Bulletin of the American Mathemati­
cal Society, XX (1913), 85-86.

306

Philosophical Physics

Though intuitionism is often claimed to have an affinity with
western tradition, Brouwer's foregoing statement stands in con­
trast to the more orthodox notion of number in philosophy. There,
number is prior to its properties, and one number is related to its
successor mentally by the relating act of judgment. Objectively
and subjectively, a thing is prior to its relations. One is what it is,
first, and is then related to two, and the order of thought follows
along with this arrangement of reality itself. In Brouwer’s vision
of things, however, one and two are drawn much more tightly
together. They are intuited along with the link that relates them
in this “basal intuition,” and so in a single flash of insight there
arise the concepts of one, two, and their relation. They are seen
as succeeding each other; the relation of succession is welded into
the very concept of two-oneness.
The intuitionists recognize the existence of only denumerable
sets. To jump ahead to the region of the non-denumerable is
unwarranted by the data of our intuitions. Intuitionism rejects
the Cantorian hierarchy of the transfinites, and to that extent it is
more allied to the traditional notion of mathematical infinity.
Brouwer declares that the original two-oneness can be broken
into elements, and one of these can be regarded as another "twooneness.” Indefinitely repeated, this process gives rise to the con­
cept of “between.” The notion of the infinite is precipitated from
considering this idea of “between” which can be strewn indefi­
nitely with repetitions of the "two-oneness.”
This interval of the “between” is included in the basal intui­
tion of “two-oneness,” and it can never be exhausted by inter­
polating new units in it. It is therefore not a true collection. No
infinity can be finited to a point of being compared with other
infinities. Thus, Cantorians go far beyond the conclusions which
intuition authorizes; a0 is the only infinite which Brouwer admits
as meaningful, and it is reached not by inductively extending a
series or a set but intuitively and from the meaning of “between.”
It may help to suggest Brouwer's meaning, which is highly
debated in modern thought, if reference is made to the priority of

Mathematics and the Infinite

307

mathematics over logic in intuitionism. Formalism, of course, em­
phasizes the regulative and the logical. The weight of intuition­
ism is more on matter or content and on the meaning of mathe­
matical existents rather than on logical rules. Intuitionism is
a constructive approach, holding that an entity to be mathe­
matically real must be included in intuitive representation by the
mind of man. This approach invalidates the Cantorian hierarchy
of the infinities, which Russell and Hilbert refine by logic, since
the differences among Cantorian infinities cannot be given a con­
structive, intuitive form in the world of “content” but only among
the rules of logic. So intuitionism holds to one infinity only and
refuses to submit mathematics to a domination by the logical
order.
The unified whole of “two-oneness” must not be confused
with Kronecker’s finitism, where God made the integers and man
everything else. To put it bluntly, what is involved in the notion
of all the real numbers between 1 and 2? For Russell and for
formalism, following the course which Cantor charted, this mid­
dle area is mapped out in terms of a series of infinite decimals,
requiring an infinite number of operations. Not so for intuition­
ism. In this doctrine, the stretch from 1 to 2 is spanned by a law
to construct the series of intervening decimals, a law that is in­
volved by an analysis of “between”; there is thus a finite number
of operations. There is no such thing as a non-denumerable set.
There is no such thing as a more “between” or a less “between.”
To posit the non-denumerable, to heave up a hierarchy of infini­
ties, to determine the indeterminate, is to range beyond the
boundaries of intuition, which encloses numbers and their differ­
ence but refuses to give meaning to differences among infin­
ities.
The mention of the indeterminate foists into the fore a peculiar
tenet of intuitionism, the denial of the principle of excluded
middle. For ancient as well as for modern mathematics in gen­
eral, there is no medium between being and nothing, between
being a triangle and not being one, between being congruous or

308

Philosophical Physics

not being so. A thing is either A or not-A, without the possibility
of a middle ground.
Intuitionism on the contrary holds to a three-valued logic or
three-valued mathematics. A collection of numbers can never be
taken as A or not-A, until it has either been denumerated or
yielded a law for denumeration. Barring such definite knowledge,
the reality in question must be considered indeterminate. Thus,
one should not say: either A or not-A, but rather: either A or
not-A or indeterminate. Has Brouwer come upon the meaning
of potency which Aristotle defined as the indeterminate and held
to be a kind of middle between being and non-being?
The key vision of the intuitionists on the infinite is outlined
succinctly in four steps by Hermann Weyl:
There first occurs in the mind of the mathematician a con­
crete individual judgment like 2 + 5 = 7. In this matter, certain
relations are intuited, which brings mathematics to a second or
symbolic stage, where arithmetic graduates to algebra, so to speak.
Here one can form the judgment: m + n — n + m. It is a judg­
ment comprehended intuitively. At the third tier of the move­
ment, the very concept of sum is seen to involve the possibility
that to any given number another unity can always be added,
forming a new number, and thus it is fourthly and finally seen
that the series is open and infinite. The intuitionists allow us to
transcend our experience but not our intuitions.
Such an analysis is quite close to the traditional view of mathe­
matics. The difficulty reposes in the a priori and idealist character
that is assigned to the intuition and in the confusion of content
with relation.
WHAT IS ACTUAL IN MATHEMATICAL INFINITY IS A RULE

All this sometimes tenuous and technical array of data has been
outlined with the sole view of achieving a summit from which
the concept of infinity in modern thought could be viewed and
evaluated according to realistic canons. It was seen first that at
the root of the present-day concept of number is the notion of

Mathematics and the Infinite

309

correspondence. It is this concept which, by analogy with the
points on a line, propels the mathematician to define number in
terms of an infinity of decimals, with infinity, according to Bol­
zano’s pattern, taken to be any collection, or aggregate, or set,
where any subset is equal to the whole.
Cantor’s notion of the infinite results in the hierarchy of transfinite numbers where a0, the smallest transfinite, is the set of
denumerable sets, the number of natural numbers, indeed the
number of all algebraic numbers since all of them, by proper
rules, can be put into correspondence with the integers. The real
numbers, by contrast, are not denumerable, and this non-denumerable character gives to c, the number of the continuum, a
higher status in the hierarchy of the infinites than a0 was seen
to hold. Finally, a third transfinite cardinal was established as f,
whose derivation was seen to be an affair of taking all the sub­
classes of c, which are greater than c, just as 8, the number of
subclasses formed by the letters a and b, arranged in classes of
three is greater than 2, the a and b of the original class.
Russell apparently made Cantor’s notions more rigorous at the
expense of locking mathematics into a logical skyscraper where
the hierarchy of transfinites developed into a hierarchy of types.
Formalism was shown not only to turn logic upon an inducted
subject matter, as in Russell’s approach, but to close mathematics
off entirely from reality in the search after a system whose only
law is consistency. To this retreat from reality, intuitionism raises
a din of protest, claiming that formalism and logicalism alike
dangle in a dream world, failing to keep their mathematical feet
on the ground of construction. Intuitionism insists on construc­
tion and content rather than pure form and pure consistency,
and it gives priority to mathematics over logic.
In evaluating the various theories and countertheories of the
preceding sections, space will permit going only to the roots of
the problem and letting the branches fall where they may after
that. Furthermore, mathematics has only entered into this account
of the philosophy of nature by the back door since it properly

310

Philosophical Physics

belongs in a higher order of abstraction than philosophical phys­
ics and ought here to be discussed only where mathematics is
applied in the physical world. Yet it is a traditional principle that,
putting it awkwardly, whatever does not involve an incompatibil­
ity in its internal structure has possible existence and the argu­
ment against an actual infinity in matter is not won until it is
shown that such an infinity does involve incompatibilities and
hence cannot ever be actualized in the quantified world.
There are two principles encrusted in the theory of finite
number as the modern mathematician has jelled it. One is the
principle that the whole is greater than its parts. The other is the
notion of correspondence. But when these rules of thumb are
applied in the domain of the infinite, they are found without
credentials.
Bolzano’s definition of the infinite says that the parts are
equivalent to the whole and thus makes the classic whole-part
picture invalid. Moreover, if Bolzano’s idea holds, then corre­
spondence likewise goes out since whole corresponds with whole
and part corresponds with whole. An element no longer has one
and only one correspondent.
It is certainly not legitimate, if one is talking about the real,
to employ the notions of correspondence and of whole-part as
premises for an argument that will deny both of them in its con­
clusion. If the premises were wrong, the conclusion is likewise
false.
As a matter of fact, the notion of correspondence is the same
broadly as equivalence or identity, and the principle of corre­
spondence is nothing but the principle of identity, a positive way
of stating the principle of non-contradiction. Now if quantity
is the essence of things, as post-Cartesian empirical physics tends
to say, and if the world is nothing but an infinite series of
decimals, then it scrambles itself into the indeterminate chaos
of the infinite regression. It becomes a Heraclitean continuum. It
becomes a fluid universe where, it was seen, opposites edge into
one another, and distinctions and identities are blanked out.

Mathematics and the Infinite

311

Thus, the principle of correspondence, if it has real application,
forbids an infinity of particles in matter actually divided, and
such an infinity would forbid the principle of correspondence.
One or the other must go.
In another sense, correspondence involves defining equal num­
ber before defining number. It states the equivalence between the
members of sets. Equivalence, self-identity, is opposed to non­
equality, to more or less, and the whole traditional equipment of
numbering is used before embarking on the definition of number
in terms of infinite decimals. It is used as a premise and then
ignored. It is used and then, purportedly, replaced by a more
analytic definition like the notion of infinite fractions. You can­
not replace a thing by using it to accomplish the replacement,
just as the water in a puddle is not dried up by pouring more
water into it.
How the traditional notion of number as discrete is used as
the basis for modern number theory in terms of the continuum
is borne in upon a critic not only by the principle of correspond­
ence. The set of natural integers, inductively and abstractively
known, is used as the pattern to which other sets are put into
correspondence. The whole modern number theory rests thus
upon a view of number as basically discrete, where each is self­
identical.
The dissection which results in the definition of number by
infinite decimals is something secondary; what is primary in
reality and in knowledge are not infinities but unities, and it is
only in terms of such unities that decimals and fractions can be
constructed. Both rule and reality affirm the primacy of discrete
number over infinity and the continuum—the rule which is the
principle of correspondence or equality and the reality which is
the integer system taken as a measure of all other numbers.
Before glancing at the legality of relating numbers to points
in a continuum, Aristotle’s notion of material or potential infinity
may be fruitfully reconsidered. Such an infinity is, to use the
language of Brouwer, the indeterminate, or in the style of Cantor,

312

Philosophical Physics

the continuum. What is actual about this infinite series is the
rule for continuing the series, and the truly infinite matter to
which the rule applies is an ens rationis. This corrals infinity
into a logical class, quoting Russell’s idiom or into an “ideal
object,” to cite the formalists. All these men have a great deal in
common with realism, and a critique consists not so much in
rejecting as in interpreting them. The number series is indeter­
minately long. A new integer may be progressively determined
each time the mind adds unity to another integer, but the deter­
mination can go on and on because what is being molded is the
potential, the indeterminate, the continuous, and what is actual
is a determining rule; when physical determination stops it can
be continued with tools of the logical or formal order.
There are thus logical constructs in modern mathematics
which, while valid to the working mathematician who wants to
control his matter and to derive it, are not in one-to-one corre­
spondence with real quantity, and when actual, have only a
logical actuality: that of rules or “regulative ideas.” Hence such
logical entities, designed to exploit their objects, cannot apply in
philosophy which studies what is not exploited but only explored
and what has its actuality not in the logical but in the real order.
A line, for instance, is not formed from points. For points are
inextended quantities having only position. Much modern mathe­
matics would agree with this ancient truth but would not be at
all congenial as to the manner in which points are on a line.
Realistically speaking, an infinity of points can be located on a
line, even though they do not form the line. But the infinity
is one of potency since a point is not determined, actualized,
located, until another line has been drawn through the linear
continuum. It takes two lines to locate a point, just as it takes two
planes to locate a line and two solids to locate a plane. Thus the
continuum is not actually infinite in its number of points but
indeterminate. Each time it is divided, a new terminal point is
determined, and the intervals caused by the continued division
can continue to grow smaller and smaller without ever being ex­

Mathematics and the Infinite

313

hausted. It is thus fallacious to say that there are just as many
points on a long line as on a short one since the points on both
are indeterminate and hence cannot be compared.
It is illicit, or at best equivocal, to compare the number series
with points on a line. A line is not points but between points. If
numbers are analogated to extensions, arithmetic to geometry,
then as the size of decimals is decreased a new segment is deter­
mined on an original line representing, say, unity; the segment
decreases with the decimal, and thus points that were potentially
present on the original line are made the actual terms of the
smaller segments. Segments, not points, resemble numbers. A
point as the term of a segment does its job of terminating and by
that very fact prevents the stretch between one and two from
ever being an indeterminate continuum of actual numbers.
This makes even the series of rational fractions between one
and two a discrete set as far as they are actual and a continuous
set as far as they are potential. If the mind moves rigorously
from one to two, it can never actually do so by traveling across
intervening points. It takes abstraction to accomplish this task—
abstraction that can bear upon the discrete because it alone can
relate being to non-being, or in other words relate a thing to itself.
It alone can bridge the gap between being 2 and not being 2.
In brief, a point is a limit of a line, and where limits and terms
are apprehended, intelligence is at work just as in the world of
nature form as the term of generation cannot be counted but
only understood.
Cantor’s hierarchy of transfinite numbers may now be con­
fronted face to face, and the discussion of it will shed further
light on the remarks about determination, indeterminacy, and
the infinite. The outline of his theory leading to a0 etches out the
fact that he has found a rule for determining or denumerating the
rational and even the algebraic numbers. But rules for continuing
a series do not authorize the conclusion that it can be completed
in the sense of being assigned a number, in the sense that it is
thinner than the series of real numbers which is called non-de-

314

Philosophical Physics

numerable, in the sense that it can be compared with other types
of real infinity.
Both reals and algebraics are equally infinite, in the sense that
they can never be completely enumerated, and though compara­
tive size has no real meaning here, there are just as many of the
second type of numbers as there are of the first if infinity is what
the word means. In the case of the algebraic numbers, the rules
for enumeration are known; in the other they are not.
But knowing the rules for determination in one case and not
knowing them in the other really has nothing to do with the fact
that a sequence is indeterminately long or short or, to put it more
concretely, that any continuum can be divided indefinitely. These
directions of thought twine together into a conclusion that the
semblance of act which the various transfinite numbers wear
and which enable them to be compared are rules for dealing with
the respective series and not the series themselves as accomplished
facts. The act is logical and not real.
What is objective in all Cantor's cases is the indeterminate,
and indeterminates cannot be compared with each other in the
sense of more or less, lower or loftier in hierarchy, just as chaos
cannot be compared with chaos. If there were degrees or deter­
minations in the chaos enabling comparison, chaos would not be
chaos. Different ways of determining the potential do not imply
difference in the raw material, any more than the difference
between a good bricklayer and a bad one is in the bricks rather
than in the man. Men are still men if we arrange them in alpha­
betical order, in the order of height, or if we do not arrange them
at all.
Modern mathematics has discovered rules for determining
series and rules for showing that they cannot be determined, as
in the case of transcendental numbers. Modern method tends to
the logical order, that of rules, and Whitehead has aptly described
it as a search after “rules of succession.” The difficulty is that the
rule is confounded with reality. For example, the sum system for

Mathematics and the Infinite

315

¿enumerating fractions involves rules that as such lie outside the
series. Cantor’s a0 is admittedly in this post-series area.
But when a rule lies outside the series it does not mean that it
is a reality like a stone that can be represented no longer as a
rule or logical entity but as a real number.
A number is not a rule, any more than Americans are the con­
stitution which governs them. In one sense, it may well be the
case that a rule is only the nature of a thing, defined regulatively
by the mind and only logically distinct from the thing. Knowing
that a number is made of unities, we have a rule for extending
number, and knowing that man is a rational animal, we have a
rule for identifying man whenever and wherever he may be
found—in America or in Europe or upon visiting Alaska and see­
ing the Eskimos for the first time.
But in modem method, rules are stationed outside the realities
that they govern so that the researcher, mathematician or em­
piriological physicist alike, may more effectively control his mat­
ter. The modern trend is to get outside the series in order to
dominate it and, in the language of Kant and James, to make it.
The modern approach likes to elevate method into the status of a
thing so that it can be made more pliable. Getting a better hold
on method means more control on the matter which the method
measures. Modern method is like false teeth which can be taken
out and inspected and cleaned and repaired. Man can get a more
deliberate control on them. He can improve them. His natural
teeth he can never even see, directly.
Admitting the right to use whatever working principles a
scholar finds appropriate to carry out his mission, the philosopher
assessing such a method must place such differences as Cantor
makes, between his levels of infinity, in the logical order. They
are different ways of dealing with what in reality is the poten­
tially infinite, and when they are compared, as a0 is compared
with c and with f, it is rules that are interrelated, i.e., actualities
that are logically different and not indeterminacies that are really

316

Philosophical Physics

the same. The rules for actualizing the potential do not mean
that the potential is different as each rule applies to it or that it
is any more exhaustible in one case than in another.
The hierarchy of transfinites thus corresponds to different
ways of deriving number from the indeterminate, or different
ways of dividing the continuum; but it leaves the reality of the
raw material forever continuous and indeterminate, which is the
Aristotelian definition of potential infinity. The philosopher
quarrels with the modern method not when it makes its rules
but when it mistakes these rules for reality. In line with the ap­
proaches suggested by Russell and Hilbert, the realist is driven
to admit the differences between the infinities of modern mathe­
matics, but he holds that they are logical and not real. Brouwer,
when he flattens the Cantonan hierarchy into one infinity and
calls it the indeterminate, is simply emphasizing what is real
rather than logical about mathematical infinity, and the reason
for his failure to capture the mind of present-day empiriological
temper is that his views do not permit method to control matter;
they do not recognize the status of empiriological method as that
of an art, in the language of Dewey, or that of a logic, in the
vocabulary of Russell. With Hilbert and Russell dedicated to
logic and Brouwer to content, the difference between the two
schools is more a matter of where emphasis is laid.
The denumerable or non-denumerable character of sets, as the
Cantorians employ these terms, has nothing to do with whether
a set is really infinite or not. In one case, a rule is known for
actually denumerating, in the other the enumeration remains
potential. The empiriological spirit is interested in formulas
rather than forms. When we have actually enumerated the first
trillion algebraic numbers, we are just as far removed from ex­
hausting the infinity as when starting, rulelessly, at the potential.
In fact, the continuum itself is a case of the confusion in mathe­
matics between rules and realities. Thus c is the mathematician’s
rule for representing real numbers and more specifically a rule

Mathematics and the Infinite

317

for illustrating their density. But the rule of the continuum must
be kept distinct from the reality that it represents.
Such reasoning as this tends to hack away at the bottom of
the Cantorian hierarchy which rests on the confusion of laws and
the entities which they govern, on the confusion of denumeration
and non-denumeration as dividing infinities among each other.
The number of algebraic numbers is indeterminate, and so is the
number of reals. Indeterminate cannot be compared with the in­
determinate; the comparison is only in rules for determination
which are different among themselves and leave in each case an
infinite margin of further determinability. Mathematical infinity
remains the potentially infinite; as act it is in the logical order.
There is no doubt that such schemes as Cantor constructs
and as Russell and Hilbert adopt are powerful aids to the im­
agination. The empiriological method, to control, needs matter,
composition, plurality. Its user cannot deal with the difference
between being and non-being, and thus the discrete character of
entities like numbers eludes his methods. So he fills up the gap
between numbers by infinity, the continuum, the potential,
thus feeding his imagination but starving his philosophy into a
purely logical skeleton. This has its value, like a skeleton in a
class of anatomy, but life and reality are something different.
In the top-heavy hierarchy that modern mathematical theory
has become in defining number, it is easy to forget the founda­
tions which are the series of natural integers that are taken as a
pattern in the correspondence of sets and that test whether a set
is denumerable. This series is best envisioned not by Cantor but
in Aristotle who viewed number as a complex of unities, varied
when a unit is added or subtracted. The fundamental thing about
number theory then, when its bases are philosophically stressed
and discovered to be the set of discrete numbers which is the
pattern for correspondence, is not the continuum of potency but
the unity of act. The continuum or the potential is something
secondary. It is known, like all potency, with reference to act.

318

Philosophical Physics

As Aquinas said, “the last thing we reach in knowledge is the
material”—the continuum which even Whitehead recognized
stands for potency while act or form appears in discreteness.
A distinction must be made here between determination out­
side the mind and inside of it. The quantity tt and even V2 are de­
terminate quantities; V2 multiplied by V2 yields 2, a very signifi­
cant and determinate number; and the relation between the
diameter and circumference of a circle is so determinate outside
the mind that it is called a constant. Such quantities are de­
terminate in themselves but indeterminate with regard to us
when we interpret reality arithmetically. This determination in
themselves shows that tt and V2 are not merely infinite decimals
pitching on a non-periodic sea, and the same conclusion could be
drawn about the difference between two integers which must
clearly be something more than an infinite line of fractions, since
each integer can be subjected to very definite arithmetical opera­
tions and must therefore be something very definite in itself.
Now any unity that stands in nature, a man, a sulfur atom,
or a sycamore tree is what it is as a formal unit, and the same is
true of unities called numbers in the mathematical order. But
men, atoms, and trees, standing undividedly, are yet divisible,
and as an earlier section showed, they can be divided not just once
but indefinitely as quantified things. The natural unities are
determined in themselves by their form, the determining element
in things; but they are indeterminate regarding their number of
divisions because they bear inside them an indefinitely divisible
material element.
Irrational numbers—transcendental and algebraic alike—thus
bear out what Aristotle said of the continuum where a thing is
undivided or determined in itself but always further divisible
and determinable. As undivided or determinate entities, more
densely sown in the field of number and more fundamental than
rationals, Cantorians say, these irrationals show that the most
ultimate of mathematical entities, even for modern theory, is not
the continuum by which their series is purportedly represented.

Mathematics and the Infinite

319

Transcendental and algébrales are thus units rather than af­
fairs of continuity, acts and not sheer potency.
Intuitionism, logicalism, and formalism, as philosophies of
mathematics, are all inadequate accounts, even when they are in­
spected internally. Intuitionism fails to account for form, for­
malism for matter, and logicalism tends at least to reduce one
to the other. Intuitionism is too inductive, logicalism and formal­
ism are too deductive. Neither radical induction nor radical
deduction can afford a realistic account of things, even in math­
ematics. Moreover, there are inconsistencies involved in each
of these schemes. Logicalism and formalism must use content, or
they would be studying a vacuum. Intuitionism uses form or it
would be studying a plenum. One extreme leads to the conclu­
sion that there are only relations, the other tends to view things as
irrelational. True science freezes away at either pole. Only a
world of act and potency can own that temperate climate which
avoids the errors of all extremes and makes a home for all truth.

Suggested Readings
Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, What is Mathematics? (New
York, 1941).
Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics, 2d ed. (New York,
1938).

10
Place: The Measure of Motion
LOCAL MOTION IS A FACT OF EXPERIENCE

This is a restless universe on many counts, but nowhere is the
traffic more apparent than in the passage of things from place
to place, the fact of local motion. In infancy, man is attracted
to things when they move, and as he matures to his status as a
perennial questioner, he is still fascinated by the problem of
motions in place. He is exploring the stars, improving means of
transportation, or perhaps simply sitting by the fireside as the
flames leap up through the chimney. Where is one of the pro­
verbial five w’s that command the descriptive approaches to reality
like history, journalism, and even the empiriological disciplines.
In knowledge, things are often distinguished or united according
to the place or places which they occupy; in action, for example
in walking, man is always going someplace. As Aristotle re­
marked, a chimera is recognized as unreal because it is nowhere.
Local movement is one of the few realities whose acceptance
escaped into the modern mind when the philosophical science of
nature was surrounded by empiriological physics and left to die
as a prisoner of the middle ages. The universe in Cartesian phys­
ics was one of quantity and local motion, and the twentieth­
century intellectual is still insisting that he lives in it. When the
quantum physicists sets out to picture the world entirely in terms
of positions and velocities, or when the theorist of relativity re­
ports that the universe is nothing but space and time, each in his
own way is carrying out the terms of the Cartesian will. Both
views are inadequate. But they at least bear their witness to the
320

Place: The Measure of Motion

321

reality of local motion. The philosophical science of nature is
pressed today not so much to establish the fact of local motion; it
is more to establish that local motion is not everything.
Contemporary scholarship is much more focused on space than
on place. This reverses the order of importance and degree of
being which these two realities are assigned in philosophical
physics. Indeed, the treatment of space belongs much more to
mathematics than to the philosophical science of nature because
it is an affair of dimensionality; it is a weak reality in the physical
world, founded there truly enough but blown into the entity that
we call space by the abstracting mind. An alien in the purely
mathematical world, the philosopher of nature can consider such
things as dimensions not in themselves but only as incarnated in
the mobile universe whose career he follows. In the light of mo­
tion, he may, in fact he must, evaluate such challenges as the
non-Euclidian world of relativity theory and the n-dimensional
space of quantum mechanics. He must likewise face honestly
up to the problem of the all-pervading ether of space which
classical physics posited, the theory of special relativity rejects,
and the theory of general relativity, under a new guise, reinstates.
But before such vital contemporary problems are confronted,
premises must be wrested from an inductive analysis of local
motion.
The empiriological physicist classifies by measuring. He does
not delve into what things are, and he measures reality by yard­
sticks, not by itself. Instead of getting down to the bedrock of
motion by diving into the stream, he counts dead fishes on the
bank. The philosophical science of nature, on the other hand,
wants to know what place is. It is only in the light of motion that
place can be studied in philosophical physics and only in this
light also that the reaches of place in the physical, natural, mobile
world can be scanned.
After a preliminary definition of place, its nature will be more
fully probed. This requires a decision on whether place is rela­
tive, and if it is not, how it functions as a final cause which yields

'i'2.2

Philosophical Physics

a finer and more scientific definition of place. In connection with
the problem of place appear the questions whether nature toler­
ates a vacuum or is always a plenum, and if it is a plenum,
whether it is infinite. The problem of infinity prompts the ques­
tion, whether the universe as a whole is in place.
Space can then be discussed, and here likewise there are im­
portant questions: Is space a full-blooded physical reality? Or
is it an a priori mental form, as Kant held? If it is in some way
physical and real, is space non-Euclidian or Euclidian?
PLACE IS AN IMMOBILITY IN THE MOBILE WORLD

Place, (or position, in a language that is more mathematical)
is the reality that answers to the question: where? This, at
least, is what the ordinary man means when he uses the word.
The answer to the question might be the name of a city, or a
street, the number of a hotel room, or a jewelry box on a chest
of drawers. It might even be a planet, if the question is on the
origin of light rays, or a continent, if we are discussing geo­
politics. But the common factor in all such answers would be their
relation to the question: where?
The ordinary man thinks of place as a kind of vessel or con­
tainer, and for a thing to be in its proper place is to be in its
proper surroundings. Moreover, at the level of common sense,
place is considered as something stationary. Home is always on
the same street, and New York City is always at the same longi­
tude and latitude. But if place is stationary for the plain man, it is
nevertheless known from motion. When he looks at the map to
discover the whereabouts of the China sea, he imagines himself
as capable of going there. Without motion as joining two posi­
tions, place would be a meaningless thing. Even the mathema­
tician discerns this fact, choosing for example to illustrate a line
as a trajectory of a moving point or a solid as the trajectory of a
moving plane. It is good teaching technique because the ordinary
mind hooks up position with motion and grasps one better by its
reference to the other.

Place: The Measure of Motion

323

But philosophy would be easy if it could be sublet to the views
of common sense. Can the fact of place be more rigorously de­
tailed? As a first approximation, it might be said again that this
is not a Heraclitean universe. Though matter is always astir,
there is a real immobile aspect to every motion, or the motion
itself could never be and be discerned. There is a norm for
measuring motion, not a numerical yardstick or a speedometer
but simply an objective standard according to which a thing is
said to move and indeed to move from this place to that. 1 his
norm is not anthropomorphic and subjective. If it is not real,
neither is the motion. There must indeed be two immobilities to
account for the origin of motion as different from its end. In
other words, the standard is differentiated, as a foot rule that
has two ends.
Such in general is the answer to whether place exists. It is
an immobility in this rough definition, according to which motion
occurs. More specifically, it is an immobility at which motion
ends or, for our present purposes, where it begins. Unless this
immobility is real in the outer order, the differences of origin
and end would also be unreal and unknowable; if motion involves
such differences, and they turn out to be unreal, motion likewise
becomes impossible.
Aristotle likened place to a vase, and it is tempting to pursue
the metaphor while forgetting along the way that it is only a
convenient example. Water, gasoline, or orange juice can be
poured into the vessel, and it can also be filled up with air.
Obviously then, the place is distinct from the things that occupy
it, called locata, if only because places remain the same while
locata come and go. If place is not something distinct from mat­
ter or, what amounts to the same impasse, if a body as its own
place, then a moving thing would have to cart its place along with
it, and the movement from place to place that we define as local
motion would become impossible. A similar absurdity would re­
sult if place itself were posited within another place, and so ad
infinitum. There would thus be no immobility, and motion would

324

Philosophical Physics

be siphoned off again into the indeterminacy of the infinite flow.
A body could not move from place to place if everything were
fluid. There is an ultimate immobility involved in each new posi­
tion that a body occupies; there are many immobilities because
there are many places to which a body moves.
When water is poured into the Aristotelian vase, the vessel
is a container. Thus the definition of place, unraveled as it is
from the fact of local motion, may be extended to mean “sur­
rounding immobility.” Moreover, the outer portions of the vase,
the handles, the ornaments, and even the exterior parts of the
walls, do not touch the water. Only the interior surface of the
container is in contact with the contents. This fact must likewise
be legislated into the definition, so that place may be fully and
formally defined as “the immediate, immobile surface of a sur­
rounding body.”
The use of such terms as “immobility” and especially of “sur­
face” lend, at first sight, a mathematical strand to the definition.
But mathematical place, which empiriological physics borrows
and applies, is something different from physical place. In geom­
etry, quantities are located in terms of points, and since a point is
a unity having position, there is no difference between a point
and the position which it occupies. Changing the position means
changing the point. In the proper sense of the word, there is no
such thing as motion in mathematics, even the motion of points,
lines, and planes. The physical definition, on the other hand, is
drawn from the analysis of motion which is really all that mat­
ters in the science of nature. “Immobility” and “surface” are
known with respect to motion, as its opposites, with local mo­
tion indeed etching out our concept of place in much the same
way that changes of form thrust upon us the conclusion that there
must be a primordial matter.
The physical definition may now be shown to involve five facts
about place, all of which team up to carry its complete meaning.
Place is immediate; it is immobile; it is a surface; it is something
surrounding; it is of a surrounding body.

Place: The Measure of Motion

325

1. Place is an immediate or first surface since every body when
at rest is immediately in place and not just suspended by its
bootstraps. A book in a study is in the given room, but this
is only its larger or general place. More properly, it is on a
particular shelf, but most properly it is in the place dimen­
sioned by the surfaces of the two books along side of it and
of the air around the remaining portions. A body that is not
immediately in place is in motion, like a toy balloon, floating
freely in a room until it immediately touches a surface where
it stops.
2. Place is immobile, since this is not a Heraclitean universe.
3. Place is a surface only; were it a body there would be a compenetration between a thing and its place.
4. Place is a surrounding reality since a thing moving locally
changes with respect to its environing relations only and does
not alter its inner constitution.
5. The surrounding thing must be a body. A spirit, having no
parts like right or left, up or down, cannot bound anything,
and a purely mathematical surface is an ideal, mentally de­
tached from the physical country and incapable of containing
its population.
RELATIVITY DOES NOT REFUTE ARISTOTLE’S PHILOSOPHY

Aristotle was much more minute in his account of place, but be­
fore he can be followed, the general contours of his universe
must be outlined. His astronomy was a geocentric system, with
the earth, at least at its center, pictured as immobile. Around
this geocentric axis, the heavenly bodies circled in concentric
spheres, and with the earth thus firmly anchored, up and down,
owned something of an absolute significance. Indeed, once an
immobile reference point was gained, it became possible at least
in theory to specify the absolute positions of all other bodies.
Copernicus replaced geocentric astronomy by a heliocentric
system, but despite this new astronomy, it did not seem necessary
to scrap the notion of absolute place. The stationary reference

326

Philosophical Physics

point was simply shifted from the earth to the sun. Moreover,
there arose the field physics of the nineteenth century, chiefly as
the result of Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. Lorentz black­
ened the silhouette of the ether, an imponderable substance per­
vading all space and acting as a carrier of light. It was another
vote for the absolute. The earth could move with respect to the
sun, and the sun, as astronomy had shown, was swinging also by
reference to the Milky Way. But this did not stop the music of
classical physics. There was after all the ether to pipe it on—an
immobile reality for tracing out absolute positions in the absolute.
Then came the Michelson-Morley experiment that stirred a
revolution in empiriological physics as great as the noise of the
Copernican victory over Ptolemy. A thoroughgoing classical
physicist, standing atop the earth and measuring the velocity of
sunlight—once when the earth was spinning away from the sun
and again when it was spinning toward it—would have expected
the composite velocities to be different. After all, was it not a
simple matter to show that, in a railroad car moving forward at
20 miles per hour, a man walking toward the rear at the rate of
5 miles per hour would be moving forward at a combined velocity
of 15 miles per hour? If he were walking toward the engine at
5 miles per hour, his combined forward motion would be at the
rate of 25 miles per hour. A corresponding difference would have
been expected on classical principles in the two measurements
of Michelson and Morley, if the earth were really drifting
through a stationary ether. But the difference was not observed.
And the experiment, while rocking the leaning tower of classical
physics was also rocking the cradle of the theory of relativity.
What Michelson and Morley showed, Einstein reasoned, was
that the ether, this vast immobile receptacle of matter and energy,
was not observable. If it were, then it would have been the norm
to referee the composition of velocities in the Michelson-Morley
experiment—just as motion, with respect to an earth considered
immobile, justifies the classical conclusions about a man walking
either forward or backward in the train. There is thus, Einstein

Place: The Measure of Motion

327

went on, no detectable immobility, no absolute frame for compar­
ing motions and measuring positions in the universe. It may well
be said that the train is moving relative to the earth and the earth
relative to the sun. But since there is no absolute arbiter of
motion and place, it could also be said that the earth is moving
relative to the train and the sun relative to the earth. Motion
and place, lacking an absolute character, are always yoked to
a relative frame of reference. This is the meaning of the theory
of relativity.
Local movement thus becomes an affair of relation and gives
primacy to neither of the terms. Ptolemy can arise from his
tomb and live again with Copernicus. It can be said that the
earth is moving relative to the sun or vice versa, depending on
the observer’s point of view or, more technically, his frame of
reference.
Relativity will be more fully assessed in connection with the
character of space and the reality of the ether. But for the
moment, it is important to see if the weight of all these facts
will break the Aristotelian scales. Place, it was said, involves
the stationary, and since there are many places, there must be
many immobilities in the mobile universe. But the failure to
measure immobility does not argue to its non-existence.
Does this mean that the ether or some other such Atlas of
the world must be reinstated? No, it simply means that measure­
ment cannot touch any of the ultimates and hence cannot gain a
hold on whatever might be involved by motion in the way of ul­
timate imobility. In quantum mechanics, the position and veloc­
ity of small particles cannot be exactly measured when considered
simultaneously. But despite the pleas of scientism, this does not
mean that particles have no position or have indeterminate ones.
To affirm that a position cannot be exactly measured and to
state that it does not exist is to say two very different things.
Positionless particles on the level of atoms could no more give
rise to positioned bodies like the rock of Gilbraltar than a house
can be built by simply laying vacuums on top of each other.

328

Philosophical Physics

Whether in the Aristotelian, Copernican, Einsteinian, or quan­
tum systems, the two terms of motion are somehow immobile or
the motion is an absurdity staggering from nowhere to nowhere,
hence not motion at all.
7 he mathematics of Einstein show that he cannot adopt the
Heraclitean viewpoint in practice. The relation of a thing to its
specific frame of reference is, as a relation, absolute; and when
one frame of reference is in motion with respect to another, defi­
nite equations exist for relating them. The theory of relativity
seeks to relativize the absolute but ends by absolutizing the
relative. From all this it may be concluded that with the ether
or without it, in ancient or in modern astronomy, motion still
involves the stationary which is not simply projected by man but
is as real as the motion itself.
PLACE IS THE TERM OF LOCAL MOVEMENT

Burning paper does not mean burning the fireplace. The cor­
recting of Aristotle “the empiriological physicist” does not neces­
sarily mean the demise of Aristotle the philosopher, just as the
decline of Newtonian physics does not mark the end of the
broader methods that he used, especially the principle of inertia.
The difficulty with Aristotle’s notion of absolute place was that a
geocentric immobility was unobservable. It was too mechanical
in the first place, like the ether hypothesis, and stood at variance
with the broader spirit of Aristotelian science of nature. Im­
mobility is specified by motion. But what specifies the im­
mobility? It cannot be said that a thing is immobile absolutely
except by reference to an absolute, and how can the absolute be
defined in the sensible universe except by reference to another
motion. In Aristotle’s doctrine of absolute place, there is too
much of an appeal to the imagination which intelligence should
have picketed. Place is always elusive to define because the im­
agination insists on legislating the definition. There is nothing
absolute about a sensible picture, but there is something very
definitely ultimate about the immobilities which local motion

Place: The Measure of Motion

329

implies since a moving thing, far from carrying its place on its
back, takes up a new position leaving the old one behind. Such
immobilities can be understood but not imaged, discovered by
abstraction to exist but not of the stuff for quantitative tech­
niques to measure.
Does this mean that Einstein was right in turning local move­
ment into a relationship rather than leaving it a truly dynamic
event where one term is stationary and where motion takes place
with respect to it? When A, apparently, moves to B can it just
as legitimately be said that B moves toward A? From the view­
point of quantitative measures, Einstein is certainly right since
the empiriological physicist simply lays his rulers on the stretch
which a motion covers, without the power to detect its principles
and purposes. In deciding that a stone is 18 inches thick, it makes
no difference whether one begins at 36 inches on a yardstick and
counts downward to 18 or begins at 0 and counts upward.
Origins and ends, causes and effects, objective order and cosmic
purpose—all of these as such involve more light than empirio­
logical physics can ever form by using shadows. What is not
synonymous with the question how much, as any salesman
knows.
Place is in fact a kind of end or purpose, and it is in this light
that Aristotle, refusing like the modern physicist to forsake mo­
tion for quantity, defined place as “the term of local movement,”
since the water is certainly in the kettle before it boils out into
space.
Psychologically speaking, a place is known more as a term
than as an origin, and it is not until a thing starts moving that
we know it was present in place beforehand. Prior to knowing
where a thing came from in local movement, we know where it is
going, and by reason alone, it cannot be established that move­
ment had a beginning in time at ah. Change is always christened
by its term; there is a going or coming, rising or falling, analysis
when compounds are broken down into elements, or synthesis
when elements are built up into compounds. The term of local

330

Philosophical Physics

movement, at least psychologically, enjoys a primacy over the
origin which is known, when known, more as an afterthought, as
potency is known by reference to act.
This ascendency of term over origin in our knowledge of
local motion holds true likewise in the physical order where
local movement is the actualization of potencies in the order of
place, and where the net result is a higher, nobler, and richer
reality than the status of mere potency had provided. Final
causality or purpose belongs to other chapters, but there is some­
thing of matter’s eternal striving that enters into the philosophy
of place. The actual local motion in the world and the tendency
to be moved elsewhere that stamps a body when at rest are but
an index of the searching by mobile realities for places that ful­
fill their destinies and are thus connatural.
A billiard ball, for instance, when struck by its neighbor
moves to a different position on the table. Charged by the impact
with a tension that demands response, movement to another posi­
tion is the best expression of its nature. A ball of a different ma­
terial, say rubber, would move differently, satisfying its nature, to
borrow a phrase from Whitehead, and a ball of lead would per­
haps not move at all. Movement toward an end, the end set by the
nature of what is moved and different from one nature to another,
is the only way in which local movement can be explained.
Things tend to their natural places, to spots in the world of
motion that most befit their stimulated natures. The empirio­
logical ambition of replacing this finalizing role of place by the
blind discharge of mere mechanical energy received wholly from
the outside was confronted in Chapters 7 and 8.
The finalizing character of place might also be presented by
taking Aristotle’s suggestion that place has a conservative as­
pect. The arrow, shot from a bow, arches in time to rest in
order to conserve its nature, its identity, and its being, which
an infinite flight would wholly spend. The arrow could be en­
visioned, to use a homely metaphor, as trying to shake off its
disturbances and come to equilibrium. By contrast to unending

Place: The Measure of Motion

331

motion or to rest in the sky which would require potencies that
the arrow does not own, the descent to the earth is the most con­
natural to this husbandry of resources.
If this sounds anthropomorphic, an analogy may be framed
from empiriological physics which rests so heavily on two tenets
from thermodynamics, the law of the conservation of matter and
energy and the law of entropy, that energy is constantly de­
graded. Both laws apply to the same bodies, the one expressing
conservation, the other a dynamism toward destruction. Place
points up the first force and motion the second in this analogy.
A thing moves toward a place, Aristotle said, by the tendency to
conserve itself. Banished from one home, like a dime dropped
accidentally on the floor, a thing seeks a place that is most con­
natural to it. It might have to buck opposing bodies like a plane
in a storm or like the money when it meets up with the unyield­
ing surface of the floor and bounces off into a corner. But it will
choose the path of least resistance, to use an empiriological term;
it will conserve itself, as Aristotle said, acquitting its nature,
searching for ends that the nature sets, moved always by an out­
side agent but moved none the less on its own terms.
Such conservation is an expression of the nature in mobile
realities and the tendency to the fulfillment of the nature’s
destiny. That is why it involves final causality. But no such
mobile being fully attains its natural place since it always has
further potencies and tends, as long as it exists, to move toward
their fulfillment. If it ever attained a wholly connatural habitat,
it would no longer tend to move and would have completed the
mission of its existence. This is not to say that the places of things
presently occupied are unnatural, any more than a man is not a
man when he has not yet attained perfection. In this interacting
network of the mobile universe, the places which things have
attained are what their natures order under the circumstances.
They are natural places in a very genuine sense. But there is a
tendency to march onward toward that which is even more
natural, as an apple partially red tends to ripen further. There

332

Philosophical Physics

is no equilibrium so long as this supremely natural summit re­
mains unsealed. The arrow, at rest after its parabolic flight from
the bow, still retains its natural tendency to be moved and will
show it when another mover comes along to set it going. Matter,
like man, is always restless.
Einstein, when he defined place as an affair of relation, and
Aristotle, when he dubbed it “the term of local movement,” were
adverting to two different notions of place. The relativistic ac­
count is a snapshot of mathematical place (space) which is
copied by empiriological physics. Aristotle, the philosophical
scientist of nature, was loyal to his mobile subject. He spoke of
natural place, as that which is in accordance with the nature of a
thing and realizes its fullness. In more contemporary lingo, he
defined the ideal case that makes other places natural to a thing
as progressive approximations, like a tadpole stage which is nat­
ural in the development of a frog. A nature is most conservative
when it attains its fullness because it has more act and inward­
ness to itself and less potency for an exterior agent to rule by
actualizing.
Place, as the term of local movement, gives it directionality and
does not permit it to be defined as a relation in which a car can
be said to move with respect to the street, or the street with re­
spect to the car. The purpose of local movement is the term, and
direction is known not from yardsticks or frames of reference
outside the moving natures but from their tendencies and goals.
A meteor flying through space, water cascading down a moun­
tain slope, or the molecules of oxygen dancing in the atmosphere
of the earth have tendencies that motion is only fulfilling. Water
is tending down the mountain and not the mountain up the
water because the water by its motion attains a greater degree of
perfection which is its end. It can drive ships, put out fires, and
quench thirsts. It is the natural tendency of air in a punctured
tire to escape through the aperture, and it is the natural tendency
of dust, swirling in the wind, to settle down to earth again when
the wind subsides. If the notion of nature is correct, things tend

Place: The Measure of Motion

333

to conserve and fulfill their natures, before they embellish the
universe as a whole. This statement would have to be qualified
in order to distinguish in an individual thing its tendencies as a
particular and as a member of the cosmic community. But for
present purposes what has been said is accurate enough. For it
is only as an aggregate of natures individualized that the uni­
verse has any being. It has no nature itself because it is not one
substance.
Now Einstein starts with the cosmic dimensions of the uni­
verse in the attempt to anchor a frame of reference. Because
Aristotle is concerned with individual natures, the seats of inner
tendencies that are not simply the products of external relations,
his philosophy parts company with empiriological ambitions and
his doctrine of place with that of Einstein. It is these inner or
natural tendencies that are accountable for local movement
which, in turn, is their fulfillment. The discharge of this obli­
gation to be moved is, in the order of place, local motion, and
the purpose is to acquire new assets in nature’s treasury which
are more connatural places. An electron tends toward an atom
that has become a negative ion because the electron is more
potential and hence impoverished. The electron is the ontological
starveling. Apart from other forces such as the random collisions
of particles, it is not the ion that tends toward the electron. The
falling snowflake tends toward the roof—rather than the roof
toward the snow—because it is less stable and permanent, less
independent and commanding than the tile. The Water of the
mountain spate, drawn perhaps from the sea into the clouds and
then deposited in the winter snow, is more potential than its
mountain bed which has been there for centuries and has chan­
nelled countless thaws that have preceded this. It is nature and
not quantity, interiorities and not aggregates, principles, and not
mechanisms that the philosophy of nature is primarily after, and
the directionality of natural motion, completely baffling to mathe­
matics, will yield its secrets when the mind knows the combina­
tion of natures, tendencies, and terms which opens the lock.

334

Philosophical Physics

This is all beyond images and beneath the mechanical aspect
of matter on which one can lay a finger and focus the eye. In­
telligence discerns that there are places in nature, and that far
from being a mere matter of relations which relativity experts
can juggle, local movement in nature expresses the tendencies in
natural realities to move to places more connatural. Such a doc­
trine does not require that there be any such thing as a stationary
body in the mechanical sense but only that there is a hierarchy in
motion or, in the picturesque language of a Santayana “degrees
of permanence.” On such a premise, all things can still be in
motion without giving the palm to Heraclitus. Immobility does
not involve the stationary of a mechanical sort in the world of
place any more than form is a fixed frame like that of a picture
we see and feel. Philosophy is the child of intelligence, and if
imagination can lay hold of its conclusions, it is a sure sign that
philosophy is false to its promise of probing what is ultimate.
Scientism is simply looking for final answers in the wrong places,
like an explorer who would search for an orange grove in the
arctic circle.
A VACUUM IS IMPOSSIBLE

No one who has gazed out at the starry heavens can help wonder­
ing about interstellar spaces. Is the universe a massive solid, or
is it, as Sir Arthur Eddington declared, largely empty space? Is
the universe a plenum, and if so, how can motion occur in it?
If it is pocked by empty spaces, how can light, for instance,
travel through them? The answers to such questions will try the
case for the existence of a vacuum and later hear the supreme
court of modern empiriological physics with its opinions about
space.
The early Greek atomists, whose chief spokesman was Democ­
ritus, held that vacuums existed as the interstices between their
atoms and that a vacuum surrounded the world. A vacuum can
be defined as an empty place, a place without a body. As such,
it was not only a fact for Democritus in explaining the separation

Place: The Measure of Motion

335

of atoms and their motions from point to point, but it has also
been the ambition of modern empiriological physics, especially in
its prerelativity estate. Freshman empiriological physicists perform
the experiment of pumping the air out of a bell jar, and they
hear frequently of the velocity of light or the forces between elec­
trodes, in vacuo. Electronics has transcribed the expression vac­
uum tube into common language.
It might sound like a verbalism to declare to the empiriological
physicist that no matter how strong he makes his bell jar to resist
the atmospheric pressure from without, if nothing separates the
walls, they are not separated. This has sometimes led philosophers
to distinguish a physical vacuum which the empiriological physi­
cist tries to achieve and a so-called metaphysical vacuum which
is said to be impossible. But if the philosophical physicist sticks to
his last of nature, he can show from motion that even in the
physical order a vacuum cannot exist.
On the premises of empiriological physics, electromagnetic en­
ergy, like light or electrons, would move with an infinite velocity
through a so-called vacuum since there would be no resistance in
their paths. Rate in a moving body—acceleration and retardation
—is established for empiriological physics by the impact deliv­
ered to a thing and by the medium in which it moves. If a thing
were traveling through a vacuum which is no medium, its own
initial energies would propel it to its goal in an instant. More­
over, everything would move through a vacuum with an equal
velocity.
Such would be an ad hominem argument against scientism,
but philosophically speaking, this analysis is inadmissible. Every­
thing moved is moved, at every moment of its motion, by some­
thing else. “Whatever is moved,” the principle goes, “is moved
by another.” On such a premise, once the initial mover has
ceased moving a body the medium does the rest, facilitating mo­
tion rather than simply impeding it. If this is true, no motion
could occur in a vacuum since a vacuous medium is not a medium
and hence not a mover. Motion would collapse in a vacuum.

336

Philosophical Physics

Moreover, and in still a philosophical sense, local motion is
the result of the fact that a body is first in a less natural place
and tends toward its natural home. But a vacuum would not
allow such a hierarchy. Far from attracting a thing as an end,
it is totally indifferent, and having no parts, there is no reason
why a thing should rest in one region of it rather than another
nor why, if the thing continues on through, like a ray of light,
it should have taken this or that path. A body at rest in a vacuum
would be coterminous with it, a reality and a vacuum, something
and nothing simultaneously. Leibniz was right in his famous
maxim that nature shrinks from a vacuum. A vacuum would
still motion and crush the nature that would enter it. It is thus
not a place, nor can a body in place be said to occupy a vacuum.
Place is the immediate, immobile surface of a surrounding body.
It is something external, a fixed frame that a thing abandons in
local motion to seek a station more fitting for its nature. Even
granting that a thing should occupy a vacuum, as its place, and
move to another vacuum or another part of one, local motion
would produce no changes since the thing moved, at the end of
its trajectory would be where it was before—in a vacuum.
But if it is easy to deny the existence of a vacuum, the denial
does not explain the reality of a highly evacuated bell jar nor
the more striking reality of apparent emptiness in the nocturnal
sky. Classical empiriological physics pumped these areas full of
all-pervading ether, and philosophy, to preserve the notion of
place as an immediate surface, jumped at the idea also. But apart
from the Michelson-Morley experiment, the ether ought to have
signed only a very uneasy peace with the philosopher. If it per­
mits a moving body to bite through it, it has to be elastic; if it
holds things in their places, it has no “give” at all. In fact, it
comes perilously close to a contradiction since it would have to
be as resilient as rubber and as rigid as steel simultaneously. As
an immobile reality, it was certainly contrary to Aquinas' idea
that matter is ever tense with tendencies to motion and to his
broader idea of finality in the universe. The ether idea seems

Place: The Measure of Motion

337

dead now, and no one ought really to mourn it except those who
wish to think with their imaginations.
In the wake of the Michelson-Morley experiment, the theory
of special relativity which applies to uniform, translatory motion
—say motion in a straight line—dispensed with the ether as un­
observable. But in the theory of general relativity, which applies
to non-uniform rotary motion, the ether comes vigorously back to
blanket not only the interstices of matter but the whole corporeal
universe.
This analysis, however, is not quite correct, since it is a mis­
take to give the same name to the classical ether which the theory
of restricted relativity impugned and the new ether which the
theory of general relativity introduces. Ether in this second sense
is really the pseudonym for the whole universe which Einstein
views as an all-embracing field of energy, thick where there is
matter in the classical sense and thin where there is not. Matter
and energy become equivalent in general relativity. The inter­
stellar gravitational field which classical physics held to be pro­
duced by celestial bodies is found to be of the same massive stuff
as the Newtonian stars. A field can be “weighed.” It has “iner­
tia.” It can do work. It can guide even light rays like a river bed
containing its water. The experiments confirming the theory in
astronomy are too intricate to be discussed here. But though these
experiments are few in number, every single one of them votes
for Einstein. The release of atomic energy with corresponding
changes in atomic mass has lowered the evidence of relativity
from the stars into commercial laboratories and even into inter­
national diplomacy. This new ether of general relativity is in­
deed a powerful brush for the empiriological physicist in paint­
ing his world-picture.
In the generalized theory of gravitation, Einstein attempts, as
others have done, to construct a more unified field theory that
explains gravitation and electromagnetism in the same four­
dimensional space-time continuum of non-Euclidian geometry.
Einstein is again struggling toward what is potential in matter,

338

Philosophical Physics

what is beyond the differences of gravitation and electromagnet­
ism and thus affords a richer field for man to exploit in his
universe-building. The field of the generalized theory of gravi­
tation, besides being more fundamental and more contentless
than the field of the older relativity mechanics, is another argu­
ment for the universe as a plenum. Unfortunately, Einstein
cannot suggest the physical analogues to his calculus that could
put his new theory to crucial test; but if the future runs true to
form, such tests are likely to be devised or some new field theory
will be propounded that will transcend quantum and relativity
physics toward a view of the world as more potential and con­
tinuous than our present empiriological picture makes it to be.
No realistic philosophical physicist need fear the advance of
empiriological physics. He should be the first to encourage it
since new data mean new insights, more facts, and subtler analo­
gies the better to depict and also to deepen those timeless truths
which are the life of philosophy and without which even empir­
iological physics in practice would be nothing but its own fu­
neral. In the ether-field, where energy is but a diluted form of
matter and where it is allowable to caff an interstice of matter a
material thing, mobile like other bodies, the traditional notion of
place as an immediate surface is reinforced. There is no reason
to posit the classical ether, out of apparently a priori gratuity, as
an immobile backdrop for position and motion. The volume be­
tween the heavenly bodies and the volume in a highly evacuated
vessel are material.
Relativity physics, philosophically interpreted, is a hint that
the universe is a plenum, and Aristotelian physics on this point,
rejected in Galileo and Newton, is retrieved in Einstein. It is true
that there is danger, a grave one indeed, incurred by such reason­
ing as this. An empiriological theory can never graduate into the
status of a fact. But if relativity is ever abandoned,—and its life
expectancy may not be very great—its successor must contain an
analogue to its ether and to its equation of matter and energy;
and where the new theory carves out its successes, philosophy

Place: The Measure of Motion

339

will fall heir to better analogues to express itself and will gain a
better inventory of its own timeless riches.
The universe, as a plenum, might at first sight seem to clamp
an embargo on all local motion. This was the reasoning of the
early Greek atomists which led them to fill nature with holes so
that a body would have a place to move. It is the reasoning also
in the hidden cloakrooms where the law of inertia was prepared
for adoption by empiriological physics. As especially clear from
Galilean-Newtonian physics, motion is slowed down and then
stopped by the resistances that it meets, so that its cause is really
the removal of restraint. Motion on this view becomes more and
more perfect as its environment becomes more and more evacu­
ated. The ideal motion would be born of a vacuum.
But with the meaning of nature ever paving his path, the real­
ist can show how the universe is full and yet permits, even de­
mands, that constant local motion of its members which expe­
rience reveals. Motion is not the product of a physical vacuum,
spreading out ahead of the thing moved, nor is it the mechanical
sum of the outside agents that we call efficient causes. The mov­
ing thing, a nature, contributes something of its own. It is an
original, spontaneous thing, endowed with inner tension, and it
is this spontaneity that upsets the balance which a plenum would
apparently be and moves firmly and smoothly to its goals. A na­
ture is beset with inner tendencies to move; hence its motions are
natural, and not simply mechanical like stresses and strains. Far
from abetting a nature’s movement, a vacuum would block it. A
nature tends to a connatural place. Far from being a barrier to
local movement, a plenum is its requirement.
THE UNIVERSE AS A WHOLE IS OF FINITE EXTENT

Let the case rest here that the parts of the universe, natures indi­
vidualized, are in place. But what about the universe as a whole?
The earth is moving relative to the sun, and the sun is moving
relative to the Milky Way. Astronomy gives evidence that the
Galaxy in turn is also swinging about a distant center. Is it pos-

340

Philosophical Physics

sible that the entire universe, of which our solar system is only a
small cross section, may be flying through space with a speed un­
calculated and a destiny unknown? Such a question pivots on
the problem of whether the universe is infinite in extent. If there
is any issue that threads through all of these chapters, it is that of
infinity. Gazing out into the vast expanses that astronomy ex­
plores, the mind cannot help asking if it ever comes to an end.
Sir James Jeans had a simple answer to this question. The
heavens are not a solid canopy of stars, and the blank spaces show
that there is nothing beyond them to shine through. But looks,
especially in the philosophy of nature, are not the final court of
appeal. Even if they were it could be asked if there were stars be­
yond the blanks whose light has not yet arrived upon the earth.
George Gamow, another astrophysicist, writes that “our space
seems to be infinite and rapidly expanding into infinity.” An infi­
nite that is becoming more infinite! Such an analysis shows again
the dark and confusing clouds that hang over the modern mean­
ing of infinity.
By using a principle which acoustics calls the Doppler effect
and which, alongside a railroad track, is observed as the drop in
pitch of a train whistle as the engine speeds by, astronomy
showed that the distant stars are apparently receding to an even
greater distance from the earth. The “pitch” in their radiation
was observed to be dropping, shifting from the short-wave or
violet.end of the visible spectrum toward the longer waves in the
red. The apparent fact of an “expanding universe” has been fur­
ther investigated by Edwin Hubble. Indeed, it has become cus­
tomary in astronomy to speak no longer of a single universe but
of “island universes,” of which our galactic system, where census
figures estimate there are 40 billion stars, is only a single example.
The neighboring islands appear as spiral nebulae, as curling
clouds of flaming gas. It turns out, however, that the apparent
nebulae of stardust are really extragalactic systems of stars. Hub­
ble’s telescope, clocking their motion, makes it seem that the socalled nebulae which are farthest away from us are flying out­

Place: The Measure of Motion

341

ward not only at a constant speed but ever faster and faster as
they go. There are many problems raised by Hubble’s theory, es­
pecially in connection with the theory of relativity, and astron­
omers are asking their new 200-inch telescope at Palomar, Cali­
fornia, to search the skies for the answers.
That the extent of the universe is finite can be wrung from
premises in the foregoing chapters, and its unity can be better
argued on the platform of final causality. This question of exten­
sive infinity must be solved by reference not directly to quantity
but primarily to motion, to natures. If monism is routed by the
reasoning in Chapter 6, then it is already established that the
universe is not a single substance, and the problem tapers down
to deciding whether there is an infinite multitude of distinct ma­
terial substances, stretching one after the other without end.
It should also be affirmed that if one body in the universe is
finite in extension, then every other body must be finite. For sup­
posing that another body outside the finite reality were infinite,
it would overlap the smaller body by its very infinity and hence
the finite body could not exist. In general, if there are natures in
the world, terminated by form and thus United, the universe is
not infinite in extension since it would thus become an infinite
series, actually existing.
In a more particular way, if Chapter 4 has established that
there is no infinity in the direction of the small, where it is a
question of division, neither can there be an infinity in the direc­
tion of the large, where it is a matter of a sum. It is by dividing
matter that units are won for the addition, and there is no infinite
multitude of bodies stretching out into space if division can still
free new unities to be added to the sum. Infinity is truly infinite,
that to which nothing new can be added. A proton, emancipated
from an atom, would have no place to move in an infinitely popu­
lated world and would thus be immobile. For all the seats in the
theatre of the world would be already taken by the all-embracing
block of the infinite. If there is an infinite multitude of bodies in
the universe, making for its infinite expanse, then the bodies

342

Philosophical Physics

themselves must be infinitely divisible and even divided in order
to account for the infinite series.
A universe of infinite extent would abolish the reality of dis­
tinct places, and the mobile beings of our experience would for­
ever be at a standstill. Places would perish in the infinite extent
because there would be no immediacy of surface; all would be
mediate. And local movement without place is unthinkable. In­
deed, a finite nature, attempting to move on the premises of em­
piriological physics would have to dislodge infinity in order to
realize its tendencies or, to put it in another way, an infinity
would resist its movement. To say it simply but profoundly in
Aristotle’s words, if a thing is in place, it is somewhere; and if it
is somewhere, then the universe is not infinite in its astronomical
tent.
There is another avenue for the philosophy of nature to ap­
proach this problem. There are opposite tendencies in the world,
for example the upward tendency of smoke and the downward
tendency of a leaf shaken loose from a tree. There is a constant
tension upward, or the universe would be crushed; and a con­
stant downward directivity in nature or the universe would ex­
plode. The same fact of opposite tendencies in the order of local
movement turns up in the other two dimensions, let us say longi­
tude and latitude, showing that the universe is not simply uni­
linear and univalent in its tendencies but diversified and multi­
directional. Far from setting off a fuze of infinity that would
burn onward and outward in a boundless reality, motion is like
a comeback ball or an echo bouncing backward after striking a
cliff. Motion achieves something definite; it is not absorbed into
an infinite sponge. Resistance does not tell the whole story of
motion, but it is certainly a big chapter in its biography. Indeed,
empiriological physics ought to be the last to deny it.
Extensive infinity, on the other hand, would be unidirectional
and indeterminate. It could not be divided locally into up and
down or sidewise since it admits of no centers, no definitions, no
determinations, no immediacies and immobilities that we call

Place: The Measure of Motion

343

places. Place is a term in local movement, but infinity is precisely
that which is not terminated and is properly called the indeter­
minate. To put this argument concretely, if this is an expanding
universe, there must be forces canceling the expansion, or the
whole of material reality would be scattered in a single instant.
The equilibrium in the order of place is a proof that the universe
is finite.
It is tempting here to go on and to reflect on the equilibrium,
the immobilities, and the identities which obtain in motion in the
light of Aristotle’s analysis of celestial movements as circular in
character and thus wearing an aspect of constancy and rest.
There is something of the Aristotelian circles left in motion and
perhaps in the universe, and what we now call expansion may be
only one of its arcs. But the further probing of this point is out of
place here.
THE UNIVERSE AS A WHOLE IS NOT IN PLACE

The bounded character of our universe is a clinching proof that
it is not in place. Wherever it ends, billions upon billions of miles
from the earth, there is nothing beyond it by way of a surround­
ing body. If there were, the body would be part of the universe
and could not be said to surround it. Admittedly this is another
of those difficult trails that the philosopher proper must take, sur­
rendering his imagination and moving by intelligence alone. Man
tends to sow images of a something beyond the universe. He
tends, like the ancients mentioned by Aristotle, to imagine that
there is a body limiting the universe and another thing limiting
the first limiting circuit, and so ad infinitum. The imagination
plays many tricks that make philosophy at times rather unphilosophical. It strives, for instance, to rationalize the irrationals so
that it can picture them. Destined to work only in the world of
motion, it seeks to reduce immobility to a liquid state and when
it fails, it calls immobility an “unobservable.” Images fuel the
emotions, and that is why empiriological physics, with its pic­
tures and its power, has gained such priority with sensate man.

344

Philosophical Physics

But a limited universe, not suspended in a vacuum as Democ­
ritus believed or in the absolute space of the Newtonians, can­
not be grasped by the imagination. It is hemmed in not by a vac­
uum nor by space but by its own nature. Form terminates the
potentialities of matter. A nature is thus terminated not by an
outside nature but in itself. If the parts of the universe are thus
self-terminating and the universe is nothing but an aggregate, it
is clear to intelligence, but opaque to the imagination, that the
mobile realities on the outer rim of a finite cosmos do not require
a fence to contain them. Like the rest of natures, they are selfcontained and self-terminated.
This outer shell of the material world, whatever and wherever
it may be, is accidentally in place by reason of its parts. But as a
whole, and in the proper sense of the term, it is not adjacent to
another body and hence is not in place. Yet if there is nothing
material beyond the universe, why do not the station keepers at
the last frontier of matter rush off into the void, like air pouring
into a vacuum tube when the surface is cracked? This calamity
does not visit the universe for the same reason that a moving
body does not tend into a vacuum. Motion owes its reality not to
the absence of restraint but to the presence of inner tendencies
whose principle we call nature. And these tendencies are pointed
not to a void but to a place.
Written between the lines of this analysis is the answer to the
problem of whether the universe as a whole is moving with re­
spect to a point outside of it, flying off into so-called space like a
gigantic earth of its own. The universe cannot be moving into
something outside of it since there is nothing “there.” There is
no place that would terminate the local movement and no me­
dium that would do the moving. Local movement on such prem­
ises would become a contradiction.
Einstein’s theory, by failing to refer to this immobility, only
did what would be expected of empiriological physics. This phys­
ics proceeds by correlating events with what lies outside them,
and there is nothing beyond the universe with which to measure

Place: The Measure of Motion

345

either its motion or its immobility. This is one of those ultimate
questions which only the philosophical science of nature can an­
swer, and that answer spells out the ultimate character of our
universe as both finite and fixed. The fortunate failure of Michel­
son and Morley in their experiment and Einstein in his theory to
detect the immobile is but a proof of the finite character of the
universe. If they had laid their finger on the immobility, they
would be standing outside the universe in order to measure it. Its
limits would thereby have been transcended and they would be
in infinity. The fact that no stationary ether has been filmed by
experimental techniques is a clue that the universe is ultimately
finite and ultimately immobile.
No mention has been made in this discussion of the differences
between circumscriptive and non-circumscriptive, definitive and
non-definitive presence in place. Nor has the scholastic contro­
versy been raised about the type of modification which place gives
to a body that is in it. Such refinements have been omitted in or­
der to cope more fully with modern issues that must be studied
and settled before sitting back to see the finished copy of the
Aristotelian-Thomistic cosmos. These finer questions are no
longer asked by the modern world, and the first task of the real­
istic philosopher of nature is to prompt it to ask them by con­
fronting its larger difficulties.
SPACE IS LARGELY A MATHEMATICAL ENTITY

The failure of the modern mind to account for local movement
is greatly the issue of its Cartesian parentage in philosophy and
its Cartesian heirloom of empiriological physics as an ultimate
view of reality. Local movement has survived in a world where
location is repudiated, and the Cartesian view of a nature as “an
extended thing” has been invited to fill the vacancy. This it has
done in terms of space.
But space is something considerably different from place. The
space of a body is really another name for its extension, and the
space of the whole universe is the sum total of such extensions.

346

Philosophical Physics

A mind, thinking mechanistically like Democritus when he
placed his universe in a void, conceives of a body as occupying
space and envisions a mobile reality as moving through it. Inter­
preting this, realists have rightly pointed out that space is a being
of the reason, grounded in the real (fens rationis cum fundamento
in re). Space thus becomes extension conceived in a mental light,
considered in fact as a receptacle for a body or as an interval be­
tween it and some neighbor in the universe.
Empiriological physics has trained us to say such things as
“portions of space,” “movement through space,” “the filling of
space,” “a body falling in free space.” It has raised such problems
as the non-Euclidian space of general relativity, which is not a
hollow form but the very substance of things. This physical and
even dynamic view, inspiring Einstein in empiriological physics,
receives philosophical expression in Samuel Alexander. Kant, on
the other hand, denied the objectivity of space, ranking it as an
a priori form fitted by the mind on the data of sense. This dogma
is stih sounding from such otherwise distant cousins as Russell,
the logician, and Heidegger, the existentialist. From many angles
then, it is important to determine what space is, what status it
has on the scale of being, and if all the things which scientism
says about it are wholly and objectively true.
In a positive sense, space is what becomes of place when theo­
retical mathematics goes into action. At least in classica] geom­
etry, it is a vast, immobile, homogeneous locus for points, lines,
planes, and solids. Empiriological physics has tended to become
an applied mathematics, and it is only natural that the qualities
of space should be transferred from their theoretical birthplace to
the area where they are put to work. In empiriological physics,
mathematical as it is, space wears the character of an interval,
either between the extremities of a given extension or between
the extremities of different things, leading to a distinction be­
tween internal space and external space. Internal space is the ex­
tension of a single body, viewed as its receptacle or as an interval
occupied. External space is the extension intervening between a

Place: The Measure of Motion

347

thing and a distant neighbor. On a cosmic scale, it is the totality
of extension in the universe, and when the universe ends, imagi­
nary or possible space can be multiplied outward indefinitely.
Space is primarily a mathematical entity, and its treatment is
the business not so much of philosophical physics as of geometry
which is competent to discuss such things as distance and dimen­
sion. The mathematical space of Euclidian geometry can be said
to be infinite in the same sense as number. It is the potentially in­
finite. What is actual about it is the rule for continuing the ex­
tension, a rule that gives the mind the impression of dominating
the infinite expanse and thus determining it into something ac­
tual. The rule here is sometimes confused with reality, as often
happens in the case of number, and then applied to the world of
nature.
Space belongs to mathematics because it has to do with the
measuring of quantity and extension. Place is defined only
through the lens of philosophical physics because it is an affair of
nature, of motion, of finality. It is only when the geometry is ap­
plied to motion, as it is in empiriological physics, that the philos­
opher and mathematician can stand on a common platform.
Space, as explored by the geometrician who inhabits the world of
quantified being and considers matter as without motion and as
purely extended, would be expected to plummet downward to
applied mathematics, whether that of common sense or of empir­
iological physics. In this area, space presents a problem for the
philosophical physicist. It is truly of moment to counter that
space is something primarily mathematical, whereas place is
something in nature. It is likewise important to keep repeating
that space is simply extension viewed in a mathematical light and
given a new name. But since the concept of space is applied so
persistently by common sense and so successfully by empiriologi­
cal physics, the philosopher of nature can underwrite his realistic
analysis if he can show why the idea of space, somewhat barren
in his own field, has been so fruitful in empiriology.
Pure empiriological physics is primarily an art for measuring

348

Philosophical Physics

matter. As in any art, beings of the reason (entia rationis) set the
pace for matter to follow. Art diverges from nature where its
principle is not in the matter moved but outside of it, more pre­
cisely in the mind of the artist. In art as such, form is not educed
from matter but imposed by man. Maritain has remarked how
richly empiriological physics is strewn with entia rationis, and
perhaps the reason is direction of empiriological knowledge not to
speculation but to art. Kant’s doctrine of the a priori grounds of
empiriological physics, Vaihinger’s philosophy of fictions, Poin­
care’s notion of physical law as a mere convention, Mach’s refer­
ence to it as an economy of thought—all of these references to
mind projecting itself on matter in modern physics tend to sweep
empiriological physics to the realm of art and thus to assume their
proper places within a realistic philosophy of the empiriological
method. For the philosophical physicist, the motions and places
of experience are in nature. With nature, as an intrinsic prin­
ciple, the empiriological physicist can have no traffic. So he ig­
nores it, sustaining its motions and its places by the crutch of log­
ical beings (entia rationis').
KANT WAS RIGHT, IN EMPIRIOLOGICAL PHYSICS

Space is in this category of empirical tools, be it the space of com­
mon sense which measures in a gross sort of way or be it the
space from the refinery of modern physics. It is extension, placed
in a new context by the mind in order to mechanize matter and
carry on its task of mensuration. In the natures of things, the
only reality of space is their extension, turned into a receptacle
or interval by a maneuver of mind and thus made something
other than the bodies within it (the other-ness being logical and
not real). As a receptacle and hence exterior to its contents, space
is not physically exterior to them like a separate realm of being.
It is not a body collocated with its occupants or a liquid where a
body swims from one place to another. Its exteriority to content
is of art; interiority is of nature. The exteriority comes from the
mind of the artist, from the ens rationis. It is in the logical order,

Place: The Measure of Motion

349

and modern realists have been correct in their analysis of space
as a being of the mind with a foundation in reality. But the prob­
ing of space is not the province of philosophical physics. For the
philosopher of nature, the sole reality of space is that of exten­
sion, and what is of interest to him is not space so much as place,
the term of local motion. Space becomes a problem for the phi­
losopher of nature when empiriological physics mistakes its logi­
cal exteriority to content for real and independent existence, like
the space of the Newtonians. Space is often turned from a logical
device for measurement into an objective reality of being.
To repudiate the Kantian philosophy of space is the work of
the metaphysics of knowledge, and it would certainly be out of
order to raise the critical question here. But the apparent facts
which led Kant to his decisions on space can be hastily inspected
to show how long he was on insights into empiriological physics
and how short as a philosopher of nature. Again, the problem is
not to reject but to interpret and limit. It is to search out the par­
tial truth which every great historical system of philosophy has
laid hold of.
Measurement, the burden of pure empiriological physics, re­
quires three things: the choosing of a standard, the measuring of
the standard in terms of itself by a mental relation or ens rationis,
and finally the measurement of other things in terms of it. It is
the second step that saves the first from being completely arbi­
trary, and it is the third step that weaves an organization into the
metrical results. Empiriological physics, unable to grasp things in
themselves and fated forever, as pure empiriology, to view them
as sums of outside forces, could never get beyond the second stair
if it chose to limp through the universe alone. It thus relates an
extended thing not to itself but to something else, creating the air
of continuing to treat matter transeuntly. The outside thing to
which extension is related is called space. It turns out to be an
ens rationis, after the philosophical science of nature has worked
it over, ranked in the same line as the measurement of a thing in
terms of itself. The empiriological physicist, however, posits it

350

Philosophical Physics

outside the thing measured, to preserve his discursive method and
to enable him to gain a hold on his matter from the outside, con­
trolling it.
Now Kant, struggling to moor Newtonian physics, argued that
space had to be an a priori form, prior to experience because pre­
supposed by all sense knowledge. The first object that greets our
senses is recognized, he argued in effect, as being in space; in­
deed, without this spatial reference it simply would not be noted,
he added. Being prior to all experience, this notion of space can
pour only from the mind, almost in the manner of innate ideas
in the psychology of Plato. After noting the unanimity among
empiriological researchers and the dissension among philoso­
phers, Kant dogmatized that Newtonian space was absolute. But
this absolute, he held, was not drawn from experience by way of
abstraction; rather, experience was drawn from it, by way of pro­
jection.
If Kant, the philosopher of space almost as much as Descartes
was the philosopher of quantity, had not started out with a preju­
dice that empiriological physics was philosophy, the western
mind might have been spared the terrible disaster of his Critique
of Pure Reason. As it was, he turned the working principle of an
art into the pivot of his philosophy. He was right when he held
that space, which comes into play only when we measure things,
owed its principle to the mind. Formally, it is an ens rationis,
since the real order shows it only as extension. The empiriologi­
cal physicist sets it outside extension in order to facilitate his
measurement, but he fails to set it back again when he finishes.
What Kant did was to confuse the working principle of an art to
measure the static with the speculative principles of a science for
knowing the mobile. For Kant, empiriological physics, indeed
Newtonian physics, was philosophy.
The empiriological physicist never carries out in all of his
youthful fervor the ambition to measure all things in terms of
what lies beyond them. For instance, in detecting the laws of
thermodynamics he must use instruments that come under the

Place: The Measure of Motion

351

very laws. As another example, he measures temperature in terms
of length, say by the height of a column of mercury in a cali­
brated tube, and yet he needs the concept of temperature in or­
der to define his measuring rods which are longer when warm
and shorter in the cold. He could never get started if he did not
recognize things (despite his method) as related to themselves or,
in more technical language, as intrinsically evident. Everything
that exists is original, and if it is known at all, it must be some­
how known in itself since there is no common denominator for
factoring the unique into a universal.
A nature is recognized in philosophical physics on the strength
of its own intrinsic evidence, and extension, when known by the
measurements of mathematics, must first be measured with re­
spect to itself. Space is thus a convenient name to give to exten­
sion in its relation to the measuring mind, or what amounts to
the same thing, it is a being of the reason for relating extension
to itself. On such logic, at least Aristotle and Aquinas regarded
phenomena like distance, dimension, and perspective as belong­
ing to extension and requested mathematics to study them. If
Kant had this tradition in mind, he was boxing his shadow when
he said that space was not objective. Who said it was, before
modern philosophy pitched its camp on the terrain of empirio­
logical physics?
But what is not objective need not be a priori, any more than
the two laws of thermodynamics are simply figments of mental
forms. What is already knowable in itself does not exact an a pri­
ori apparatus from the mind to make it knowable. Kant gave a
new twist to matter-form dualism. Matter, his philosophy holds,
comes from experience, while form comes from the mind. This is
how precisely traditional philosophy would define art.
Place, not space, is the concern of the philosophical science of
nature. Space is handled by mathematics and mathematical phys­
ics. It may well be infinite as extension is infinite—potentially
and not actually so. For it is extension which the mind thinks in
the image of its own metrical purposes. It might be the extension

352

Philosophical Physics

of a body or the extension between bodies. Where place is an af­
fair of motion and is treated in the philosophical science of na­
ture, space is a creature of quantity and is properly discussed only
in the science of quantified being which is mathematics. When a
body is falling through free space or moving in space or filling a
space, it is obviously not performing on the stage of an ens ra­
tionis. The physical side of the picture is extension which is the
only thing real about space, and the descriptions of the empirio­
logical physicist are in line with the points of view which his art
requires. If space were something real, like a doorknob or the at­
mosphere, the same case could be made out against it that, in
both a philosophical and empiriological sense, is argued against
the classical ether.
RELATIVITY PROPOSES A NON-EUCLIDIAN SPACE

The linking of the ether and space opens the passage to the gen­
eral theory of relativity and its so-called non-Euclidian space.
This is a considerable departure from the classical Newtonian
view which Kant had in mind and which, a century ago, in the
non-Aristotelian world, passed for eternal truth. Einstein’s ideas
can be simply set down without preface or proof and then evalu­
ated not to prove them wrong but to prove them limited. After
all, philosophical physics is not concerned to dispute with the em­
piriological physicist over his facts but only to fit them back again
into the common experience from which he departed and which
must cross-check his findings to see how well they interpret it.
The restricted theory of relativity disqualified the ether as “an
unobservable.” In the general theory, it comes back to life not as
a fluid between things or as the medium in which they move but
as an all-engulfing field of truly cosmic proportions, the only real­
ity of the universe. What is commonly called a physical body, the
general theory says, is nothing but an acute configuration in this
all embracing ether, even as an ordinary field, like the gravita­
tional force around the earth, is the same thing in milder form.

Place: The Measure of Motion

353

Another name for relativity’s ether is space, though this must be
somewhat qualified since time also shares in its reality, as the
next chapter will show. The point for the present is the new real­
ity accorded to space, which is not the empty expanse of Newton
nor the a priori form of Kant but the very stuff and substance of
the universe. This continuum of field is even more strongly
argued in Einstein’s generalized theory of gravitation (1949).
In the principles sketched so far by relativity’s crayon, there is
a healthy emphasis on the universe as a plenum and especially on
the real identity of space with extension. But the description of
this new space makes it an even more difficult problem for phi­
losophy than Kant’s notion which it explodes. It is said, for in­
stance, that space is anisotropic, meaning that it is not homoge­
neous but different from point to point. There is, it is said, a cur­
vature in space, as shown among other things by the bent path of
a ray of light. If one could see far enough through this curving
continuum, relativity assures him, the lines that his sight actually
follows as he looks straight away would enable him eventually to
see the back of his head. To put the problem in pointed form,
the space acclaimed by relativity is said to be non-Euclidian be­
cause Euclid’s never-meeting parallel lines do not appear.
Einstein stands in the tradition of non-Euclidian geometry
which developed in the nineteenth century and reached the deci­
sion that consistent systems could be constructed in which the
parallel postulate is disregarded. Gauss, Bolyai, and Lobachevsky
were among the leaders of this revolt from Euclid, but the system
which Einstein adopted to chart his way through the cosmos was
the so-called elliptic geometry which Riemann developed from
the ideas of Gauss. Here a straight line is not the shortest Euclid­
ian distance between two points. It is an arc, bending like the
path of a ship which sinks beneath the horizon. It is a line not on
a plane surface but on, say, a spherical one. Through a given
point, Euclid postulated, only one line can be drawn parallel to a
given line. On a sphere, however, all circumferences intersect,

354

Philosophical Physics

and it is impossible to draw circumferences that are parallel; every
great circle intersects every other. The shortest distance between
two points on the circumference is the smallest arc uniting them,
thus not a Euclidian straight line but a geodesic.
Einstein discovered the analogues to Riemannian lines in the
actual physical world and proceeded to describe all matter by
these non-Euclidian curves. A geodesic was found to be not only
an arc on a Riemannian ellipse but a good description of the ac­
tual lines in their field of ether space, of their contours, distribu­
tion, and direction—lines which are followed by the motions of
the world and enable empiriological physics to forecast their fu­
tures. Curving and changing at every point, space is called ani­
sotropic. Through these adapted Riemannian principles, Einstein
was able to predict the bending of the light rays observed in the
now famous solar eclipse of May 29, 1919. He was able to ex­
plain certain deviations in the trajectory of the planet Mercury
which Newtonian principles could not handle. Such results are
potent assets to the Einstein theory, though in its new and gen­
eralized form it may have to select a different non-Euclidian
geometry to provide tests for itself, and Riemannian geometry
like present relativity theory may revert to the status of a special
case, true under certain conditions.
The issue here is not, however, about the merits of Einstein as
against Newton nor even about the dynamic view of things
which the general relativity takes. It is of immediate importance
to pursue the statement that space is not Euclidian and, as Plato
says, to follow reason wherever it may lead us. Poincaré also
raises the problem as to whether Euclid is a good guide through
the cosmos. Imagine, to paraphrase his example, that one walked
from the ordinary earth where Euclidian geometry seems to hold
and moved outward toward the farthest stars. Space could change
its Euclidian clothes; time could run faster or slower. But with
our bodies also subject to such changes, we would not notice that
they occurred. Can we produce a passport to show that we are
citizens of a Euclidian world?

Place: The Measure of Motion

355

THE EXTENSION OF THE WORLD IS EUCLIDIAN

Francis Bacon said that a problem well posed is half answered,
and it is of capital moment to determine the precise sense of our
question and what part, if any of it at all, is in the competence of
the philosophical science of nature. Euclidian space belongs to
mathematics, the science for measuring quantity. It is properly at
home only in the world of pure extended being which is homoge­
neous and hence isotropic by the very purity of its estate. When
Euclid is forced to trace out the arteries of cosmic motion, he is
bound to fail since the problems of motion lie off his beaten high­
way. The question which relativity poses is not so much whether
space is Euclidian or not, but whether extension is Euclidian.
And that is not all. For relativity does not consider purely ex­
tended being but interjects the motion of light rays and planets,
of matter and energy, of what it calls space and what it calls time.
Einstein says in so many words that he takes geometry to be a
physical science and rejects Euclid because his system is not
physically observable.
Now it is a quite different thing to ask about the path of a
moving thing, where the motion is plotted on a local frame of
reference, and to ask about extension without reference to mo­
tion. A projectile shot from a battleship takes a parabolic path to­
ward the earth when seen by an observer in a plane parallel to
the trajectory. But this does not mean that extension, taken by it­
self, must necessarily be parabolic. The projectile passes through
much more than pure extension, so to speak, and so does the
light ray, or Mercury whirling about the sun. They are all mat­
ters of motion and are out of place in mathematics, the science of
motionless, quantified being where alone the Euclidian or nonEuclidian character of space and extension has any sense. Two
does not refer to motions of human feet but to their quantity.
Abstracting from motion, space retains its Euclidian character.
It is only the extension of things, not their motion, that was ever
deemed Euclidian. Euclidian geometry does not mean that mo­

356

Philosophical Physics

bile reality must always be a parallelepiped, and the ancient and
medieval astronomers accepted it without scruple, even when
they felt that the fundamental motion in the world was not rec­
tilinear but circular. It is only with Descartes, who viewed mat­
ter as a system of Euclidian geometry and nothing else, and with
Newton who made so much of motion in a straight line, that
Euclid abdicated his traditional degree of abstraction and came
down into the world of motion. It is more Descartes and Newton
rather than Aristotle and Euclid that Einstein is against. It is
only in matters of extension considered apart from motion that
Euclid has any meaning. No genuine philosopher ever attempted
to find the perfection of Euclidian circles, lines, angles, and
points in the world of motion, and a physical test of the parallel
postulate would involve the impossible task of carrying lines out
to physical infinity. What relativity really shows is not the nonEuclidian character of extension, but that extension alone, pure
and homogeneous, is not enough as an explanation of mobile
reality.
The Euclidian character of extended being, as such, is inde­
pendent of the path of physical motion and does not refer to it.
Euclidian geometry is a general one, more general indeed than
the philosophy of nature because it is at a higher level of abstrac­
tion. It shares the dignity of metaphysics as a science not of fact
but of cause (scientia propter quid). Mathematical truths enjoy
an absolute certitude, a degree removed from the motions that
give a contingent tone to empiriological physics.
Now it is true that geometry cannot provide a direct proof of
the parallel postulate, deducing it from the other axioms; all of
these others are concerned about finite reality whereas the paral­
lel postulate stands unique as a pronouncement about the infi­
nite. But by using a proof which is called the reductio ad ab­
surdum, and which consists in showing that the angles formed
by a third line, that cuts across the parallels, forbid their actual
meeting, the geometer discerns a rule, or forms what Kant called

Place: The Measure of Motion

357

a regulative idea, about the Euclidian lines seen in their very
nature.
Let us agree that the lines do not actually meet over a given
finite extent. But do they meet at infinity? No, for the infinity of
mathematics is only a potential one, and however far the lines
are extended, the rule applies. If it did not, the lines would not
have been parallel in the first place, and this is contrary to the
definition, to the rule. It is .the rule, not the infinite, which is ac­
tual; and since extension, pure and without motion, is homoge­
neous extension, the rule would apply no matter how far we
travel out into space with Poincaré and Einstein. These empir­
iological physicists would be right if mathematics were a depart­
ment of physics, and the example chosen by Poincaré to portray
his principle shows that he rates mathematics as the science of
sensible rather than intelligible matter, verified by the body of
the observer rather than elaborated by his abstracting mind. Pure
extension can be abstracted from a whirlpool as well as from a
plain table top. Mathematics prescinds from what is of greatest
interest in the physical order—hierarchical differences, cosmic
motions, matter the root of contingency, and reference to time.
Intelligible matter is pure form, and since form itself is invariant,
it would betray itself if it were different from one stretch of ex­
tension to the next. If this form of extension were pure, there
would be nothing to make it different from point to point except
itself; as an invariant, it would also be variant.
The postulate of parallel lines corresponds to a rule for extend­
ing them, and if this rule did not force the parallelism no matter
how far the lines are elongated, the rule would rebel against its
own self and become a contradiction. It would be a rule for par­
allelism and not a rule simultaneously. In short, that parallels
never meet is twined into the very definition of parallelism, con­
sidering not the motions of the world but its pure extension only,
and if this Euclidian separation were not infinitely the case, the
lines would be parallel and not parallel at the same time. No

358

Philosophical Physics

greater blow can be administered to a principle than to show it as
violating the principle of contradiction. Thus, wherever pure ex­
tension may be, and it is found wherever there is matter, hence
as coterminous with the universe, it will carry its Euclidian cre­
dentials which are nothing but a geometrical version of the prin­
ciple of non-contradiction. Extensively then this is a Euclidian
universe. Its fundamental motions may not be rectilinear, but
this should not be surprising since curvilinear motion was even
held by Aristotle as the highest of cosmic movements. The geom­
etry of extension does not care whether rectilinear or curvilinear
motion dominates our cosmos. It prescinds from motion.
A stretch of extension, measured in the Milky Way, provided
pure extension without motion is considered, would fall under
the rule just as man, taken anywhere in the world, is always a
rational animal. Mathematics, it was said, is a science in which
effects are deduced from their causes and vice versa. The rule
here represents the formal cause. It is abstracted like a circle in
mathematics, or a nature in philosophical physics. It is universal
because pure extension prescinds from individual differences
among the mobile objects; the rule is immutable because pure
extension prescinds from motion (mutation); it is necessary be­
cause the matter to which it applies, being pure and undifferen­
tiated, cannot impede it and thus produce exceptions to the rule;
the rule is negatively eternal because pure extension makes no
reference to time. (Einstein gives his curvatures a time charac­
ter.) Thus the scientific character of Euclid and the certitude of
his geometry are fully vindicated. Nothing more could be asked
of a science than that its truths be universal, immutable, neces­
sary, and negatively eternal.
Projective geometry has provided schemes for transforming the
non-Euclidian systems into Euclidian ones, and in addition, it is
a psychological fact that the Euclidian picture throws, if not its
light, at least its shadows upon the non-Euclidian achievements.
There is, at least in the wings of the non-Euclidian stages, the
view of extension as general and as homogeneous; for only thus

Place: The Measure of Motion

359

can continuity be achieved. Anisotropic space implies differences,
hence breaks in the fabric, and it is only by reference to a deeper
homogeneity of extension which is Euclidian and realistic that
the geometer is able to achieve continuity in his figures and or­
ganization in his system, and that the applied mathematician is
able to speak of a continuum and to construct a mechanics.
Mathematics is not simply a science of relations like logic. It
has quantity for its object, and a critique of mathematics would
be able to show that the non-Euclidian systems do not consider
pure and general extension but qualify it.
This does not mean that relativity is to be rejected. It only
means that it must keep its property in its own yard rather than
throw it across the fences into philosophy of nature and the phi­
losophy of mathematics. Its empiriological success is owed to the
very factors which limit it as a philosophy. It has often been said
in these pages that empiriological physics is primarily an art for
dominating matter and that to move along toward this end, it
must act as though matter were nothing but the potential and the
controllable. In this light, it was the genius of Einstein to exploit
the idea of a continuum where space, extension, motion, time,
and even the differences between things and the relations be­
tween events and their observers are all lumped into a cosmic
Heraclitean continuum which matter becomes when only its po­
tencies or indeterminacies are attended. That is why Einstein has
developed a purer empiriological physics than Newton, but that
is also why he secedes from territory of philosophy. His latest
theory attempts to include even electromagnetism in the con­
tinuous whole. Dewey and Alexander likewise have been logical
in pushing empiriological method until the world becomes a
continuum.
In the monism of method which relativity proposes, motion
and extension, empiriological physics and mathematics, cannot
be put asunder. The reason for Einstein’s rejection of Euclid is
that his parallel lines are not physically observable. Empiriologi­
cal physics prefers the continuum or the potential. To pass from

360

Philosophical Physics

motion to extension, from empiriological physics to mathematics,
involves a leap which only abstraction can bridge; and there is no
continuity between the terms for empiriological physics to meas­
ure and maneuver. It is an abrupt break, corresponding to the
difference between motion and non-motion, physics and non­
physics, being and non-being. This gap is not controllable, ca­
pable of more or less, any more than non-being shades into being
as Hegel imagined. In pure empiriological method, the hierarchy
between motion and extension, experimental physics and mathe­
matics, cannot be taken into account, and it is to the advantage
of empiriological physics to try to get around it.
Now in the field of empiriological physics, as such, there can
be no quarrel with Einstein. To a realist, his system, struggling
forward to a purer empiriological form, has tremendously more
to commend it than the Newtonian view. The difficulty is not
with Einsteinian physics but with the tendency to transplant the
working principles of an art into the certitudes of philosophy,
thus equating our domination of matter to our knowledge of it,
as pragmatism implies. It is good empiriological method to focus
on the potential and to chum reality into a continuum where
motion and extension are mixed into a community called the
ether.
But good empiriological physics is not a science of nature any
more than Raphael’s art makes him a speculative genius or any
more than Roman engineering can be equated to Greek philoso­
phy. Einstein might predict and control better by his world pic­
ture of the ether, but in proportion as we control we move down­
ward through the cellars of reality rather than skyward to its
peaks. Empiriological physics succeeds so well because it is so
shallow, like a man who might wade a brook but would drown if
he tried to walk the floor of an ocean. It is only the potencies of
things that empiriological physics considers, and by emphasizing
the space-time continuum, greater attention is paid to what is po­
tential and controllable.

Place: The Measure of Motion

361

Far less serious as a philosophical problem but still deserving
of passing mention is the «-dimensional space of quantum me­
chanics (especially when the quantum system is treated by what
is called matrix algebra). This is not really space, but a way of
referring to number by analogy with the familiar relation be­
tween numbers and an ordinary graph, enabling high school stu­
dents to plot the curve x — y. For instance, x + y + z is a gen­
eral equation for a straight line in three-dimensional space.
When four or more factors enter into an equation, each (vari­
able) term can be called a dimension, though no geometrical pic­
tures of the “line” can be given. In this language, there are as
many dimensions as there are (variable) terms. They might thus
be called algebraic dimensions. They are not, at any rate, phe­
nomena of, extension, any more than arithmetic is geometry or
number is a line. Discrete quantity and extension are different,
but the story of their relation belongs to Chapter 12.
The present chapter has shown the reality and relations of
place which is something natural in the real world and is neces­
sary to explain motion. Place is the term of local motion. It was
also seen that space is a being of the reason and that its only
reality in the makeup of the universe is extension. Various views
of space, inspired by modern philosophy and by modem empirio­
logical physics, were weighed, to show not that they are wrong
but that they are simply restricted. Place, as the term of local
motion, was called a measure by Aristotle who used the word in
the sense of specifying motion rather than quantifying it. In a
sense, place is a measure of motion and space of extension.
The distinction between place and space, motion and exten­
sion, is a crucial one, especially today. The divergent approaches
which are made to them by contemporary and by traditional
thought require a constant reference to the distinction between
art and nature. More and more in the relations between empirio­
logical and philosophical physics that distinction looms up as the
great divide.

362

Philosophical Physics

Suggested Readings
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. 4, chs. 1-9.
Einstein, A., Relativity (New York, 1931).
Einstein, A., and Infeld, L., The Evolution of Physics (New York
1938).

11
Time: The Measure of Motion
TIME MEASURES THE ORDER OF MOTION

In the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., there is a
display of the various ways in which men have told time through­
out the ages. The hourglass is of course a homely example; a mod­
ern version of it, sized to empty its upper chamber in three min­
utes, is still sold for cooks in boiling three-minute eggs. Other
d.evices have included candles burning in a unit of time down
through a unit of length calibrated on their sides. A rather un­
usual system which one locality employed was a pan punctured in
the center and floating on water; when the pan filled and sank, a
“clock-watcher” beat upon a huge drum to notify his community
that a unit of time had elapsed. A sundial, recording time by the
shadows of the sun, is preserved on the ruins of the famous mon­
astery at Cluny, France.
Today, precision springs in watches and the crystal-controlled
oscillations in the latest chronometers have replaced the shadows
of the sun and the sand of the hourglass as our timekeepers. Dur­
ing the last war airplanes were shot down by timing mechanisms
called radar which clock electromagnetic energy traveling to a
target (and echoing back) with the speed of light.
But it is one thing to measure time and another to ask what
time is. Minds have always been magnetized by the problem of
time, but the magnetic field of force has rarely been directed into
a clear and satisfying definition. Time has been a theme in an­
cient, medieval, and modern thought, and the concern of con­
temporary man with the sheerly material world makes the issue of
363

364

Philosophical Physics

time especially lively now. Kant drained time into a vacant men­
tal form. Einstein, adopting the space-time continuum of Min­
kowski, depicts time as a dimension. Entropy, the law that the
universe is running down, is a pronouncement about time, so
much so that Eddington called it “time’s arrow.” A glance at the
titles in the present-day literature of philosophy reflects a pe­
culiar commerce with the problem of time. There is Alexander’s
Space, Time, and Deity; Bergson’s Time and. Free Will; Heideg­
ger’s On Being and Time; Bachelard’s The Dialectic of Duration;
Lavelle’s Of Time and Eternity; Eddington’s Space, Time, and
Gravitation. Historical disciplines like geology, ethnology, and
paleontology often favor the opinion that time is fertile and that
a mere searching of the past yields a genuine science of origins
and principles. Evolutionism, of course, inspires such a view.
Confronted with the fact that no serious biological transforma­
tions have occurred within the memory of written history, evolu­
tionists often answer that the theories need time and that by al­
lowing the world more and more age there is more and more
reason for its evolution. It is as though time were even a cause. A
great many problems would automatically solve themselves with
the proper definition of time.
The present chapter will begin naturally with a definition of
time and then with a definition of the now. The terms implied by
time will be probed, and the flow of time examined to see whether
it is composed of indivisible nows. Time will be found to be
neither a substance nor a cause but an “accident” of motion,
which like motion itself is untractable to experimental tech­
niques. The standard of time will open a discussion of the cy­
clical character of time.
The remainder of the chapter will discuss prominent con­
temporary views of time as found in Einstein’s denial of the unity
and irreversibility of time, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal re­
turn, the four-dimensional relativity continuum, the idealism of
Kant and Leibniz, the crisis between relativity and quantum me­
chanics, and existentialism.

Time: The Measure of Motion

365

Time is not motion, and yet it is something so akin to motion
that philosophers from Plato to Bergson have identified the two.
Nor is time mere quantity like the shadow on a sundial, a line on
a Cartesian graph, or the wave length in a ray of light. Yet there
is so close a relation between time and quantity or number, that
empiriological physics, as Bergson showed, tends to identify
time with a line in space, and clocks tell time in numbers.
The sequence in motion is the factor that informs the mind of
the passage of time. When a body moves, it is observed to be now
in this place and now in that, since there is a certain order or se­
quence in which a moving body passes through various places.
One place is in front of or behind another in the passage, and the
mind is aware that time has elapsed. One place is before or after
another, and the motion is numbered as now here and now there.
Time is the number of motion according to a before and after.
As number time is a measure, and as a measure it has certain
analogies with place. But the analogy does not go as far as analo­
gies are sometimes pressed. Place is something permanent and
fixed, as the last chapter argued; it is immediate and immobile.
Time refers to a succession of before and after. It measures a
thing with respect to antecedents and consequents. It does not
compare motion with the immobile but motion with motion. And
where things come to rest in place, they never do so in time. Time
and tide wait for no one.
Time is a number or measure. Thus it provides a standard for
organizing things into a system, as a mile is a scale for computing
distance and a pound is a unit for reckoning weight. The now is
a norm for organizing motions, for time is the measure of motion,
numbering it according to its priority or posteriority with respect
to a now.
Before and after, it should be emphasized, are primarily in the
order of location, and in the last analysis, location involves place
more than space. A moving body crosses a certain magnitude. It is
first in one place and secondly in another. The priority and pos­
teriority in motion refer to the successive places that a body trav-

366

Philosophical Physics

erses, and it is from this trajectory that the notions of before and
after are born. With respect to a kind of reference point, called
the now, a certain part of the trajectory and of the motion is prior
and another part is posterior.
THE

Now

IS UNITIVE AND DIVISIVE

In grasping the character of time, the now forms a problem
within a problem—the now that is always passing and yet is
present, the now that flows and yet divides the past and the fu­
ture, the now that seems ever the same and ever different? Where
is it, what is it, and how does it exist? Time is a flow of nows. It
is recognized because there is first one now and then another one.
Is there a third now which divides them, and so on and on until
an infinity of nows must be unreeled to relate the past and the
future? If there were only one now, there could be no time; if
there were only a passing, there would be no now. The now that
is so forcefully evident to the mind is yet so elusive when the net
is spread for its definition.
The notv may be likened to the subject of motion, going from
this place to that, and in one sense, a thing owns the same now as
long as it exists. The ivy climbing the wall is the same plant today
that it was yesterday, and the gold of a ring is likewise the same
gold. Things that move in time bear a certain fixity with them
across the temporal passage. The flow is never a pure flow. If it
were, it would be indifferent in the order outside the mind, and
the mind of course could never grasp it.
But though the permanence must be mentioned, the flow must
never be forgotten. The now of today, though not completely
partitioned from the now of yesterday, is somehow different from
it, just as a moving thing has a permanent and a novel character
as it goes its way. Aristotle likened this relation of sameness and
difference to that of a point moving to generate a line. It is the
same point that moves, and it moves through different positions,
and it is by different positions that motion is measured. The line

Time: The Measure of Motion

367

corresponds to time and the point to the indivisible and moving
now.
The analogy to a line has more to offer, before it weakens to
remind us that it is, after all, an analogy. The moving point is al­
ways the term of segment behind it and the principle of the seg­
ment just beginning. In the chain of time, the now is a similar
link. But a point really terminates a line, and a now never simply
terminates anything in the actual order since it is always a-flow.
Here the point and the now part company, though inside a line,
not at the ends of it, the now is truly like a mobile point, with
segments before and after it that are not actually cut off into sep­
arate lines but, on the contrary, ever change character with their
common mobile term. The now, like a mobile point, is unitive
and divisive, a principle and a term, and this dualistic character
of the now which accounts for its fluency explains also how time,
under different aspects, can be continuous and discrete.
In the foregoing analogy, where the now was envisioned in the
role of a moving point, with a portion of the line behind it (the
past) and a portion ahead (the future), the two segments have
a common term since they are not actually separated into two
lines. Outside the mind, this pointlike now, dividing the past and
the future, is one. However, the mind can consider it under a two­
fold aspect, as the end of the past and the beginning of the future,
where there are tw'O nows of reason corresponding to the one real
now outside of reason.
In this strict sense of the word, the now is not a synonym for
the present. The present is a very much wider term, including
something of the past and of the future. In 1950, one may speak
of the present century, which includes the time from 1901
through 1999. There is a present day, a present hour, a present
second. There is, of course, only one real now, but there can be
many nows of reason, yielding many meanings to the expression
“present time.” As a line is bounded by points, so a stretch of
time like a second or a century is bounded by two nows which

368

Philosophical Physics

the mind sets up in order to slice out the portion of the temporal
flow which it wishes to consider. The terminal nows of reason,
which bound the flowing now of reality in, for example, a minute,
are not parts of the time they mark off, and when the flowing real
now is stopped again by reason as a new terminal to section off a
subdivision of the larger time interval, like a second within a min­
ute, the new now is again not part of the subsection. The now,
again like a point, is not a part of the linelike flow of time. The
nows of reason are also limits or terms, principles or beginnings,
hewing out the portion of time that the mind chooses to consider.
But the real now as opposed to the nows of reason is the factor
in the philosophical physics of time that must receive the heaviest
accent. In this real and precise sense, the now is a moving bound­
ary, like a point originating or terminating a portion of a line, and
when taken in this terminal sense as a limit, the now is not a part
of time because it is indivisible.
Time does not stop for man to measure it. It is a flowing con­
tinuum. A moving thing is now here and now there. One now
comes after another, permitting the number which is called time.
But the succeeding nows do not come like raindrops tumbling
down at intervals; they are like points on the edge of a continu­
ous ruler, indivisible because they are points but abstracted out
of the temporal flow which is not a string of points but a con­
tinuum of motion.
Implying a changeless element just as motion does and iso­
lated only when man stops the clock in order to consider it, the
now flows continuously. Time is no more a string of nows than a
line is a series of points. Two nows of reason bound a motion as
two points limit a line. Between them is the flow that is time and
that is, in turn, generated by the flowing noxv.
The view of the real now as a boundary between the past and
future, where reason forms two nows from the single now that is
real, does not of course breach the continuity of time. The real
now can unite the past and the future and still divide them, just
as a point may join one portion of a line to another and yet dif­

Time: The Measure pf Motion

369

ferentiate the two. Reason, considering the flow of time, can in­
ject its own nows to divide the continuum, just as the spatial
continuum, say a line, is potentially divided by points. In reverse
fashion, when time is actually divided by reason which forms
two nows where there is only one in reality, the portion of time
considered by reason apart from the whole and called a second, a
day, a year, a century, is really united with the prior and posterior
time, thus continuing any unit period of time with the whole of
it. For time is not a series of segments merely juxtaposed outside
the mind. Such fragmentation of time is the work of the consid­
ering intellect. Outside the mind, there is a continuous flow. Rea­
son cuts into it by considering the one real now as two and thus
making a mental segmentation of what is actually continuous.
For a point, unlike the real now, can be the beginning of a line
without being the end of another, and vice versa. But the now is
always both a beginning and an end in the real world, and where
the beginning of the future is actually marked off from the end
of the past, this is the work of the mind which actually segments
for its consideration what is really and physically unsegmented
and continuous.
TIME IS NOT MATHEMATICALLY DEFINED

When Aristotle defines time as the number of motion according
to a before and after, he merely points out that the mind meas­
ures motion by the portion of its trajectory which is prior to the
now and the portion which is posterior. But number is something
mathematical, and Aristotle must be defended from the appear­
ance of allowing mathematics to dictate to his philosophical
physics.
Actually, there are two ways in which number can be taken.
One is number applied to things (numerus numeratus'), like
ten men or two electrons or a dozen eggs. The other is number
taken absolutely (numerus numerans), like ten or two or
twelve. It is in the former sense that number is applied to time,
the measure of motion, whereas in pure mathematics there can

370

Philosophical Physics

be no reference to time because there is no attention to move­
ment.
Number in the definition of time is applied in the world of na­
ture and hence invites the philosophical science of nature to con­
sider it. If a shopper is buying two pounds of apples, he does not
ask a mathematician to do a purely paper computation of the
weight. He puts the quantity on a physical scale and relies on
the motion of physical springs. In a similar way, number is ap­
plied to time.
But there is an even greater difficulty than this. Time involves
a continuous flow, as the facts of nature indicate and as the con­
tinuity of the motion to be measured even demands. Since num­
ber is an affair of discrete quantity and is wrongly applied to a
continuum, how can the stream of time be reckoned by num­
ber?
The closing thought in Aristotle’s definition suggests the solu­
tion. The now divides time into the past and the future, and mo­
tion is measured according to this before and after. The so-called
successive continuum which time involves is hence not an un­
qualified continuum, pure and homogeneous and undifferenti­
ated in its contents. It is precisely a successive continuum. It is
heterogeneous. It has the aspect of discreteness since there is a
past and a future. This discrete character of time makes it a field
for number.
But it might still seem that a numbered continuum is just as
grave a problem as a discrete one, and if time is considered alone,
this is true. It looks as though the philosophical physicist would
have to choose between the discrete and the continuous and that
he cannot have both in the same reality. Here matter-form dual­
ism again comes to the rescue. Explaining motion, it also directs
its light upon the measure of motion as would be expected. Mat­
ter is that out of which something is moved or made, and form is
the term of the movement or the making. Matter corresponds to
the unity underlying change and form to the element of diversity
or discreteness which motion manifests and time measures by

Time: The Measure of Motion

371

numbering. Time measures the order or succession of movement
with respect to a now. It refers to the before and after in motion,
with a heed for the unity of motion by reducing the before and
after to an order.
Aristotle’s definition must thus be taken not part by part but
globally. Time is not number, for number is of mathematics and
is reversible, at least in the sense that what is added to number
can always be subtracted again to restore the original number;
time is not motion, for if it were baldly motion and the measure of
motion it would involve a vicious circle; time is not simply prior­
ity and posteriority, for such concepts are distinct in themselves
and do not involve a flow. Because of the before and after, num­
ber in the definition of time is not reversible; because of motion,
time is physical; because of number, it is the measure of motion
rather than motion itself; because it is according to before and
after, time has the aspect of discreteness; because of motion, it is
continuous; because of number, it unites prior and posterior, as
8 and 10 are related in the same number system.
TIME IS NOT FORMED FROM INDIVISIBLES

The moving now is always one in its real status and is turned into
two nows of reason to end the past and open the future which the
mind wishes to consider. Thus, for instance, today, January 1 is
compartmented off by the mind from yesterday, December 31,
and if a year is to be considered as the present time, the mind op­
erates similarly to terminate next December 31, dividing the real
now into two nows of reason, one to close the present twelve­
month period and another to open the next one. Between the now
of the mind that marks off the beginning of January 1 and the
now projected by the mind to terminate next December 31 is a
time that could be called the present year. It includes some of the
past and some of the future. Apart from man’s mind, the only ac­
tually existing thing about time is the indivisible now. And this
real now, as a boundary, is not a part of time any more than a
point is the part of a line. The past and the future, the before

372

Philosophical Physics

and after with respect to this indivisible now, are envisioned by
the mind and numbered.
From the foregoing discussion of the now there arises naturally
the question of how far time can be divided by indivisible nows
and where, if at all, a dividing line can be drawn between the
past and the future. No special reference is planned here to socalled psychological time, like that treated by Plotinus and by
Augustine, both of whom refer more or less to so-called lived
time fie temps veçu). When Aristotle called time a measure, he
left copious room for this psychological approach. Really it does
not differ from the more general view of time in philosophical
physics, except that the measure and the measured are united
with the peculiar intensity made possible by the spirituality in
man and the higher identity and self-possession and synthetic
power which his soul bestows on him. Philosophers, as varied in
views as Bergson and Heidegger and Alexander, are in accord
that the human mind has a remarkable synthetic power, capable
of unifying the past with the future, clasping them into what is
commonly called the “specious present.” In this discussion, of
course, psychology and the nature of knowledge are not at issue,
but if psychology goes its way realistically, it ought to rejoin the
main thoroughfare of philosophical physics which these pages
are attempting to map.
Motion and magnitude and time are all allied concepts. Local
motion goes through a magnitude and is continuous because the
magnitude is continuous, and time, if it be truly a measure of
motion, must be continuous also. In dividing the trajectory of a
moving thing, it is no more possible to come upon an indivisible
element of motion than an indivisible quantity can be attained
by dividing continuous magnitude. Always and always the divi­
sion can go on and on, because the continuum is indefinitely di­
visible and hence potentially infinite. When physical division
must halt, mental division can begin. Time, the measure of mo­
tion, follows the footsteps of motion, and motion is continuous
because of magnitude.

Time: The Measure of Motion

373

The continuum of magnitude through which a body travels
does not allow of an indivisible element in motion, and the con­
tinuum of motion requires the continuum of time. No matter
how small a time may be, it is always further divisible into smaller
times. The microsecond (10‘6 sec) is a common word in the em­
piriological vocabulary, but there is no reason why it should not
be split into millionths and billionths of itself and still be suscepti­
ble of indefinite further division. There is no smallest unit of
time, just as there is no smallest unit of matter.
It is true that the norv, by its analogy to a point, is indivisible.
But the now, taken in its strict sense as a boundary, is not a part
of time, as a point is no part of a line. Just as a line can be short­
ened by setting its terminal point nearer the origin, so a time like
a day or a microsecond can be made smaller and smaller by
dwarfing the interval between the nows which limit it. But the
two points forming a line can never be superimposed or tangent,
and neither can the nows which are their analogues in time.
There is no minimum magnitude. There is no minimum motion.
There is no minimum time.
Time can boast the nature of a true continuum. But the mind
can cut into the continuum, chopping it into segments by indi­
visible pointlike nows, where the one now of reality is converted
into two nows of reason and today is sharply divided from yester­
day and from tomorrow. It is the lines, not the points, which re­
semble time, just as in Chapter 9 points were not said to resemble
number, but the lines which the points terminated were said to
do so. These analogies between time and a line and between a
line and number reinforce the definition of time as a number of
motion.
Time is broken down into the past and the future, which might
be represented as two parts of a line. If the “specious present” is
included, there is a triad like this morning (past), this afternoon
(present), and this evening (future). But at what precise mo­
ment does the past give way to the present and the present to the
future? Or, in stricter terms, when exactly does the future cease

374

Philosophical Physics

to be future and become the past? In a sense, the present owns
the strongest claim to existence, since the past has already been
and the future is not yet. This is where the analogy with a spa­
tial line fails again since the temporal continuum, unlike a line,
does not exist all at once. That is why it is called the successive
continuum. The only really existing thing about it is the point­
like now which is not a part of time but an ever-moving boundary
between the future and the past.
As a continuum, the past and the future flow into one another,
and they do so in the indivisible now which is always an end and
a beginning. They are never actually divided because the now is
never a beginning without being an end, and vice versa. In con­
tinuous motion, the limits of one part join those of the succeeding
part so that there is no break between the elements of the tra­
jectory. Two parts of a continuum have a common boundary.
Thus likewise with time, the measure of motion. In its ceaseless
flow, there are no minimum units. It is impossible to put the fin­
ger on a stretch of time and say, for instance, this is the past, com­
pletely isolated from the future. In fingering an oak leaf on a tree,
an area of it might be more or less localized, but it is impossible to
state that this or that area is precisely where one part begins and
another ends, no matter how fine the eyepiece may be. In re­
flecting on an electron, with its radius of the order of 10'13 centi­
meter, it can certainly be said that the portion near the periphery
is different from that nearer the center. But it would not be pos­
sible to draw a physical line through the precise point of separa­
tion. The parts of a quantitative continuum soften and shade
into one another when we attempt to line them off precisely. So it
is with the continuum of time. The past which has already been
and the future which has not yet been are certainly different like
the sections of a leaf. But their frontiers cannot be lined off, di­
viding time into two islands, inhabited respectively by the past
and the future.
Two nows limit a stretch of time, but the interval so enclosed
can ever be shortened, and in the smaller subinterval, say the

Time: The Measure of Motion

375

microsecond, it is still possible to fractionate the past and the fu­
ture into smaller units. One cannot say exactly where the past
ends and the future begins. There is continuity and flow. Mathe­
matics cannot cope adequately with the situation. There is some­
thing dynamic because it is motion that is being measured and
something continuous because it is magnitude that is being trav­
ersed. Time changes when motion changes, begins where mo­
tion begins, and ends when motion itself comes to a standstill.
There is no smallest part of it because there is no smallest part of
motion, and there is no minimum in motion because there is no
minimum in the magnitude through which the motion occurs.
The continuum is always divisible into further divisibles. This is
one of the definitions of it which Aristotle gave.
TIME IS NOT A SUBSTANCE OR A CAUSE •

Before diving deeper into the problems which the foregoing anal­
ysis will help to solve, it would be well to pause anew upon the
question: what is time? Objections and errors, doubts and dif­
ficulties, always open a truth to the answering mind, and in a
subtle question like that of time the mind is especially in need of
assistance. Some writers look upon time in their philosophical
physics as “successive duration”; Bergson and Alexander give
time an ultrareal existence and tend, like Plato of old, to con­
found it with motion itself; the theory of relativity weaves time
into the so-called fourth dimension; Kant makes it an a priori
form; existentialists, especially Heidegger and Sartre, are dutiful
to Kant by degrading time into a projection of man; Kierkegaard
calls the instant “an atom of eternity,” and this sentiment is
echoed in Lavelle. If Aristotle’s definition is realistic, it ought to
be able to absorb the truth in any or all of these doctrines and
trim off their fallacies.
At present, the concern is with the first pair of opinions which,
when discussed, can whet Aristotle’s definition and the realistic
appreciation of what time is. To call time “successive duration” is
a begging of the question since duration itself ought to be defined

376

Philosophical Physics

in philosophical physics rather than presumed. It does not clarify
time to call it duration.
Duration, in the authors who use it to define time, is called
“continuous existence” or “persistence.” But time is primarily con­
cerned with motion rather than existence which is properly ex­
amined in the third order of abstraction. Besides, “persistence” is
hardly more clarifying than duration. Time is the measure of mo­
tion, and this fact must be kept constantly in mind, especially in
the light of empiriological developments to be outlined below.
The whole problem of the reality to be assigned to time can be
better pointed by reference to the Platonic opinions of Bergson
and Alexander, that time is motion or at any rate a kind of abso­
lute existing outside the mind, invested apparently with the
power of causation. Whatever time may be, it is not mere change
or motion. It is the number or measure of motion. To identify
motion and time is to go against experience and to engage in cir­
cular reasoning.
It is common experience that men grow old in time, and their
growth and decline is an index of their age. But physiological
and anatomical changes are not caused by time except in a meta­
phorical sense. They are produced by external causes such as ill­
ness or hard work or by interior causes which are but the natural
movements of the human body (interiority is a synonym for na­
ture). Time simply measures such changes; it does not produce
them. The consciousness of the changes involves time. But the
changes are factors which time simply measures without chang­
ing and discerns without altering. Time wears the nature of a
cause in Bergson and Alexander. For Bergson, it is a vital elan
coursing through the world; for Alexander, “Time is the mind of
Space.” For Aristotle, time is neither motion nor the cause of mo­
tion; it is motion’s measure.
Duration, the metaphysician explains, is the being of the thing
enduring. Thus, in God Who is eternal, eternity is the very Be­
ing itself; and in angels, who change accidentally but not sub­
stantially and are called aeviternal, duration is their imperishable

Time: The Measure of Motion

377

substance. But time is primarily a measure of motion, rather than
of being. The being of mobile things is measured only with re­
spect to motion. Rest is timed because motion is timed. The now,
as a boundary, is likewise not the primary datum that time meas­
ures. The motions which happen to things are in time, and their
continuous existence, abiding and perennial, is measured by the
parade of motions across it. It is only measured by what may hap­
pen to it and by what happens around it, by the ways in which it
changes or resists, by its possible transformation of substance
which is, in the case of living things, death.
Time thus measures so-called “continuous existence” as far as
it is not "continuous” but changing, or subject to change, as far
as it is not existing but dying or liable to death. Much of the real
meaning of time is lost by calling it “successive duration.”
We are different now from what we were in our youth, not
primarily because time has passed but because changes have
taken place in us and around us, changes that time measures
without producing. Hume confused this point, and Bergson and
Alexander make time a substance.
TIME IS AN "accident” OF MOTION

Time is not the being of the thing enduring, as one would have
to aver in defining time as successive duration and duration as the
being of a thing. Time is a measure. Against Bergson and Alex­
ander, it must be argued that time is not productive. Do these two
conclusions, however, rob time of objective existence?
Time is not a measure as mathematical number is a measure,
for it was already seen that Aristotle’s full definition qualifies
number and must be taken wholly to be properly understood. In
fashioning clocks, sundials, and hourglasses to tell time—even in
the theory of relativity, to turn the velocity of light into a time­
piece—presupposes that we know what time is. A clock, for in­
stance, is manufactured to measure the time it takes for the earth
to travel around the sun. Events are measured in relativity me­
chanics by the time required for a light ray to travel from one

378

Philosophical Physics

body to another. But to build instruments around the knowledge
of “the time it takes . . .” for the sun or a light ray to move
means that we already have a concept of what time is. This, of
course, does not argue for Kant but only against the dream of
defining time from sensistic premises. It argues against the ambi­
tions of quantitative measurement and of turning empiriological
physics into a philosophical science of nature.
Time relates the stages of motion according to their before and
after, but the result is not an actually segmented line in the quan­
titative order. Time is motion considered with its order, and this
order is not simply a mental relation. It is an external and as real
and as objective as motion itself or that “part” of a motion which
actually exists. Though space as such does not exist without man,
there would be time if there were no human beings to reckon it,
in the sense that there would still be an order of priority and
posteriority in motion; motions related to each other and motions
related in their parts would still be related without the mind.
Time is as real as place.
Aquinas called time a kind of accident in motion, and acci­
dents though weaker than substances, are not mental fancies.
Time is number in things (numerus numeratus') and not sheer
mathematical number (numerus numerans). The order is dy­
namic because motion is dynamic and continuous because of the
continuum in motion. This dynamic order, however, cannot be
tortured into the quantitative forms of mathematics and of em­
piriological physics. It is a flow, like motion, and the shore of time
changes as rapidly as the stream of movement.
TIME IS A DYNAMIC MEASURE

It was the merit of Bergson to have shown that time for the math­
ematician and for the empiriological physicist is simply a line in
space. It is a fact that all our measures of time, like clocks, sun
dials, interferometers, and cathode ray tubes record their data
geometrically. But a line in space, a plot on a coordinate system
in empiriological physics or the circle traced by the second hand

Time: The Measure of Motion

379

of a wrist watch, does not tell what time is. The mathematical
line is homogeneous. It makes no distinctions between the past
and future. It was in this light that Bergson pointed to mathe­
matical time as not having to do with duration. One should also
add that space is weaker than time in the objective order and
thus emphasize the folly of defining time by spatializing it.
Time could be reversed, according to the empiriological way of
looking at things, and pure measurements, Bergson went on,
would never inform man of the shift. It may be countered of
course that the law of entropy indicates directionality and points
toward the ultimate irreversibility of cosmic processes. But this
law is abstracted from the facts which it is supposed to regiment.
It is not detected ahead of them, like a general leading an army.
Mere measurement cannot yield the law of entropy but simply
records a certain correlation among facts. Which is prior and
which is posterior is known, if known at all, by some means other
than measurements.
Strictly metrical physics, the kind conceived by positivism and
embraced by Einstein, who will accept only the physically “ob­
servable,” cannot establish priority and posteriority because it
really ignores the motion that joins them in the flow of time. It
appreciates time by taking as its point of departure not place but
space. Mathematical measurement records only the static. The
Bergsonian line, the time of the mathematician and the empirio­
logical physicist, could begin at the term and be plotted back to
the origin, just as well as beginning at the origin and working to
the term. The change would make no difference to strictly em­
piriological physics. It does not measure motion but position, and
its measures are not dynamic but static. Time is a flow, and its
reality cannot be appraised in quantitative figures.
It is clear that when speaking of time as a measure and of a line
or number as a measure, two quite different meanings attach to
the nature of measure. The one is dynamic. It is an order of mo­
tion itself. The other is static, a measure of quantity and position
and the points between which .motion takes place but not the mo­

380

Philosophical Physics

tion itself. This does not mean that quantitative measures have
no meaning in the physical world but only that the dynamism of
motion can be caught only by a truly dynamic measure.
sun time is a convenient standard

Measuring time is the work of a clock, but time in turn is the
measure of motion. The dial on a clock is an order in space;
time is the order in movement. Speaking in Ptolemaic terms, it
was, of course, not necessary to choose the movement of the sun
as the standard for reckoning time. There is something arbitrary
and conventional in any time standard, just as it is convention to
weigh in terms of pounds rather than of some other unit. It is the
relations of the unit chosen to the thing measured that are not
arbitrary.
Time could be told by reference to the evaporation of a given
quantity of water under constant temperature, the rusting of a
fixed amount of iron under constant conditions, the coloring of
litmus paper in acid of a certain kind and concentration, or the
movement of a weather balloon through a fixed space. That time
is usually told by the sun is due to the continuity, simplicity, per­
manence, uniformity, repetition, and public character of solar
movement and to its effects, such as night and day and the
changes of season, upon human life. Solar movement—really it is
the movement of the earth around the sun in Copernican astron­
omy—is fast enough with respect to man to make for definite
periods according to which he can regulate his life, and yet it is
slow enough to permit convenient subdivisions into what we call
hours.
Continuity is most apparent in local movement, and since time
is continuous, local motion forms the best standard for measur­
ing time. Besides, local movement is through extensive magnitude
and permits a scale to be drawn for telling time in more or less
precise terms whenever one wishes to know it. Finally, the mo­
tions in sun time are vast and inclusive enough to allow any
other cosmic motion to be measured with respect to it.

Time: The Measure of Motion

381

But clocks ¿0 for man what mathematics does for the empirio­
logical physicist. They tell time without telling what time is. The
clocks are themselves mechanical and moving things when it is
motion that is to be measured. What is important is the com­
parison of movement, between that of a clock and that of, say an
ocean liner navigating the seas. The comparisons, the order, the
measure, is time; so that the abstracting mind, rather than sheer
sensation, must form the concept of time and be the final judge
about it, even though dials and mathematical plots and “solar”
movement are helpful in suggesting a standard and public view­
point. Any of the movements in the world can be related to that
of the sun, taken by the time-detecting mind as a standard.
Each unit in the solar trajectory, more properly each arc in the
path of the earth around the sun, can serve as a norm for motions
before and after it. Motions are comparable in their time just as
quantities in their sizes, and a thing may be called fast or slow de­
pending on how far it has traveled while the earth has circled a
certain distance about the sun.
The rotation of the earth around its axis measures a day, and
the orbital motion of the earth around the sun measures a year.
But how do we know what year it is? And what century? Astro­
nomically, this can be computed from the orbital motion of the
sun which is known to move with respect to the Milky Way. But
in a rougher sense, a new year begins each time the earth com­
pletes its orbit about the sun and begins a new one. Time runs
in cycles, and the circular dial on a clock imitates this.
TIME IS CYCLICAL

From the viewpoint of entropy as well as from the emphasis of
relativity astronomy, these cycles may not be perfect; but there is
something cyclical and repetitive about our universe, as experi­
ence so forcefully shows. This leads again to the conclusion that
the fundamental motion in the world must somehow be curvi­
linear rather than straight, and that there must be more than
inertial forces in back of it. If time has this cyclical aspect, there

382

Philosophical Physics

is all the more reason why it escapes empiriological physics and is
available only to the probing of the philosophical science of na­
ture. Circular movement in time, like reflection where the mind
bends back upon itself in thought, cannot be caught by experi­
mental traps. There is an element of sameness and permanence
and almost supratemporal identity in circular movement. Em­
piriological physics views a thing as determined by external forces
in obedience to the law of inertia, but it cannot handle sameness
and identity and nature.
When a circle or an ellipse starts through its swing the second
time, this can only be established by a third thing since the same
line is being traced out again. But if this third thing is also a circle
or an ellipse, if there is a cyclical character to the fundamental
movements in the cosmos, it is obvious that the empiriological
physicist gets nowhere by appealing to other motions to define
time as though time were only motion or jelled with space in an
ultrareal continuum. When two figures coincide, how are we to
know that there are two figures except by abstraction?
Einstein’s theory holds that the elliptical movements of the
heavenly bodies are never quite closed, and this would be ex­
pected on a finer probing of traditional principles. The universe
is not a repetitive monologue but open and expansive and pro­
gressive under a final cause. Einstein has detected a fortunate
analogy to the open universe that is Aristotelian in spirit, if not in
word. Here, the emphasis is on the cycles or sameness, rather than
differences in the movements of nature. The days, seasons, years,
and even the larger repetitive movements cannot, in so far they
are repetitive, be tucked into the categories of empiriological
physics.
The cyclical character of time makes its unity and its order and
its character as a measure of motion even more apparent. Time is
the order of motion according to before and after, and order is
more apparent the nearer it comes to being closed. Time measures
motion not as motion but only in so far as it has priority and pos­
teriority which the measure emphasizes. The return of the days,

Time: The Measure of Motion

383

of the seasons, and the even vaster weather cycles which meteor­
ology detects reinforce the truth that the priority and posteriority
in motion are not simply mental but something real.
It is the changes, not the time, that are ordered. Time is the
order itself, though the introspecting mind often confuses time
with changes and assigns it the role of a cause rather than a meas­
ure or order. Changes make us aware that time has passed, and
time informs us of the changes. Time is the order of the changes,
not the motions themselves, and if the order is real, so is time.
From this awareness of change, the mind moves up to the order
of quantity, building clocks to synchronize with the flow of time
and interpreting the readings not in themselves but by reference
to this flow.
RELATIVITY DENIES Time’s UNITY

A question that rivals in importance the problem of continuity in
time is that of time’s unity. Is there one time for the whole world
or are there many times unrelated among themselves? This ques­
tion which drew only a slight mention from Aristotle is of special
moment in this day of astrophysics, and of relativity, which allows
that there are as many times as there are observers.
A single motion can be numbered according to the before and
after of its own trajectory. But because the universe is a plenum
in extension, what occurs in one part of it can be correlated in
time with what happens elsewhere. Light rays leaving the sun
can be correlated according to priority and posteriority with
events on earth, just as the starting of a car in California, by com­
parison with the stopping of a train in New York, happens before
or after or in the “specious present.” Two distant events can be
compared with reference to a standard that includes both, because
the standard can reach out everywhere in its relations if the uni­
verse, as the last chapter argued, is an extensive plenum.
There is one time for the universe precisely because it is a
universe. Individuals within it are related to each other, causing
each other’s motions, occupying each other’s places, moving in a

384

Philosophical Physics

common extensive plenum, and working toward common goals.
Of all these communities the most important here is the magni­
tude of the universe enabling all parts to be temporally related.
All the motions of the world can be compared to the rotation of
the earth about the sun, and thus they can be compared to each
other. The continuum of quantity conditions the continuum of
motion, and the continuum of motion assures the continuum of
time.
The theory of relativity would impugn or at least qualify this
thesis. It affirms that the simultaneity between two events is un­
observable and that, if this is the case, priority and posteriority
must lapse into a similar fate. If two light flashes are emitted from
different sources, an observer, standing at the midpoint of a line
joining the sources, would assert that the flashes are simultaneous
if they reach him at the same instant. But how does he know that
he is at the midpoint since there is no absolute in space like a sta­
tionary ether in terms of which he can assume an absolute posi­
tion? Position, relativity mechanics goes on, depends on the state
of motion of the observer or of a frame of reference. Just as mo­
tion is described by relation to a frame of reference, so is simul­
taneity and, to be precise, so is time in general. As the grave­
diggers of Ophelia argued, does a drowning man go to the water
or does the water come to the drowning man?
time is ONE

It was Bergson’s merit to have underlined the measurements
of time as always bearing a spatial or geometrical form. If space
in its geometrical properties is always relative, the same fortune
befalls time which must be fitted into spatial forms for the em­
piriological physicist to detect it. Mathematically or spatially
measured, time is obviously relative, and Einstein, the empirio­
logical physicist, was boldly logical in denying an absolute char­
acter to time. On his premises, there is no such a thing as time.
There are only times.

Time: The Measure of Motion

385

But the failure to measure a reality does not black it out of ex­
istence. The empiriological method would like to find a reference
point “outside” the universe of bodies, with respect to which the
universe endures. Such a procedure is the only one that empirio­
logical physics can follow if it would be completely faithful to its
nature. The failure to find such a pivot for both extension and
time would be expected if the universe is finite. If a metacosmic
frame of reference were actually attained, it would, as meta­
cosmic, be beyond the limits of the universe and in infinity, and
if the universe were infinite in expanse, no motion and not even
being would be found in it, as the last chapter proposed.
This remark italicizes the danger of taking relativity too seri­
ously in philosophical physics, though in its own field it has
proved its worth. The temporal character of matter does not re­
quire that there be something beyond it with respect to which it
endures. This internal cosmic time, taking the universe as a single
whole and finding that it is not timed with respect to a thing out­
side of it, is the meaning of relativity, and of Ernst Mach, who in­
spired Einstein with the hint that empiriological physics should
consider “the all.” Since the universe is not related to a material
thing outside of it, to a metacosmic space and time, why should
its own space and time not appear as irrelational and hence as rel­
ative? It is sound logic to insist that time is wholly internal to the
universe, for only matter is in motion and hence in time, the
measure of motion. But Einstein makes it so internal that it be­
comes a part of things, in the space-time continuum.
However, there is something more to be said about time than
empiriological language can translate.
First of all, the continuity of motion reposes on the continu­
ity of magnitude, and because of this plenary character of the
universe, the motions of the world can be related in time. But
care must be taken regarding the meaning of magnitude or of
quantity in Aristotle as opposed to Einstein. In philosophical
physics, extension is isotropic; in relativity physics it is not, it is

386

Philosophical Physics

anisotropic and heterogeneous. This means that the classical line­
like continuum of time could not stretch from New York to Cali­
fornia to correlate events in both states within a unified time.
Relativity physics mixes its motion and its quantity, without
acknowledging the abstraction by which the mind distinguishes
them on the terrain of philosophy. But if there is such a thing as
isotropic extension, as the last chapter argued in behalf of Eu­
clidian geometry, then abstracting momentarily from motion, it
is possible to draw a continuous line in the isotropic, extension be­
tween any two points in the universe. In this way, there is seen
to be a continuity or unity of magnitude, which shows the con­
tinuity or unity of motion and, because of motion, the continuity
or unity of time. Einstein confines himself to anisotropic space,
but the philosophical physicist, while acknowledging relativity
in the empiriological domain, goes on to discern the isotropic
character of extension or magnitude, considered apart from mo­
tion. On this distinction, the solution of the unity of time can be
worked out.
TIME IS DIRECTIONAL

But such a logic does not solve the more subtle question about
directionality: Which event is before and which is after in a
given sequence, before and after in the absolute sense? How can
we possibly determine the way in which time is flowing in the
cosmos, such that the course is irreversible in its flow and direc­
tional in its nature?
A kindred problem met in the last chapter with respect to place
required a reference to final causality in order to be solved. There
it was argued that place is the term of local movement and that
the question of whether A is moving with respect to B, or B with
respect to A, is answered by the question: which is being per­
fected by fulfilling tendencies to a loftier natural place? Place
(rather than space which Einstein used) is the best framework
for specifying time since the temporal flow means that a moving
thing is now in this place and now in that. There is a before and

Time: The Measure of Motion

387

after in local motion. Indeed, priority and posteriority are pri­
marily known from this fact and seen by the mind to be proper­
ties not only of places but of the measures of motion as well.
Measuring time by space leaves man’s march on reality wholly
open to the shortcomings which Bergson pointed out; measuring
time by place is something else.
Place owns the character of an end or purpose, and the perfec­
tion of a thing can be measured by its progress toward its natural
place. It is this line of attack that sets the order of motion above
the grasp of relativity equivalences and assures that the motion
of the world is one-way. All things tend naturally toward their
more natural places, and there is a before and after in their tra­
jectories depending on their progressive approximations to their
natural terms. Einstein erects his doctrine of time not from place
but from space which, outside the mind, is indifferent extension
and by its very indifference does not allow order to be objectively
defined.
There is another approach to the theory of relativity which
underwrites the unity and directionality of time that philosoph­
ical physics defends.
Contrary to relativity theory, time is not primarily an affair of
simultaneities between events or between parallel series of events.
It refers to a single motion and to the before and after within it.
Motions are compared with each other in a secondary sense, and
if the comparison is mathematical alone, attempting to find an
indivisible physical unit in time so that the two sequences can be
compared with absolute mathematical precision by the superposi­
tion of two such indivisible physical units, the effort will surely
run aground. Philosophical physics insists that there is a before
and after in a local motion, depending on the places which bodies
occupy or traverse. Einstein does not think in terms of this march
of a single body seeking its place but in terms of the whole cos­
mos, where individuals are not considered or at least are not con­
sidered primarily. Einstein wants to establish simultaneity in
order to define before and after, and hence he requires at least two

388

Philosophical Physics

series of events. Philosophical physics first discovers before and
after, and simultaneity comes in, when it comes at all, only in a
secondary fashion. Directionality is here established not by meas­
uring two motions in space but by discerning the finality, of one
of them, in place.
Having established directionality in a single body which is
now in this place and now in that, comparisons with other mo­
tions are possible in the isotropic plenum of extension that is our
universe. But the discussion at this stage, where two chains of mo­
tions are involved, assumes a more mathematical rather than lo­
cal and final and truly physical air. It is this second or mathe­
matical stage that is alone emphasized in relativity theory, which,
as empiriological, cannot enrich itself with the local, final, phys­
ical principles that philosophical science of nature studies at their
own level and in the first order of abstraction.
This does not invalidate the mathematical and empiriological
approach to time, it does not reject relativity physics. It only weak­
ens empiriological physics as a philosophical study of the uni­
verse. Philosophical physics indeed admits this secondary and
more mathematical development regarding time, where two mo­
tions or more are interrelated. But philosophical science also
draws an important conclusion at this secondary level. For the
universe is one in magnitude since it is a plenum, isotropic when
its extension alone is considered; and just as there is a continuous
trajectory in a single motion whose parts form the temporal se­
quence, so there is a Euclidian continuum of extension between
trajectories that enables the comparison of motions and gives time
a unified character.
There is a comparison of trajectories, and this is likewise of
vast moment in the present context. Comparison of motion is not
a comparison of points, as Aristotle would have argued against
Zeno. It is a likening of lines. Time is analogous to a line, not a
point. There is a continuity of a motion and hence a continuity in
its time.
Now these unities that are linelike and not pointlike are com­

Time: The Measure of Motion

389

parable to each other in the continuum of time throughout the
universe, just as the past and future form a continuum in an in­
dividual motion. The simultaneity of such lines is determined not
by points but by planes, and the planes are tied together not by
points but by solids. Thus the whole problem reverts to the solid
bodies of experience, with the mind and not the senses comparing
them. Time is not a question of midpoints or points of reference
or punctual simultaneity but of experience in our physical world
of motions and of places.
Before and after are known prior to simultaneity and prompt
the relativity question about it. Because of their final character,
they retain their objective one-way order even if absolute point­
like simultaneity cannot be mathematically determined. When
the modern mind pledged itself against finality in the universe, it
forsook its best explanatory principle for a philosophical science
of nature.
The unity of time can be guaranteed not by seeking an anchor
outside the universe with respect to which the cosmos is moving
but by seeking an end toward which the motions work. All mov­
ing bodies in the world have the same end, and time is a measure
of their progress in attaining it. Time measures the advance of
things to their goals; and if their ultimate end is somehow one,
then time has a unified character on a cosmic scale. But finality
has had to solve the problem again. The debate between empirio­
logical and philosophical physics turns upon the distinction be­
tween finality and mathematical equivalences; quantity and mo­
tion; space and place; isotropy and anisotropy; measurements
between several motions and the discernment of order in a single
one of them.
Relativity is an empiriological theory. It aims to measure by
mathematical equations what is not really equalitarian but pro­
gressive and hierarchical and finalized. As in the rest of empirio­
logical physics, it tends to afford man control on matter. It meas­
ures time by space which has no final character and not by place
which involves ends. Making no necessary distinction between

390

Philosophical Physics

before and after, it can consider time as reversible, just as a mathe­
matical equation has two interchangeable sides. Relativity theory
has to flatten the material world in order to pick it up by control;
it is only the mathematically observable, the inert, the quantified
that man can manipulate, and since relativity is interested in un­
loading itself of all that cannot be experimentally observed and
mathematically computed for making man the master of matter,
it ignores, for its purposes, whatever masters man, like natures
and their natural places and their natural ends. But ignoring such
realities for purposes of logic does not blank them out of ontology.
THERE IS NO ETERNAL RETURN

According to traditional thought, time is irreversible. Though
some of the Greeks, especially Alcmaeon, denied this, a belief
that the clock cannot be turned back has prevailed among all
western thinkers with few exceptions. One of these exceptions,
the most notable indeed, is Friedrich Nietzsche who revived the
older Greek doctrine of the eternal return. His Superman who
was believed to be emerging in the evolutionary process would
not rest forever in his supernal state. He would crash to earth,
Nietzsche predicted; then the cycle leading up to his appearance
would commence all over again.
It has already been pointed out that Einstein’s theory, allowing
of no way to distinguish the before and after, opens the way to
the doctrine of reversibility in time.
Nietzsche, like relativity theory when it becomes a philosophy,
can also be refuted by the finality in motion, the tendency of all
things to seek their higher natural places. Time measures their
progress toward this end. If time moved in circles so that motion
always returned to its point of origin, it would be different when
it began its second time around the course than it was at first. Its
history, during the second cycle, would be posterior to that of the
first. It is because the wheels of a car make not simply the same
but successive revolutions that an auto moves along the highway.
If the second circle of Nietzsche’s eternity were not posterior

Time: The Measure of Motion

391

to the first, hence different from it, it could never be recognized.
Time measures the progress of things, and as far as this difference
of stage does not appear, there is no time and no awareness of it.
Above all, motion would be impossible if it were reversible,
and tended to the same place where it began. Such a universe
would be not mobile but static. If a thing tended to the same
place where it is, it would always remain there. Time is not re­
versible unless motion is reversible. Time is a one-way street.
TIME IS NOT A DIMENSION

The general theory of relativity—and this is retained in the gen
eralized theory of gravitation-—melts time into a fourth dimen­
sion of matter and views the cosmos as a four-dimensional space­
time continuum. Changes in matter are not simply described as
differences of a spatial nature but also by the fact that the same
matter exists at different times. It is not strictly correct, according
to Einstein’s canons, to speak of an event as a phenomenon of
space and time. This was presumably the infection of classical
physics. In the theory of relativity, there are not two realities but
one, space-time. Relativity considers the classical cut between
space and time to be unobservable.
But a certain distinction is still authorized. Space and time are
related by V— I, which is an imaginary number and seems to in­
dicate already at first glance that the achievement of combining
space and time has not been equal to the ambition. The identity
of space and time may have been achieved at the cost of a mathe­
matical trick that has no physical counterpart or, if it has, implies
a distinction in the continuum. Physically speaking, there is an­
other distinction. There are spacelike intervals between events
and timelike intervals. Two events A and B, occurring on differ­
ent bodies, have a spacelike reference if a light ray, emitted from
the first body, when A occurs, reaches the second body before B
occurs. They have a timelike reference if the light ray reaches
the second body after B occurs. Is time a dimension like the three
dimensions of space?

392

Philosophical Physics

The general drift of empiriological physics must be borne in
mind when this problem is broached. Empiriological physics will
acknowledge only what is experimentally observable. Such a
physics woos the most potential elements in things, and when
potency alone is emphasized the world retires into an undiffer­
entiated continuum, reversible because indifferent and a space­
time monotone because continuous. Empiriological physics is on
the trail of what is controllable in matter, and it will acknowledge
as real only those things which it can detect with instruments and
make with laboratory devices. In the last chapter, it was seen
that empiriological physics does not admit the break between ge­
ometry and experiment. There is a leap between the mathemat­
ical and physical orders which is not just a question of more or
less. And the same sort of gap occurs between space and time.
Space belongs to extension and time to motion. But relativitywould not admit the hierarchy between extension and motion. It
blends them into a continuum, and it does the same thing to
space and time. The senses cannot detect and define hierarchy.
They cannot jump the gap between extension and non-extension,
space and non-space, time and non-time, being and non-being.
Only intelligence can consort with problems of hierarchy, of dif­
ference, of being and non-being, of contraries and contradic­
tories.
It is then entirely logical for relativity mechanics, in order to
gain a domination over matter, to view its subject matter as a
continuum. That is what the potential and the controllable be­
come in the end. Because the difference between extension and
motion yawns as a break between two orders of reality, it cannot
be derived from experiment but only from experience. Relativistically, sensistically, experimentally, it is truly unobservable.
But the view of the world as sheer potency, which has fattened
empiriological physics in its control of things, does not carry
weight in the philosophical science of nature. Time may be just
as important and coequal with space in merely describing the
continuum that our senses touch, but there is as much difference

Time: The Measure of Motion

393

between time and space as there is between extension and move­
ment.
Space is static; time is dynamic. Space is a permanence; time
is a passing. Space is indifferent; time is hierarchical. In brief,
there is a duality about the world that intelligence can detect but
that the senses and scientism must pass over in silence. Both place
and time are measures of motion, the one performing its function
in terms of extensions (surfaces) and the other in terms of that
dynamic order in which a moving body occupies various places.
Aristotle said, against the sophists of his day, that the denial of
the principle of non-contradiction results in a continuous uni­
verse where one thing tapers into another with no difference
between them; he also argued, against Heraclitus, that his con­
tinuous and undifferentiated universe led to a denial of the prin­
ciple of non-contradiction. Einstein is unable to distinguish
between opposites because his empiriological system is, as experi­
mental, unable to reach the notion of being versus nothingness
in terms of which opposition is understood. He hammers out a
continuous universe and is logical in pressing the sensistic ap­
proach to a rather natural conclusion.
But there is as much difficulty with a space-time continuum
as with a static dynamism or a passing permanence or a square
circle. The philosophical science of nature does not expect the
empiriological physicist to use a philosophical approach in his
measurements but only to remember that beyond measurement
there is another view of reality which tells us what things are.
The continuous interval between space and time which rela­
tivity physics maps out is a mark of its shallowness, not depth.
Time is in a different order from space; it measures a moving
thing as now in this place and now in this, and to make it one
with the place it measures would be to identify the measured and
the measure, the static and the dynamic. Space would move as
time moves, and the mind would be unaware of a passing.
The theory of relativity in a way is like the philosophy of
Bergson who cloaked time as a real thing, and it is even closer

394

Philosophical Physics

to the philosophy of Alexander who speaks like Einstein of a
space-time continuum,
TIME IS NOT A MENTAL FORM

Sharply at odds with this view is the apriorism of Kant and even
Leibniz. For Kant, time, like space, is a mental form thrust by
the mind upon an indifferent matter which the senses present.
Kant argued to his conclusion by a logic similar to his discussion
of space. Time, he said, is presented as a precondition of sensible
experience; things could not be recognized as succeeding one
another unless a concept of time were enjoyed beforehand. Ex­
perience presents things as occurring at various times, but the
notions of simultaneity and succession, by which these times are
united, are, Kant went on, in the a priori form of time.
Both the ultrarealists like Alexander, Bergson, even Einstein,
and the idealists like Kant and Leibniz have not tumbled com­
pletely into error. Time is not a substance; it is an order. It is
thus neither real like a copper atom nor wholly mental like purely
logical being. The ultrarealists take the motion which time meas­
ures to be the whole of it; the idealists take measure without
regard for the reality of motion and the priority and posteriority
which make Aristotle’s definition complete. Time is neither a
substance nor a mental form. The truth lies somewhere in be­
tween these extremes, where time is as real as the order of motion
and presupposes a material that it measures.
Kant failed to gain a proper grasp on the nature of abstraction
by which the mind draws from sense experience certain general
notions which make that sense experience intelligible. Kant, un­
fortunately, let his jutting to empiriological physics become a
landslide over his philosophy. In empiriological physics, nothing
is intelligible in itself; it is always known by reference to a yard­
stick, and Kant, in his doctrines of space and time, merely tried
to find what the fundamental yardsticks are. In empiriological
physics, things are measured by what is prior to them, and Kant
simply drew the conclusion that consistently there must be some­

Time: The Measure of Motion

395

thing prior to the first sense experience in order to make even
this cognizable.
Kant contorted abstraction and self-evidence and the whole
nature of human intelligence. His view of time also plays into
the hands of empiriological physics by voiding it of all dynamism
and by turning it into a logical form without objective signifi­
cance. The way is thus paved to eliminate all but quantity from
the objective world and to view the rest of realities as mere pro­
jections of the human mind.
Kant played his part in the history of both empiriological and
philosophical physics, but there is no use refuting him further
in his blunders about time. Kant’s doctrine on this point, from
the empiriological view, is already dead; it is time as an objective
fact that relativity physics has attempted to plead. The contem­
porary empiriological pattern is not that of Newton which Kant
contrived his space-time system to explain. The new physics is
that of Einstein and Planck, relativity and quantum mechanics.
REALISM UNITES QUANTUM AND RELATIVITY INSIGHTS

Relativity physics emphasizes the continuum in space and time.
It is striking that the other modern approach to empiriological
physics which is called quantum mechanics takes the exactly
opposite view. Holding that velocity (a temporal phenomenon)
and position (a spatial phenomenon) cannot be exactly measured
together, quantum physics declares that there is an abrupt dis­
continuity between space and time. This is what philosophical
physics would lead one to expect. The static and dynamic cannot
be fitted together any more than a triangle can be superimposed
on a quadrilateral figure.
The difference between quantum and relativity theories is
deeply grooved, and one of the two systems is fated to be dis­
carded, or both of them are likely to be transcended by the ex­
perimental insights of tomorrow. Suffice it to say here that the
matter-form dualism explains how there can be continuity and
discontinuity, the static and the mobile, the spatial and the tern-

396

Philosophical Physics

poral, in the same universe. It would agree with relativity physics
that there is a unity between the dualistic elements, and would
second the idea of quantum mechanics that form is not the same
thing as matter.
Empiriological physics has the nature of an art, and the two
leading contemporary systems but represent different slants on
a subject matter that refuses to surrender itself wholly to either
one.
An artist tries to get the most and best out of his medium, using
now this chisel and now that, standing at one angle and then
taking another. The current crisis in empiriological physics is
nature gaining revenge, as it always will, for the attempt to erect
a partial picture of reality into the whole stricture. Matter-form
dualism can explain both the successes and failures of contempo­
rary empiriological systems. It takes a binocular view' of the real.
EXISTENTIALISM MAKES CAPITAL OF TIME

Existentialism, especially in the systems of Martin Heidegger
and Jean-Paul Sartre, is Kant hounded to his very extremes.
These two men set out to probe the question: What is a priori to
the a priori? When one radically attempts to think about himself,
it is argued, he moves backward to examine his preconscious state
as though man, in true Kantian fashion, were to be examined
apart from the external world that he thinks about. In this reduc­
tion of himself, man finds his existence shriveling up to a point.
Reflecting on ourselves to discover our being in its purity, we
come to see it as simply an existent, simply “there” without any
content or relations. This may be put in another way by saying
that an individual is always irrelational; he cannot know w'hat he
is, because he is an individual and knowledge is always of univer­
sals. Therefore man is seen in the existentialist reduction as a
unique existent, not conceptualized and thus not known scientifi­
cally. He is also radically free because law is always in universal
form and he is always an individual.
Heidegger and Sartre sum up this isolated character of the

Time: The Measure of Motion

397

individual by declaring that man is abandoned Qgeworfen,
délaissé). He has been “thrown-into-the-world,” Heidegger
writes, and when he attempts to look backward to discover the
preconscious state which would account for his conscious life,
seeking so to speak what is a priori to the Kantian a priori, man
finds that he cannot isolate that state of affairs in his being which
set him going along lines of thought and will. For man must al­
ways be conscious in conducting the examination. He is always
ahead of himself, Heidegger says; he does not discover his aban­
donment until he has already been abandoned and in the status
of being “before himself” or ahead of himself, he can never really
look back and see his past as it was before his conscious life caught
fire.
This notion of “before-ness” singles out the dominant role of
time in Heidegger and Sartre. Man is projected, abandoned,
“thrown” ahead of himself. But who is the thrower? Since man is
radically free and isolated and original, severed from outer agen­
cies and guiding laws, it can only be himself that has done the
throwing; he has no connections because he is an individual.
This means that man projects himself. He thus produces time, or
more exactly, he temporalizes himself. To understand himself, he
projects himself. He throws himself forward. And forward means
temporally so. Heidegger has written a book called On Being
and Time.
It is easy to conclude from the foregoing remarks that time is
the essence of man. Man creates time. The mystery of being is
to be sought in time. Kantian to the last syllable, Heidegger and
his disciple Sartre, see time as a projection of man, a network
emerging from the ego. Their existentialism finds its chief argu­
ment for this in the note of abandonment which is discovered
when man finds himself as a pure existent, without goal or guid­
ance and cut off even from a continuity with a motor cause. The
human reality is ever “before” itself since it can never return to
the preconscious state, where it originated thought, and grasp
the forces prompting that thought into being.

398

Philosophical Physics

Heidegger has developed his existential themes from Soren
Kierkegaard, a Danish anti-Hegelian who did not intend the
conclusions reached by Heidegger and Sartre but whose princi­
ples open the way to such extremes. Kierkegaard laid great stress
on the moment. He found that man was present to himself,
aware of his individuality and concreteness, only in the instant,
which provide the high point in man’s experience. Insistent on
this privilege of the moment, Kierkegaard called it an “atom of
eternity”—a phrase which is also found in Lavelle, a contempo­
rary theistic existentialist, who calls the instant “the intersection
of time and eternity.” Lavelle, even before Sartre, insisted on the
Kantian method of examining the subject first, and his metaphys­
ics is an analytic of man. But in Lavelle, time is a mark of finitude, while man also participates in the infinite. The instant
is the locus of this participation.
EXISTENTIALISM IS INADEQUATE

Two questions surge up concerning the preceding remarks on
existentialism: Is time a projection of man? Is the “now” of time
the same thing as the “now” of eternity?
To solve the first question, it is important to dig down to the
root error of existentialism which begins by analyzing man and
things on the premise that man is aware of himself as an individ­
ual before being aware of a world. This is not true, as the opening
chapter argued. Thinking does not begin with the individual and
the unique but with the general and the universal. Reflecting on
our subjectivity is a late experience in man’s thinking curriculum.
He first thinks about being in general and derives his principles
of thought from this fact. He does not charge, unaided and un­
armed, into a study of himself. He is bolstered beforehand with
principles that make his self-analysis intelligible and not an iso­
lated acrobatic. Such an attack throws out the whole existentialist
procedure. It is not time that makes man intelligible to himself,
but being. Man is aware of being before he discovers that he is

Time: The Measure of Motion

399

in time; his notions of motion, priority, posteriority, and number
all precede his awareness of time. Time is a measure of motion,
and is no more the fancy of mind that is the motion which it
measures.
The second question is more subtle. What do we mean by the
now, by the instant or moment? It has already been pointed out
that the now of things in one sense remains the same while time
passes; it is the identity which abides across change. But in an­
other sense, the now is different with each motion, since the
temporalized reality, being dually principled, undergoes a change
and in the present can no longer fully claim its previous now.
In precise words the real now is a boundary, uniting and dividing,
and time is no more a series of nows than a line is a series of
points. Time is formed by the flowing now.
Because of its fluent and bifurcated character the now of time
(nunc fluens) cannot correspond with the standing now (nunc
Stans') of eternity. The now of time is not an “atom” to quote
Kierkegaard, since the temporal now is fluent and cannot partake
of eternity which is not fluent; nor is the now an “intersection”
with eternity since eternity is the mark of a being which is simul­
taneously whole, as Boethius said. Rather than being simultane­
ous, the now of time is successive, hence partially different with
each progress of its flow. Rather than being whole, the now is
flowing and changing.
Man has no natural experience of eternity. The closest he
comes to it naturally is in contemplating eternal truths. The per­
manence of his being is, of course, an imitation of the perma­
nence of God, as the metaphysician shows, and is measured by
time as rest is related to motion. Time has primarily to do with
motion. No part of it has to do with eternity which is the exact
opposite of motion.
The existentialist approaches to time differ sharply from the
temper of scientism mentioned earlier in this chapter. Scientism
makes too much of man, the observer, removed from the experi­

400

Philosophical Physics

ence he is surveying and counting it as an audience watching a
motion picture. Existentialism accepts nothing but experience
and will allow no room for observations drawn out of it.
Truth once again marches down the middle. A realistic science
will build upon experience and thus be realistic. It will build by
speculative principles imposed by that experience. It will thus be
truly scientific.

Suggested Readings
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. 4, chs. 10-14.
Callahan, John F., Four Views of Time in the Ancient World (Chi­
cago, 1948).

12
Motion and Quantity
QUANTITY IS AN ADMITTED REALITY

Philosophical physics, dealing today with quantity, is liberated
from at least one of the burdens which so frequently delay its
larger tasks. It does not have to linger over the proof that quantity
exists. As in the case of local motion which Descartes wedded to
quantity at the onset of modern philosophy, realism must labor
now not to prove that quantity is real but more to trim down its
value as an account of the world. The modern mind likes to think
that mathematics or quantitative measures are alone able to
process a world through the machinery of knowledge, and that
quantity is all there is to matter. The problem of quantity looms
as a major issue in the debate between empiriological and philo­
sophical physics.
It was another homage of Aristotle to experience that he did
not define quantity in the abstract. It is a concrete reality, espe­
cially as the philosophical science of nature comes upon it, and
Aristotle defined it so. He spoke of quantified being (ens quan­
tum), sinking his feet once again into experience and the real
world.
Aristotle defined a quantified thing as that which can be
divided into parts each of which is capable of an independence
and an identity of its own upon the division. “ ‘Quantum’ means,”
he said, “that which is divisible into two or more constituent
parts of which each is by nature a one’ and a ‘this.’1,1 The quanti­
fied is therefore the divisible or the partitive.
1 Metaphysics, Bk. V, ch. 13.
401

402

Philosophical Physics

Now matter is actually composite in several ways. It has al­
ready been seen that prime matter and substantial form, the
principles of motion, congeal in mobile beings. But neither of
these principles can exist as a “one” or a “this” in independence,
and their union is not properly in the order of quantity. Matter
and form are often called entitative parts.
Quantitative parts are the results of dissecting continuous mag­
nitude into separated units, like the slicing of a tomato or the
felling of timber. The two halves of the tomato remain after the
division, and both the trunk and the tree, united before they
were sawed, are independent identities after the operation. An­
other example of quantitative division is the breaking of a piece
(P chalk into two parts, both of which are so independent of each
( >ther that two different people can now write on the blackboard
where only one was able to write before.
Quantitative parts are sometimes called integral parts.
Certain difficulties about the structure of matter require that
the foregoing examples be taken, at least for the present, as
analogies to help form an idea of quantitative division and how
matter-form composition differs from a quantitative one.
Having broadly identified quantity, this chapter will break its
associated problems into four major families.
The first part states more precisely how quantity is studied in
mathematics and in philosophical physics, and what quantity is
in relation to mobile substance.
The second part deals with the problem of the continuum, first
defining it and then showing that matter is neither infinitely
divided nor indivisible, but bifurcated by act and potency. Zeno,
in his ancient and modem setting, is evaluated, and the continu­
ous character of motion is argued. But continuity does not imply
homogeneity on the part of the continuous substance.
This opens the way to the third broad series of topics, which
sounds out how quantity affects substance. After outlining the
two types of quantitative division, it is shown that substance
needs a minimum of quantity and that quantity is the closest,

Motion and Quantity

403

of the material accidents, to substance. Matter operates through
quantity and quantity solves three important questions about the
structure of mobile being. However, quantum mechanics, rep­
resented in the example of the Bohr theory, seems to challenge
the whole philosophy of quantity as developed in philosophical
physics; this theory will be briefly evaluated.
The chapter thus far will have emphasized the divisibility by
which quantity is defined, and the final portion of the chapter
will consider what can be called the formal effects of quantity:
measurability and extension in place and impenetrability. There
is a summary section, restating that quantity is not nature but has
a unity that is called predicamental.
THE SCIENCE OF QUANTITY ABSTRACTS FROM MOTION

One of the urgent issues about quantity is deciding what aspects
of it are treated in mathematics and what aspects belong to the
philosophical science of nature. Mathematics abstracts from mo­
tion, and though it does not, as some authors have implied, con­
cern itself with quantity divorced from being, it does consider
being only as quantified. As Aquinas says,
. . . the mind can consider sensible realities not qua mobile or
material but qua substances and magnitudes; and this is the
meaning of abstraction from matter and motion. However, the
intellect does not so abstract that it understands magnitudes and
species to be without matter and motion.2
What are the properties and principles of being or substance,
the mathematician asks, when we take it barely as quantified and
consider it to be without motion and the matter that motion
involves?
There is no final, efficient, or material causality in the mathe­
matical grade of abstraction. The triangle of the geometer and
the number, say 2, in arithmetic, have no inner principle of
motion and hence no nature. They do not tend in the order of
2 Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Bk. Ill, ch. 7.

404

Philosophical Physics

final causality, as though a triangle would incline to be a square
or 2 would tend to be 3. It is also mathematically irrelevant what
produced the triangle or number in the material things from
which they are known. Mathematics is not concerned with the
manner in which things came into existence nor with their native
purposes. Finally, mathematics is unbusied about the material
cause. It is mathematically unimportant whether the idea of a
triangle is realized in wood or in glass or whether the 2 applies
to dollars or electrons. As Chesteron wittily puts it, the multiplica­
tion table is not made of mahogany. Mathematics thinks away
the material, efficient, and final causalities to consider being only
under the formality of its quantity.
PHILOSOPHICAL PHYSICS STUDIES QUANTITY THROUGH MOTION

The philosophical science of nature, on the other hand, does not
start with the fact of quantity, and of course it does not end with
it. Its territory is that of motion, and it migrates to a discussion
of quantity rather late in its career and even then considers quan­
tity not in itself but by the light of motion which uncovers it to
the seeking mind. Philosophical physics discovers quantity be­
cause the subject of motion and its pathway are divisible. It
studies lines and surfaces not as simply quantities but as termina­
tions of mobile beings.3
The world of motion is more than mere quantity or quantified
being; it is charged by the three causalities that mathematics
alone cannot trace. Mobile things are richer and fuller than sheer
quantified being. A triangle has no power to stretch beyond
itself. But moving things are fertile; nature means interiority and
growth, and if not always reproduction, at least productivity.
Quantity is thus only one of the aspects of the mobile world,
and its physical reality is forced upon us by the facts of motion.
Quantity is never grasped in itself by the senses. Sight races
toward the colored, touch attends to surfaces that are hard or
soft; but quantity always appears secondarily, for instance, in the
3 Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, Bk. I, ch. 1.

Motion and Quantity

405

size of the colored object or the expanse of the tangible surface.
Mathematics studies, not sensible, but intelligible matter.
Quantity is nowhere perceived in nature as something sub­
sistent in itself, and considerably more selective abstraction is
required to isolate it for attention than to study motion which is
more manifest and more universal and more sensible in the world
of experience. Spaier was closer than scientism to the truth of
things when he said that “quantity is nothing but measured
quality.”'1 It is only to be inductive and realistic to study the world
in the light of motion before surging into the mathematical order
of abstraction, where motion is ignored and where three of the
four causes needed to probe the moving world must be locked
out.
But the philosophical science of nature, even though unable
to cope with quantified being in and for itself, nevertheless comes
upon it in the physical world. When a body in local motion moves
toward its term, it traverses a magnitude; its path is spread out
and continuous; the trajectory can be divided into parts, so that
an observer can mark off the halfway point or any other point of
interest. The distance from term to term in a moving body can
be broken down into any number of subintervals.
Quantity is not the whole tissue from which matter is made,
but it is certainly something real in the real world. Without it,
there would be no separation between the origin of motion and its
term. All local motion would be stymied; a thing would have no
distance in which to travel. Quantity, in its character as divisible
into parts, appears immediately then as a factor of separation or
partition in the moving world. If it does not cause, explain,
finalize, or constitute motion, at least it conditions it.
But the conditions of motion do not reveal what motion is,
what produced it, and why it occurs. Conditions of motion no
more explain motion that the fact that conditions on Mars are
favorable for life permit the deduction that life is actually present
there.
4 Spaier, A., La pensée et la quantité CParis, 1927), p. 33.

406

Philosophical Physics

Not how a thing looks but how it operates is the key to the
secrets of nature. Both the magnitude which a body traverses and
the term which it occupies on coming to rest show the body
itself as quantified. Different parts of the trajectory are occupied
by different parts of the moving body, and the body thus reveals
itself to philosophical physics as quantified. In the proper sense,
it is a body precisely because it is divisible. And quantity, where
it enters the philosophical science of nature at all, comes into
play only after other issues about motion have been settled.
The most characteristic thing about the material universe is
the network of natures that exist in it, and the most characteristic
things about the natures are their tendencies. If no other points
could be conscripted, this would be sufficient to show that quan­
tity, where it exists, is something subordinate in nature to deeper
principles and higher purposes than mathematics can gaze upon.
Quantity is embroiled in a larger reality, the nature which is
conditioned by it, and in this physical mode of existence, it shares
in motions and their causes, conspiring in the three-ply dynamism
which mathematics overshoots and is all the more real because
uncontrollable.
What is only quantified, like a sphere, does not tend to move
because it is a sphere or to produce anything else because it is
quantified. A sphere of iron will move not because it is a sphere
but because it is iron, and the spherical shape, though a condition
in the motion, is swept along in obedience to the nature of the
iron rather than as the cause and explanation of the motion. The
sphere does not cease following the laws of quantity, when it
moves, but by the same token, it is not the cause or principle of
the motion. The rejection of empiriological physics as a science
of nature is not so much its failure to account for structure; it is
more the natural dislocation of mathematics with motion and
with the profile of matter that motion unmasks.
BY QUANTITY MOBILE BEING IS DISTENDED

Quantified being is defined in terms of its divisibility. But since
division is a negation of unity and can be grasped only in terms

Motion and Quantity

407

of unity, Aristotle’s definition needs further testing. As it stands,
it would appear to tell what a quantified being is not, and when
quantity is taken alone, without reference to its natural home in
being, it is difficult to say anything more.
Actually, empiriological physics likes to take quantity alone
and isolated from the rich world of motion. It was shown in
Chapter 5 that the experimental spirit pictures reality in terms
of its inertia. When a thing is explained by the sum of forces
acting upon it, it is explained in terms of what it is not rather
than in terms of what it is. The Cartesian reduction of matter to
quantity netted the same result in the history of thought as Gali­
leo’s taste for inertia. Quantity, taken alone, just like inertia pure
and simple, can be defined only by negatives.
But taking quantity in its natural setting enables the science
of nature to go beyond the negative character of Aristotle’s defini­
tion and the negative character which matter wears in a system
like empiriological physics, which would like to create the world
to the image and likeness of man. Quantity is a plurality of parts,
but the parts are not simply geometrical units like cylinders and
rectangles. Putting it coarsely, they have content. There are parts
of atoms, parts of tomatoes, parts of a piece of chalk. There are
not pure parts, and there is not sheer plurality.
Quantity is always a quantity of something and is hence not
alone in populating the universe. Quantity must be defined in
terms of substance to be properly understood, and that is why the
positive meaning of Aristotle’s definition surmounts the negative
character of its form. Aristotle defined “quantified being.”
By its quantity, the being which is quantified is spread out. As
John of St. Thomas so well expresses it, “quantity is said to fur­
nish integral parts to substance, not constituting them but order­
ing them among themselves.”1’ Without quantity, a mobile being
like a hydrogen or a calcium atom would be indivisible. Its inte­
gral parts, which are naturally fit for diffusion, would crumble
into an inextended status, and such realities as distance and
5 Cwrsns philosophicus Thomisticus, Ars Log., Part II, Question XVI,
article 1.

408

Philosophical Physics

dimension would never be born. The calcium and the hydrogen
would still have the natures which the parts scatter abroad, since
mere quantity does not bring content into existence. But without
quantity, the parts would not be stretched out in geometrical
patterns; they would spiral inward toward collapse.
Quantity renders the parts distinct; without it, they would be
compenetrated and indistinguishable. Quantity orders the parts
outside one another in that extraposition that is called extension.
Without quantity, the parts would be collocated and confused,
With quantity, the parts are dispersed in an order of priority and
posteriority. Without quantity, the parts would not be formally
present; the being whose parts are distributed by quantity would
only have the aptitude or exigency for parts. Quantity makes
these parts actual. Though not the essence of matter, it distributes
a mobile being into a priority and posteriority of position in a
whole.
QUANTITY IS NEITHER A CAUSE NOR A SUBSTANCE

Quantity may be redefined as the order of integral parts in the
being which it affects. And this definition is making a calculated
reference, as all accidents must, to the something beyond quan­
tity, namely the being or nature which is quantified.
To speak of order and spreading and dispersal might incline
to confusion. It might be tempting to conclude that quantity
orders like a final cause or operates like an efficient one. But
quantity is not fueled for either line of causality, it has been
noted, and it would be a most serious error to think of a substan­
tial change as involving first the appearance of substance and
later the arrival of quantity to disperse it. Nor, it was also shown,
does quantity, as such, obey a final cause as though it were a
nature, teeming with tendencies and capable by its own inner
principle of spreading matter out in this way or that.
It should further be emphasized that quantity does not ema­
nate from its subject, like a field around a magnet; for substance
could then account for its own quantity and would be divisible.

Motion and Quantity

409

There would be no difference between quantity and substance,
and Descartes would be right. The foregoing discussions have
actually proved him wrong.
As a matter of fact, when a new material substance is formed,
the substantiality and the partitiveness appear together; the
substance is responsible for what the parts are and the quantity
for the fact that there are parts, one outside the other. Quantity
does not explain the “content” that is in the parts; it is only their
distribution into an estate of distinctness, dimensionality, and
distance. Substance does not account for quantity as its product,
for then it would be quantity itself. Quantity, as an accident, is
never without substance in the nature of things, and a substance
in nature is never without quantity, as a sequel will show. But
it is not logical to say that when things appear together they are
the same thing. Quantity answers not the question what but
hmv much. It is not a cause but a disposition, something inciden­
tal to causality and to the natures which move in the universe.
No answer to the question how much can ever say what a thing
is. Quantity is the arrangement of parts outside one another and
has nothing to say about the matter which the parts extend.
Quantity then is neither a cause nor a substance.
This is where mathematics and mathematical physics part
company with the philosophical science of nature. Looking at an
envelope is not the same as reading the letter inside. In the same
way, quantity, as the extraposition of parts, cannot pour out an
intimate knowledge of the reality which the parts disperse. Not
being a cause or a substance, the order of parts which defines
quantity is order taken as a disposition in the static sense, the
sense of geometry, where priority and posteriority are not in
causal sequence, one producing the other, but in a countable
series, one coming after the other.
In a country of quantity where it has chosen to be naturalized,
modern thought has been consistent in its friendship for both
Descartes and Hume. Taking Cartesian quantity as the essence
of matter, the modem mind has abandoned the traditional notion

410

Philosophical Physics

of causes and has adopted Hume’s account which sees in the
world only countable series, studied not as natures in causal
ferment but as numbers in temporal succession.
QUANTITY MAY BE DISCRETE OR CONTINUOUS

This reference to extension and counting provides a convenient
break to recall the distinction between the two species of quan­
tity: the discrete and the continuous. Discrete quantity is quan­
tity separated into units; it is the domain of number and arith­
metic. Continuous quantity is an extended stretch, like a line in
one dimension, a surface in two, a solid in three dimensions.
Continuous quantity is studied in geometry and may be de­
fined as any quantity where the boundaries of the parts are not
actually but merely potentially present. Thus, in a continuous
line six inches long, there are not six segments, an inch in length,
laid end to end. There is an unbrokenness of parts whose limits
or boundaries are not actually bitten off. Two parts of a contin­
uum have a common term.
Continuity may be contrasted with contiguity where the parts
are only tangent or adjacent to each other without having a
common border. Contiguity belongs to discrete quantity.
Discrete quantity is of considerable moment in an account
of matter, especially when the philosophical physicist probes such
questions as the plurality of mobile beings and how they are
individuated from one another. But in an introductory work of
this sort, discrete quantity may be left to incidental treatment in
order to cope with the problem of the continuum, one of the
oldest and yet one of the liveliest issues in the philosophy of na­
ture. It has already been mentioned in the chapter on infinity,
but it deserves treatment for its own sake.
Empiriological physics explores matter by dividing it, dis­
tracted by quantity and neglecting the natures which are quanti­
fied. It has divided molecules into atoms, atoms into nuclei and
orbital electrons, nuclei into neutrons and protons, plus other
particles of lesser fame like neutrinos and mesons; apparently the

Motion and Quantity

411

neutron can be broken down into a proton and an electron. How
long or how far can division go on?
MATTER IS NOT INFINITELY DIVIDED

There are, at first glance, two possible answers to this question;
either matter is actually divided into infinity or somewhere the
division must end in what is no longer capable of division but is
indivisible. The dream of a matter divided into infinity is in the
general drift of empiriological physics, which recognizes nothing
but quantity and inertia; dynamists like Leibniz, Boscovich, and
Whitehead have chosen the second alternative. In general, dyna­
mism reduces the extended and divisible universe of experience
into inextended and indivisible parts. It is as though a line,
stretched out into space, would be nothing but a series of points
which are without extension.
Neither of these alternatives agrees with experience that the
philosophic science of nature ought to explain rather than expel
in its realism.
If matter is viewed as actually divided, all the arguments de­
veloped in Chapter 4 can be called up again. The infinitism of
the empiriological temper holds that its atom smashing does not
break up things that are formally one in nature, but merely dis­
covers the divisions as already and actually there. It tends to the
opinion that matter is infinitely divided in this fashion and that
its work is to count the divisions, pausing now and then to cata­
logue something like a proton but confident that the proton itself
is actually plural. The infinitism that lurks in the empiriological
bias would portray a universe scattered into sheer plurality,
pure passivity, indeterminacy, disorder, chance, and chaos; it
would lead to nihilism, making motion and even being impos­
sible.
But though rejecting the infinitism which a rigidly experimen­
tal method implies, it is easy to see how scientism reaches its con­
clusions. By the character of its method, empiriological physics
must ignore form. As experimental, it understands only what can

412

Philosophical Physics

be controlled in obedience to the law of inertia, and since the po­
tential is the plural, an inertial universe is a plural one.
As mathematical, empiriological physics views matter in terms
of quantity which, taken alone, is a sheer plurality of parts as
Aristotle implies.
Hence, both the matter of empiriological physics and the logi­
cal superstructure of its method, both the inertialism of Galileo
and Newton and the mathematical preferences of Descartes, join
forces to stroke a plural picture of the world. It is easy to see how
a physicomathematical approach to the real, using inertia as its
only ontology should adopt mathematics as its only logic.
Taken in its proper context, that of art, such a procedure gives
a control over nature but no certainty in our knowledge. Nature,
however, is not art, and control is only one field of human en­
deavor, subordinated to ultimate truths and ultimate goals. The
appraisal of empiriological method is not to deny it but to delimit
it. It is easy and comforting to control things, and more difficult
to explore them very deeply for the sake of knowledge alone. But
modern man in general has been willing to sacrifice knowledge
for the comfort and power of his empiriological disciplines.
In reality it is higher to know that an atom is a being than to
know how to make an atom bomb.
MATTER IS NOWHERE INDIVISIBLE

The infinitism of the empiriological method is the fruit of exag­
gerating the inertial aspects of matter. It is an overplay on the ac­
tive or non-inertial side of nature that has begotten dynamism.
Leibniz, the greatest of the dynamists, was seeking a sufficient
reason for that causal interaction of things which the Cartesian
slant, so prominent in his time, was unable to explain. How can
one thing affect another if there is no change save local move­
ment? How can unity inhabit a universe that is nothing but
quantity? Such questions inspired Leibniz to view the world in
terms of monads, indivisible in themselves, sealed off from each
other, almost vital and spiritual in their natures, and acting to­

Motion and Quantity

413

gether not through causal interplay but by virtue of a harmony
preëstablished in the universe by God. Whitehead, under the
spell of Leibniz, fashioned a world of “actual entities” which are
units of process and hence are essentially mobile and crea­
tive. Boscovich telescoped the extended world into inextended
points.
Now it is obvious that there is something to the mobile uni­
verse besides quantity and inertia; otherwise it would not move.
But dynamism is an unwarranted extreme, as illogical in many
ways as the infinitism which it opposes. Philosophy should begin
with experience underfoot and not pull a preconceived theory
out of the hat. Experience discloses the extension of the mobile
universe, and if matter is extended, it is always divisible.
For instance, an extended surface, an inch long, can be di­
vided physically into fractions of inches and fractions of the frac­
tions. Finally, the division would become so fine that even mole­
cules would be divided from each other, but molecules are
extended and hence divisible. A hydrogen molecule has a diameter
of 2.7 X 10‘8 centimeter. Mathematically, this extremely small
body can be further divided; physical division would dissect it
into atoms and the atoms into nuclear particles and orbital elec­
trons. The electron has a radius of 1.4 X IO-13 centimeter; empir­
iological physics has “not yet” divided it, as Millikan says, but it
is still divisible because extended.
Nowhere does extension trickle away to the inextended as the
division proceeds. Nor can it ever do so. The indivisible and in­
extended could never yield extension as experience discloses it.
Putting inextended things together still leaves the result inex­
tended. Putting together points does not form a line. Since points
are indivisible, where one touches another it does not do so by
parts, with point A for instance touching point B on its left side
and leaving the right side free to touch point C. A point has no
division into right or left, up or down, front or back. It is indivis­
ible, and hence if it touches another point, it does so wholly. The
result is not an extended stretch but the superposition of points.

414

Philosophical Physics

Tangent points would only coincide with each other. They
would never stretch out. There would be no more extension in a
million such points than in a single one.
Points do not sum up to extension since they are unities hav­
ing position and are only reduced to the genus of extension as a
privation. For indivisibles cannot yield the divisible and the ex­
tended, just as a million empty pockets could not produce a cent
of cash.
POTENCY AND ACT EXPLAIN THE CONTINUUM

The Aristotelian distinction of act and potency can arbitrate the
conflict between dynamism (finitism) and inertialism (infinitism), preserving what truth is to be found in each and avoiding
their errors. It discerns the contrast of what is actually divided
and potentially divided or simply between what is divided and
divisible. A whole, say an atom, is something unitary and undi­
vided if the arguments in Chapter 6 are sound. But being an ex­
tended thing in not only one but in three dimensions, it is divis­
ible, and empiriological physics has actually realized the division
in its atom smashing. The atom, stable and stubborn in its iden­
tity, may be characterized then as not actually divided in nature
but only potentially so. The empiriological physicist does not
simply discover divisions in the atom. He makes them.
The mobile world is the one place where there are two sides to
every story because there are two sides to the material things.
Inertialism fails to see that things have natures which are prin­
ciples of interiority and unity. To have form is to have feature.
It is correct to say that an atom for instance has a unity of its na­
ture and from within itself, rather than deriving its together-ness
from pressures acting from outside it. What is held together and
what holds it together are the same thing. But a material thing,
unified and undivided, is still divisible, and when the division is
made actual, the parts are likewise further divisible though they
may not be actually divided.
Dynamism accepts the unitary character of natures. But it fails

Motion and Quantity

415

to alight upon their potential aspects. It stresses form more than
matter, act more than potency. Alert that natures are undivided
as they stand in the universe, dynamism confuses the undivided
with the indivisible and must logically construct a self-moving
universe like that of Whitehead’s actual entities which are essen­
tially “creative.”
Realism would admit the infinity of matter but insist that the
infinity is one of potency. Until the division occurs, ultimate par­
ticles like molecules and atoms, being substances, are not actually
divided but potentially so. There is no limit to their divisibility.
Realism would insist with dynamism, on the other hand, that
there is a finite character to matter. It is actually undivided be­
cause the division and the infinity are only potential. Empirio­
logical physics, by dividing matter, can never get to what is ulti­
mate. But by the same fact the possibilities of unlimited progress
stretch out before it, if higher intellectual and moral agreements
among men can be reached in time to save the deeper cultural
forces that have favored the interest and methods in all scholar­
ship.
If empiriological physics had paid more heed to philosophy in
the nineteenth century, it would not have adopted the smug Vic­
torian attitude that billiard-ball atoms were ultimate and indivis­
ible bricks. Realism would likewise warn against some of the de­
scriptions of atomic energy as the “basic energy of the universe.”
A century from now, perhaps sooner, experimental physics may
have electron smashers and proton smashers, liberating an energy
even more basic than that binding energies between presently
known nuclear particles. There may even be meson physics and
meson bombs. The philosophical physicist can assure the empir­
iological physicist that his protons, electrons, and other units are
divisible. It is up to the experimentalist to devise means of doing
the actual dividing. This is one of the many points where philo­
sophical physics can be of service to empiriological physics, re­
ceiving in return a richer mine of data to illustrate its principles,
born of experience and alive to truth wherever found.

416

Philosophical Physics
ZENo’s ARGUMENTS ARE FALLACIOUS

Thus far, it has been assumed that matter is continuous and that
it is not, as Eddington expresses it, but a sprinkling of micro­
scopic dust through vast stretches of empty space. In the stick of
chalk mentioned earlier and in the case of the extended surface
of the foregoing sections, it may well be that there is not continu­
ity but a very tight contiguity between molecules; the chalk may
be something like a heap of sand where the particles are not in­
terpenetrated but simply an aggregate. There is very good evi­
dence for saying that this is the case. But there are likewise strik­
ing arguments from the theory of relativity to say the opposite
and to hold for the continuity of an iron bar or even a raindrop.
The aim of this chapter does not require the solution of this
question. But if molecules and atoms in isolation are substances,
as Chapter 6 argued, then continuity certainly exists at this level
and at the level of subatomic particles for the brief flash of their
own isolation. Aristotle discusses the problem and principles of
change before grappling with the issue of the continuum, and it
is valid to bring to bear upon the present question whatever con­
clusions were reached in the foregoing chapters about motion.
But before going any further into the discussion of where con­
tinuity certainly makes an important appearance to form true
units of quantity, it would be luminous to go again to facts of
motion by which the philosophical science of nature solves all of
its problems, including the present one.
The philosopher who made the continuum such a live issue
for Aristotle was Zeno, the Eleatic, who concocted arguments
from quantity in the attempt to prove that motion is impossible.
Some of Zeno's so-called paradoxes are rather tenuous to outline,
but a knowledge of one of them is sufficient here since they all
pivot about the same principle and reflect the same error. Zeno
argued, for instance, that an arrow could never be shot toward a
target by an archer because it would have to cross an infinite se­
ries of intervening points or places. Actually, it would not only

Motion and Quantity

417

fail to arrive at a target, but since the first fraction of its trajec­
tory would be paved with an infinity of points—one point can be
located between two others ad infmitum—the arrow would never
move at all. Working like mathematical physics from quantity to
motion, Zeno trusted his a priori reasoning more than the facts of
experience. He declared the universe to be immobile.
Modern mathematics has rediscovered Zeno in the swirls of
dust it has kicked up over the problem of infinity, and since
mathematical discursion declines to accept the unities which real­
ism discerns in nature, it aims to reconstruct the unity which mo­
tion demands from purely mathematical raw material. Zeno held
that an infinite series intervened between the origin of motion
and its term. Modern mathematics admits the series but holds
that it converges toward a limit. Thus, a geometrical progression
like 1/2, 1/4, 1/16, is one in which the terms grow smaller and
smaller tending to zero while the sum tends to a unified and rec­
ognizable number. It is often believed that a convergent series
can account for the unity of trajectory which Zeno denied and
can thus permit motion to occur, Zeno to the contrary.
However, Chapters 4 and 9 showed that such convergences
are a support for the imagination and that the difference be­
tween 1 and 2 is not a matter of infinity but is abrupt. The same
reasoning applies here. The convergence braces the imagination
but only approximates the differences which are sharp and abso­
lute in reality, available not to images but only to ideas.
The infinity involved in a converging series is the potential
one. Actually, nature is a meshwork of unities. There is the unity
of a continuum wherever motion has a trajectory and hence
wherever it occurs. Only form or act, only the unity or interiority
of natures keep the infinity of mathematics from ever becoming
actual and absolute, where it would throttle motion into a com­
plete stop. Nothing could ever move if it had to cross the infinite
series. The end could never invite it by attraction and the effi­
cient cause could never span infinity to produce its motion.
Aristotle employed against Zeno the argument that Bergson

418

Philosophical Physics

invoked against scientism; he was obsessed by the idea of what is
multiple in motion, Aristotle charged. He overlooked the unity
which motion involves. What is moved does not go along in
steps, like a heap of snow melting flake by flake until the whole
is gone. A moving thing moves as a unit, and in a world where
there are forms and unities bound up with inertias and quantities
the simplicity of motion, as blended with its plural character, can
be explained.
MOTION REQUIRES A CONTINUOUS TRAJECTORY

Even more striking and more compelling, there is a unity of mo­
tion shown by the continuum of space that a body, in local mo­
tion, is observed to traverse. This pathway can be divided and
divided, and nowhere does the indivisible appear. If it did, and if
the distance between the origin and term of a moving thing were
a discrete series of indivisible elements, the body would move by
leaps and bounds. It would not really move but would appear
now in this point, now in that, and in the interim would have to
pass out of existence. In the “skip distance” between two points,
nothing could move the thing since there is nothing there to do
so. By the time the moving body has lurched to the second point,
not to mention the last and terminal point, the influx from the
initial cause and the originality which it bestows upon the mov­
ing subject would have been lost. A moving thing would be self­
moved since it would be broken off from subjection to a cause,
vanishing in the interval between points to appear anew, ab­
ruptly and causelessly, where the interval ends. Or if it is caused,
then the cause must make it out of nothing, to which it has pre­
viously fled.
If the stretch between origin and term is not continuous but a
series of indivisibles which is the only alternative to continuity,
causality would be ruled out from another angle. A cause touch­
ing the indivisible would coincide with it, like the superposition
of tangent points. Cause and effect would become the same
thing. Motion would be impossible once more. In the efficient

Motion and Quantity

419

order, the cause must be divisible, hence continuous, and the
same conclusion applies to the effect. Otherwise their contact
would be superposition and coincidence, equivalence and indis­
tinction, and the extrinsic cause would cease to be both extrinsic
and causal. It may then be taken as a valid principle that cause
and effect in the efficient order are divisible and continuous.
If a trajectory is pocked by indivisible subintervals, final cau­
sality would perish also. The initial tendencies of things would
have no meaning if they had to be snapped out of existence to
attain the goal of the nature which bears them. Besides, a reality
at its term would be completely different from the initial reality
which vanished in gaps along the trajectory, and hence the ini­
tial tendencies would never be fulfilled.
The intrinsic causes would, of course, evaporate in the gaps of
the trajectory, giving way to a vacuum, which is another absurd­
ity.
Hence, the lack of unity or the denial of the continuum in the
stretch which a moving body covers would actually eliminate the
four causes of motion and thus make motion impossible. A mere
quantitative attack upon the moving world, like that attempted
by Zeno and by modern mathematical physics, cannot make out
a convincing case that there is or is not such a thing as a con­
tinuum in nature. But studying the continuum as a problem
raised and solved by motion is only to treat it as philosophical
physics should. Without the continuum motion would not only
remain unexplained. It could not occur at all.
It may be concluded from the foregoing study that, in addition
to the testimony of experience on the continuous trajectory of a
moving body, reason can defend the reality of the continuum in
the light of the fourfold causality in nature.
CONTINUITY DOES NOT IMPLY HOMOGENEITY

If the atom and the molecule are substances, as Chapter 6 ar­
gued, then they are capable of causing, because substances have
natures and natures have tendencies, and tendencies are poised

420

Philosophical Physics

for action to a goal; a nature is defined as a cause and principle.
The atom and molecule and other such unities must be divisible
or continuous units, organized by their forms so that there are no
gaps in their structure and having throughout their being the
same nature whose parts are spread outside of each other by
quantity. The form is indivisible since it exists wholly in the
whole and wholly in all of the parts; it would not be indivisible
if it were interrupted between the nucleus of an atom, say, and
the orbital electrons. Form represents the indivisible or simple
principle found in mobile being; primordial matter, or more prop­
erly quantity, is the source of divisibility and partition and
extraposition.
The continuous character of atoms and molecules does not re­
quire that they be homogeneous or insure that they would appear
as undifferentiated if microscopy could ever resolve itself to the
point of seeing them. A differential structure should be expected
in matter, and something analogous to the Rutherford planetary
atom is surely to be found apart from experiment. At least, sound
philosophy on the basis of sound empiriological physics would
accord with the view that the positive particles of the atom are
concentrated near its center as Rutherford reasoned.
But such differential texture within the atom does not mean
that its parts are separated and discontinuous. If the positive
charge is concentrated in the center, it could be pointed out that
the brain of man is concentrated in his head. But in the human
body, as physiology shows more clearly than anatomy, the head
is not separated from the lower portions. It is motion of a thing,
not looks, that grind the science of nature on to its conclusions.
In a similar way, the atom can have a heterogeneity of appear­
ance and even a heterogeneity of function without becoming a
mere mechanical aggregate.
The form of mineral matter is much less dominant over the
primordial substrate than in man’s case, and it would be expected
that it would be able to achieve less of a unity among the parts of
atoms than the soul of man obtains over his material principle.

Motion and. Quantity

421

Matter is almost inert; the form is weak, and partition and plu­
rality are strong. This has sparked empiriological physics to daz­
zling triumphs over mineral nature and led to the belief that the
aspects studied by empirical methods are the only aspects that
matter owns. But there is just enough form in the minera] world
to make the empiriological approach inadequate even to touch
what is highest in nature, its form, unity, finality, and motor
character. The presence of this form, which constantly steels
matter to resist the empiriological physicist when he attempts to
treat it as purely passive, forever challenges the existing empirio­
logical techniques and forces them to be revised in time to push
on their control and their conquest.
MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL DIVISION DIFFER

If what has been said is correct about atoms and molecules, it is
also clear that a neutron, proton, or any other subatomic entity is
not quite the same inside the atom as out of it; as food is not the
same after digestion that it was before, so if the atom has a for­
mal unity, its parts which are virtually present in it share the na­
ture of the whole and no longer have the independence in being
and in motion which they enjoyed when isolated. But care must
be taken lest the elemental parts, like the subatomic units in the
case of an atom, be confused with quantitative parts. Quantita­
tive parts do not say what is extended but only that there is an
extension.
This suggests the distinction between physical and mathemati­
cal division: After a mathematical division, the parts may still be
of the same character as the whole. When a rectangle is bisected
across its length, the two parts are still rectangles, and they are of
homogeneous extension like the original. Division of a homoge­
neous continuum, where the parts are of the same kind of matter
as the original, ought also to be thought out for its physical im­
portance, as in the case of a hydrogen molecule divided into hy­
drogen atoms.
But the physical division might also result in a substantial

422

Philosophical Physics

change. If, for instance, the experimenter wielded a subatomic
razor that could slice a helium atom into equal halves the two di­
vided parts would not be helium. They would be hydrogen iso­
topes. Actually, the empiriological physicist achieves the same re­
sults with particle guns, dividing matter not into homogeneous
parts or parts that resemble the original but inducing substanial
changes by his division.
Mathematical division is the division of extension; physical di­
vision involves substantial change with new species of matter ap­
pearing in the residue. Both kinds of division can occur in the
same motion, though there seems to be no reason why mathe­
matical division could not occur without the physical one, so that
a change of extension appears without a change in the type of
substance under dissection. The case of hydrogen would seem to
indicate that this actually happens.
SUBSTANCES NEED MINIMUM QUANTITIES

Aristotle argued that materia] substances have minimum quanti­
ties and that when they are divided beyond these requisite di­
mensions a substantial change is produced. This idea finds a
warm confirmation in empiriological physics.
For example, if carbon is completely divided into units of
about IO’13 centimeter, the resulting particles will not be carbon
but subatomic particles. An outer orbital electron or even several
of them can be chipped from the carbon and the remainder is
still carbon, even if the original atom now has a different electri­
cal quality. A neutron could also be dislodged from the carbon
nucleus, and no change of substance would be noted.
But divided far enough and beyond a certain minimal value,
carbon would cease to be carbon. Smashed so that all of its units
were of the order of magnitude of 1O'1S centimeter or smaller, the
carbon atom would decline to be an atom at all. Chisel out a pro­
ton instead of a neutron from the carbon nucleus, and a consid­
erable change takes place. The element no longer has six for its
atomic number but five. It is no longer carbon but a boron iso­

Motion and Quantity

423

tope. Removing a neutron and removing a proton, particles of
about the same “quantity” have two quite different effects upon
the carbon.
But when Aristotle insisted that every substance, in order to
preserve its identity and existence, required a minimum quantity
specific to the substance, he was taking quantity in its strict sense,
the extraposition of parts. What these parts arc, quantity alone
does not say; it merely says that there are parts. A probing of the
kinship of quantity and substance with attention to modern
atomic physics will break upon the truth that each kind of sub­
stance has its own threshold quantity beyond which it changes
character. Unfortunately a long build-up will be needed before
this problem of minimal parts can be resumed.
QUANTITY IS CLOSE TO SUBSTANCE

In a sense, quantity comes closer to being a substance than any of
the other accidents. Its definition as a plurality of parts suggests
its affinity to prime matter, the most characteristic principle of the
mobile world, dividing it off from the world of spirit. Quantity,
however, is still far from matter. It is an accident. It is not in the
substantia] order nor a principle of substantial motion. Matter is
sheer plurality because it is pure potency; form is the term of
generation, conferring on matter a substantial identity and thus
making it complete.
But form does not invest the integral parts with an actual sta­
tus. As act, form is indivisible. The spreading of the integral parts
can be the work neither of the matter which is not actual nor the
form which is not divisible. It is the office of quantity which is
always a quantity of an informed nature.
Quantity is thus not matter. It presumes both matter and form,
dispersing the substantial identity which results from their union.
But though following the logic against the identity of quantity
and substance, the fact remains that the plural character of quan­
tity does make it a close analogy to matter.
Quantity is called the first accident of material being and the

424

Philosophical Physics

proximate subject in which the qualities inhere. This kinship of
quantity and prime matter is already an argument that quantity
is the first accident of mobile being. But there is another and
more illuminating insight that comes from form.
MATTER OPERATES THROUGH QUANTITY

Material form is not capable of subsisting by itself (except of
course in man’s case where special reservations must be made to
account for his spiritual soul). The material form is not great
enough of its nature to claim that simplicity of being and opera­
tion, characteristic of realities from man upward. Just as a great
mind can see at a glance certain truths that lesser intellects must
take time and effort to reach, so higher realities operate more sim­
ply than lower ones, and with greater independence of outside
instruments. What loftier beings do undividedly, lower ones can
only achieve with a division of labor. The more eminent and in­
tense a being is, the less transeunt is its mode of operation.
Giving the words a real and not merely logical flavor, it could
be said that intensity is the converse of extensity in a striking
way here. The more intense a form, the fewer steps are needed to
reach a goal that a less intensified thing must approach pace by
pace, part by part, doing by a kind of extraposition, and hence
extension, what a simpler form does more simply.
Now in the mineral world, the form, with its destiny to exist
and operate only in matter, cannot do its work unless it is spread
out. Where an intellect can operate indivisibly, not like a point
but completely above reference to quantity, matter has no such
concentration and interiority and loftiness of nature. The mate­
rial nature must be scattered to achieve by number and size what
a higher being can do with fewer facilities. A mineral needs parts
so that its form can operate; a plant begins to show the rise of an
intensity in being over its extensity; an animal is even more strik­
ing in the unity which it clamps upon its parts; and in the mind
and will of man there is a simplicity of operation which shows a
complete lack of parts in the principle by which he exists and
lives and senses and thinks.

Motion and Quantity

425

In order to operate and hence to own a nature and be a sub­
stance, a material thing needs quantity before all other attributes.
Quantity spreads out the matter-form union, disposing it into an
extraposition of parts which, being distinct from one another, en­
able the form to divide its labor and to express its power of mo­
tion some of it here and some of it there. It cannot exercise this
power either in a punctual way or in the supraquantitative man­
ner of a spirit.
Quantity is naturally necessary when matter is contrasted with
spirit, when transeunce is opposed to immanence, and when the
foothills in the hierarchy of matter are set off against the peaks.
The weaker a form the more it depends on quantity to spread it
out, in some way reclaiming through number what it lacks in
nature.
It is easy to see how Descartes was lured into taking quantity
for the essence of matter; and it is likewise apparent why empir­
iological physics has scored so impressively on the Galileo-New­
tonian stage of inertia, which holds the exteriority or extraposi­
tion of all matter’s determinants. But quantity and inertia,
however close they lie to the core of matter, are not close enough.
There is always a minimum form in all matter, however inert,
and form is in a different order from both matter which is an in­
complete substance of pure potentiality and from quantity which
is not a substance at all.
Aquinas pointed out the fact, witnessed in empiriological
physics, that the figures of mineral things were rich in revealing
their inner substances and their differences from one another.
This would follow if quantity is as close to matter as the fore­
going paragraphs set it and if quantity is the first subject of in­
herence for all the other material properties.
QUANTITY SOLVES QUESTIONS ABOUT SUBSTANCE

On the basis of the foregoing analysis which etched out the need
for quantity by the very nature of matter and material form,
three allied subjects can be explored : why quantity is the proxi­
mate subject of inherence for all the other material accidents,

426

Philosophical Physics

how elements are virtually present in compounds, and finally
why substances require a minimum amount of quantity beyond
which division introduces substantial changes.
1. Quantity is the proximate subject of inherence for all the
other attributes of matter, its qualities like color and sound, rarity
and density, and the operations like local motion, with its actions
and passions that modify subjects. The truth of all this can be
ground out by using the conclusion of the previous development
where quantity was seen to spread matter out, meeting the re­
quirements of its form for doing in an extensive and scattered
way what the higher forms can do more intensively and with
greater concentration.
The definition and discussion of quality and its divergence
from the quantitative must be withheld until the following chap­
ter. But quality could never do its work unless it were spread out,
as mineral form requires. Bergson was more or less in stride with
Aristotle when he called quantity “a distention of quality,” for
quality, like any other material reality, has to be dispersed in or­
der to vindicate itself.
It is a commonplace observation that material quality has to do
with extended surfaces, for the inextended could never be col­
ored, and it certainly does not emit sound. Qualities in matter,
being of it and from it, could not operate at a point or in a supraquantitative and spiritual way. They must be extraposed, and
this distention is quantity. Matter must be distributed in order to
receive qualities, just as matter must be distributed before it can
operate in any other way.
2. The genuine notion of quantity also enables a further prob­
ing of the virtual presence of elements in compounds. (Cf. Chap­
ter 6.) Though there is one form for the composite and hence an
overall substantial unity in its being, one part is distinct from an­
other. The being is dispersed so that each part has different vir­
tualities and potencies.
Matter cannot operate pointally or spiritually, and the form
sublets its work to the various parts. Each part operates with dif-

Motion and Quantity

427

ferent powers or virtues for the good of the whole, enabling mat­
ter to achieve in a divisible way what higher beings accomplish
indivisibly. Matter is too poor to deploy its manifold of motions
in a simple way. It requires a heterogeneity of parts, each one
having a more or less specific function within a whole that is in­
formed. The plurality of function in an atom, for instance, re­
quires a plurality of different kinds of parts which are virtually
present in the form of the totality. The more virtual parts there
are in a material substance the loftier are its motions.
Philosophical physics would tend to anticipate the differentia­
tion within the atom that empiriological physics has spaded up
through the work of Rutherford. It would be an ally of Einstein
in his stress of the anisotropic character of space. It would join in
certain part-whole statements of quantum mechanics.
3. Lastly, the form’s need of quantity in order to move ex­
plains the meaning of minimal parts in substances, beyond which
they cannot be divided. Quantity extraposes the content of their
virtualities. Too little quantity means that the form does not have
what it takes to operate, and what cannot operate in nature can­
not exist. Removing a proton from carbon removes a virtual­
ity that the carbon needs in order to be carbon, and boron re­
sults.
Cutting up any atom by restricting the volume which it can
occupy will eventually destroy the virtualities which the sub­
stance needs and a new substance will result. The smaller vol­
ume eventually becomes so small that it does not afford the ex­
tended facility for the present form to express itself, and the form
vanishes in favor of another one which is more at home in the ex­
tension available.
The genuine notion of quantity would lead to a suspicion that
further division of matter, especially the neutron or neutral meson,
may bring further liberation of its virtualities. For matter re­
quires a divisible and heterogeneous and differential field in or­
der to operate and to compensate by expanse of quantity for what
it lacks in strength of form.

428

Philosophical Physics
THE BOHR THEORY HARMONIZES WITH PHILOSOPHY

The infinitely divisible was one of the ways in which Aristotle
defined the continuum. His philosophy, as it has so far been de­
fended, has forced the conclusion that a substance, like an atom
or a molecule, is certainly a continuous unit.
But there seems to be a serious challenge to this whole idea in
the quantum theory, as founded by Planck and ornamented by
Bohr. Planck discovered that energy is emitted in discrete packets,
and Bohr applied this novel notion to the atom. According to the
Bohr theory, an electron in an outer atomic orbit can be excited
into even more remote orbits by suitable means. When it falls
back toward its native orbit, the theory continues, it does not do
so continuously. It moves by a leap, and a quantum of light is
emitted in the process.
The important and somewhat revolutionary turn of the Bohr
atom is its discrete character. The quantum is not protruded little
by little, beginning with zero and reaching a maximum of energy.
It is emitted all at once, and the electron which obtains its release
is therefore thought to move discontinuously. Such a phenome­
non would seem to oppose the Aristotelian idea of continuity.
(There is a similar discontinuity suggested by the photoelectric
effect, as explained by Einstein, a contributor to quantum theory
as well as the author of relativity.)
However, in the quantum atom there is more of an obscurity
than a pointed difficulty. It should be remarked in the first place
that the Bohr idea is hazy with theory and on purely logical
grounds cannot compete with the Aristotelian notion of matter’s
continuity, as hardened by experience. In the second place, the
reason for matter’s apparent discontinuity may well be the inter­
ference of man’s instruments, creating the uncertainty enunci­
ated by the Heisenberg principle. In the third place, the appar­
ent discontinuity might owe itself to any number of factors; the
break between cause and effect, between matter and form, be­
tween the inert and the dynamic.

Motion and Quantity

429

The Aristotelian doctrine does not affirm but on the contrary
stoutly denies the entitative continuity between a thing and its
environment, between datum and instrument, between matter
and form which cannot be included in the same concept any
more than position and velocity can be congealed into a single
category.
This is not a fluid universe but a universe of discrete natures,
and the apparently discrete character of energies measured on a
refined scale might simply be the result of these gaps that make
the airplane different from the air.
There is not enough data to interpret the Planck and Bohr
hypotheses in detail. But there is copious evidence, on other
grounds, to weight the scales against matter’s discontinuity. This
evidence was marshaled against Zeno’s pointillism. It should also
be reaffirmed that form is indivisible and that the same form can­
not inform parts that are separated by a gap. The same facts of
efficient and final causality that were invoked earlier break down
the Bohr picture, when taken as an exact account of the way
things are in nature instead of as mere analogy that must be inter­
preted in a larger context.
MEASURE NUMBERS THE CONTINUUM

Continuous quantity is measurable. It is known by measure­
ment, which may in turn be defined as the correlation of the con­
tinuum with number. In the proper sense of the word, only the
continuum can be measured. The whole or the parts or both are
compared with some standard, and the ratio between the datum
and the standard is expressed by number.
Defining the standard is as subtle as it is common. According
to strict empiriological method where discursion is the rule and
inertia the reality, the standard ought to be determined by an­
other one outside it, and so ad infinitum. This infinite regression,
however, is not only illogical in theory. Practice must always cir­
cumvent it. The empiriological physicist measures a yardstick
first with respect to itself by making a merely logical distinction

430

Philosophical Physics

between the yardstick as a thing of continuous length and the
yardstick as a standard to measure other continua. The empirio­
logical physicist is required to accept the self-evident or the selfintelligible in choosing his norms, and he brings something more
than his strictly empiriological method to the task. That some­
thing is human intelligence which is able to relate a thing to it­
self, understanding it as it is and hence not driven through the
dark corridor of infinity.
Measurement provides no glimpses of the absolute. It simply
compares beings of the same order with each other, moving nei­
ther up nor down a hierarchy but sidewise. A meter rod is not an
absolute thing. It is scaled by lines that have thickness and are
not the widthless lines of pure geometry, which would be invis­
ible.
Both the approximate character of actual measurements and
their failure to climb above the order where they begin bar the
empiriological method, even in its logical instruments, from ever
being able to probe content and study the true and real causal­
ities of motion which are graduated into hierarchy.
No matter how gross or how fine, measurement can never bare
the kind of being that it is measuring. It comes close, to the ex­
tent of the proximity between quantity and matter and to the ex­
tent that quantity distends the virtualities of substance. But meas­
uring things is toto coelo different from telling what they are.
Measurements record quantity. They register whether it is great
or small, with respect to a norm. It is only by measurement that
quantity is known and compared.
In many respects, mathematics is the most human of the sci­
ences. It deals with quantified being, and the mind is quite at
home among the quantified. As Maritain says, in metaphysics
there is too much intelligibility, and in the physical order too lit­
tle. Mathematics is facile, and this may account for its perennial
appeal and its special prominence in the present.
In mathematics even more than in empiriological physics, the
controlling power of man is front and center. The mind can con­

Motion and Quantity

431

struct in mathematics, as if creative, and the highest science, that
in God which man analogates as a constructive mathematician,
is one that not only thinks things as they are but, thinking, makes
them so. There is no possibility of error in God’s knowledge, and
constructive mathematics imitates this. But quantity is not na­
ture, and mathematics is not philosophy.
Finally, mathematics proceeds on the surface of the real,
equating things of the same order with each other. Its horizon is
the world of man’s own power to conceptualize. Philosophy be­
gins in the world about us and rises to a higher one. Empiriologi­
cal physics begins in the world and descends to a lower one. But
mathematics takes the world before man and compares its mutual
regularities and relations on the same plane. Measurement is a
human task, but the big and important task is to find what
man is.
MATTER IS IMPENETRABLE

It is primarily by its quantity that matter is in place and is im­
penetrable.
Place, according to the classic definition, is the first surface of
a surrounding body. The measure here is a quasi-geometrical one
in terms of extension, but extension in its natural rather than a
separate mathematical setting. It is by quantity that a thing fills a
place, spreads throughout its dimensioning volume. But with this
deference to quantity, it must be reaffirmed that motion is prior
in the recognition of place, in propelling a body to it, and in ex­
plaining why the body is there.
Experience witnesses that two (or more) bodies no not occupy
the same place. Each has dimensions, and each is commensurate
with the place that it occupies. When one body moves into the
place of another, the second body is dislodged.
If two bodies were in the same place, they would have more
than a common location. They would have the same quantity.
That would mean that two bodies were using the same extension
as a field to deploy their powers, and the limits of matter do not

432

Philosophical Physics

permit such fertility. Two bodies with the same localized field of
operation would have to be the same body, having the same vir­
tualities and the same instruments. Quantity and material vir­
tuality would be called upon to do more than they could if they
had to channel two different forms into their natural operation.
Matter is heterogeneous and rich in virtuality, where one part
has one job to do; it cannot double up in the way that penetrabil­
ity would require.
QUANTITY YIELDS A PREDICAMENTAL UNITY

In the mineral world, there is no motion attached to quantity as
such. Growth, which the classical vocabulary called augmenta­
tion, is an increase in the quantity of the growing thing; but vital
action, such as growth, does not appear in the mineral world,
where there are no changes of quantity in the proper sense.
Knocking an electron from an atom’s edge is a qualitative change.
Smashing the atom changes its substance. Piling a heap of sub­
stances together, like laying bricks, does not change the sub­
stances but only their position. There is more local motion than a
change of quantity.
Quantity in the mineral world does not change.
This remark is easily grasped in the light of what quantity is.
It does not have interiority or nature. It is not a cause or principle
of motion. It does not tend to change. It has no final cause, and
as a plurality of parts, spread out rather than concentrated and
compenetrated, it does not of its nature move other things, like
an efficient agent. A newspaper will burn not because it is rec­
tangular but because it is paper. A box will rot in the weather not
because it is one box and not two, but because it is wooden.
A cause acting in the cosmos must be a unit freighted with
tendencies. Quantity is more scattered than determined when
taken in itself.
The unity ascribed to quantity is usually called predicamental
unity in contrast to transcendental unity which is a synonym for
being and is studied in metaphysics. Predicamental unity is the

Motion and Quantity

433

principle of number. Such a unity added to another unity, for
instance, is the number 2. Predicamental unity in the order of
extension is number transferred to extended quantity and used as
a unit to measure it. Predicamental unity is a yardstick; it is the
principle for a sum. A number is specified by its last unity, and
when this is subtracted, the next smaller integer results. The
new number can be applied to measure extension.
But predicamental unity, the principle of number and of meas­
ured continuity, does not have a nature. It is not a principle of
motion. It is entirely in the order of quantity, a factor of succes­
sive more than causal order and a means of organizing things
rather than explaining their inner character.
The unity of a nature is not of this type. Two natures cannot
be added together to get something new. Only an aggregate re­
sults from the addition. But quantity has no interiority that for­
bids its union with other quantities. It can be added and sub­
tracted. The unity which it claims is of a different type from that
of natures. A unit can lose itself in a higher number because it
has no tendencies that would repel another unit or a series of
them. Number is not the unity of nature but a unity of order,
whose species or size is determined by the last unity added which
terminates the rest, as matter is terminated by form.
Mobile realities have more than sheer quantity. They are al­
ways of a determinate quantity, as required by the being in
which they inhere. The thing which quantity serves as an in­
strument to disseminate power and virtuality is determinate, and
the quantity is determinate likewise.^This is another way of stat­
ing that the quantity of any material being cannot be actually in­
finite. Quantity is terminated essentially not by outside forces but
by the nature which bears it. There is an intrinsic termination of
quantity because of the intrinsic principle in which it inheres,
which is the unity not of quantity but of nature.
The shape and figure of a mobile thing is not the fruit of
quantity. Quantity is the extraposition of parts. It is pluralizing
and it says nothing about the organization of objects into round,

434

Philosophical Physics

oblong, or irregular figures. Shape and figure are something fig.
yond quantity. They belong to the genus of quality, and they
bridge over to the subject of the next chapter.

Suggested Readings
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. VI, chs. 1-10.
Nagel, Ernest, On the Logic of Measurement (New York, 1930).

13
Alteration: The Motion of Quality
ALTERATION IS MOTION IN QUALITY

Because quantity in the drama of modern thought has so popular
a part, the last chapter was exempted from proof that quantity ex­
ists and headed almost at once to what quantity does in the mo­
bile world and what it is. Here, at the doorway to a study of qual­
ity, just the opposite problem looms up. Since the time of
Galileo and Descartes, and especially under the patronage of
John Locke, philosophers have inclined to think that such acces­
sories of matter as color and sound are coupled to reality by the
mind. Extremists, like Berkeley, go even further to hold that all
attributes of matter such as extension, and movement which
Locke wrongly termed a quality, are only ideas. Though idealism
is in retreat, there is a strong bias in modern thought to deny the
existence of quality as such and to reduce to quantity and local
movement what the ordinary man calls sound, color, and heat.
From the task of passing sentence on Locke and Berkeley,
philosophical physics can of course be saved. Such work belongs
to metaphysics since the problem of knowledge’s value is not one
of motion. This critical discussion, of course, should come after
philosophical physics has had its say. For contrary to the Kantian
dream, the critical issue must follow after the rest of philosophy
has evolved, since knowledge is its subject matter or its content.
Going before knowledge which it reflects upon and justifies, it
would begin with nothing to study.
The philosophical science of nature must regard the problem
of quality as it looks at everything else, through the keyhole fitted
435

436

Philosophical Physics

by motion. By alterations are meant those changes which result
in new attributes or properties in a subject without the destruc­
tion of the subject itself. They are changes which are neither of
substance nor of place.
Water is the same substance whether it is snow, ice, or steam.
Moving the water from place to place does not alter its color. The
changes in the appearance of water in going from one state to an­
other are likewise unaccountable by sheer quantity, which is a
simple extraposition of parts and does not imply that the parts are
white, blue, or that they are colored at all.
Bodies not only change color. They also change in sound.
Moreover, the changes need not be directed from one species
of color or sound to another, like the shift from yellow to orange
or from middle to high C in a musical note. There may be
changes in brilliance or loudness, an intensification or remission
of the same type of color or sound. All such changes are what is
meant by alteration, which occurs, Aristotle says, “when the sub­
stratum is perceptible and persists, but changes in its own prop­
erties, the properties in question being opposed to one another
either as contraries or as intermediaries.”1
Alteration, according to this description, requires three things:
Q) there must be a substratum or a subject which does not
change but loses one quality to acquire another as the result of
the movement; (2) the changes are therefore of properties or at­
tributes which inhere in the subject; (3) the old and the new
attributes must be opposites like hot or cold or some intermediate
temperature; the point is that one property is replaced by another
of the same genus, by a different color, sound, temperature, or
the like.
There are three different kinds of alteration. Simple alteration
is a change from one species of property to another in the same
genus, like changes of color or of pitch. Intensification or inten­
sion is the change from a lesser to a greater possession of a prop­
1 On Generation and Corruption, Bk. 1, ch. 4.

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

437

erty, to a brighter color or louder sound. Remission is the oppo­
site to intension.
With this preface of definitions and divisions in alteration, the
next question will be the nature and divisions of quality itself.
Examples throughout this chapter will be confined to color and
sound for the sake of simplicity, and the empiriological view of
these two fields will be sketched before showing that quality is
not inertial but that the determinate must always be formal.
Quality is therefore formal but only in the accidental order.
Quality is, furthermore, bound up with quantity and so close to
substance that any alteration tends to substantial change. Inten­
sion and remission and condensation and rarefaction will be dis­
cussed where they involve true alterations. Having defined and
defended the various types of alteration, the chapter will then
discuss the continuity of alteration as proposed by Aristotle and
challenged by Bohr. Finally, realistic dualism will be reaffirmed
as accounting for both quantity and quality in the real world.
QUALITY IS A PROXIMATE FORM

The region of the mobile world in which alteration occurs is that
of quality which like substance, quantity, place, and time, is one
of the ultimate categories of material being and hence has no
higher genus which permits it to be defined. Quality, Aristotle
declares, is what makes a substance qualified, a description that
says very little except to give a concrete stiffening to an abstrac­
tion. Aquinas is clearer when he calls quality a mode or disposi­
tion of substance, which does not just extend its subject like
quantity but determines it in the line of form. It informs the sub­
ject in a way analogous to the function of substantial form with
respect to prime matter. Unlike quantity, it perfects and actuates
the subject by adding something new to its potencies rather than
simply distending parts without bringing anything new in the
line of form to what is so dispersed.
Another way of gaining a hold on quality is as a proximate
principle of operations. It is, in the order of properties, what a

438

Philosophical Physics

nature is, in the order of subjects. A substance acts through its
qualities as through its instruments, affecting thus the realities
surrounding it and revealing itself to man. Mineral substance, it
has been argued, is impoverished; it needs tools to achieve what
higher things can do in simpler fashion. Projects that matter it­
self is not great and nimble enough to accomplish, it calls on
qualities to facilitate.
But mere mathematical division of labor is not enough to ac­
count for variety. There are deep differences of form among
qualities, revealing even deeper cleavages among their sub­
stances; so much so that chemists can identify things often by
their color, taste, or smell; so much so that geophysics can map
the mineral structures deep beneath the soil by a study of the
electrical, magnetic, or acoustic qualities which echo on the sur­
face.
Moreover, it is through quality that the plural character of a
nature which quantity prepares is made full and formal, and
through quality too that the same substance can have different
powers or virtues which quantity extraposes to enable the sub­
stance to realize its destiny.
It is, in short, through quality that a nature, fundamentally
one, owns a diversity of more proximate principles which further
its motions and reveal its character.
QUALITY IS FOURFOLD

Quality is a more elastic term than alteration, and a quick glance
at its various divisions will narrow down the scope of this chapter
and beam its issues into brighter focus. There are four species of
quality; habit and disposition; potency and impotency, passion
and sensible qualities (patibiles qualitates'); and form and fig­
ure.
The psychological inclinations of man are called dispositions,
if easily affected, and habits, when they are difficult to change.
But the probing of these qualities does not belong to the study of
inanimate nature and may be elided here with mere mention.

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

439

Potency and impotency are the proximate principles of opera­
tion in a given substance and are synonymous with its tenden­
cies. Potency is a strong tendency like that of lead to fall. Impo­
tency is a weak one, like that of an electron to budge a mountain.
Such tendencies are not natures but stem from natures. Though
the philosophical science of nature is concerned with them, they
need not be considered in this chapter because they do not in­
volve alteration. They are not altered in the proper sense because
they change only with the nature changes and appear in the na­
ture when it is realized anew. It is more correct to treat them
under generation and corruption.
Passion and sensible quality (patibilis qualitas^) form the third
species of quality. Passion is a transient quality, like the redness
of a blushing cheek. Sensible quality is more permanent and is,
in the proper meaning of the word, alterable quality, changed
without changing the subject. Examples of it are color, sound,
taste, smell, hardness or softness of surface, heat, electricity, and
magnetism.
Form and figure, the fourth and last species of quality, apply
to quantity, though they terminate it in this way or that and
hence involve more than the sheer extraposition of parts which
is all that quantity can explain in matter. Figure is shape and
form is proportion. The figure of a thing might be irregular, unsymmetrical, and unique, to a point of being unnameable to a
mathematician. Form adds proportion to shape, and the example
usually given of it is a work of art, like a statue which adds a new
and proportioned arrangement to the figured matter of its me­
dium. Form and figure can likewise be omitted in a discussion of
alteration since they are not changed by continuous movement
which a later section will prove essential to alteration. Form and
figure vary abruptly like number. The difference between a poly­
gon and a circle is not a matter of more or less polygon but is
a sharp, discrete affair like the difference between 1 and 2 in
arithmetic.
Ruling out some qualities because they do not pertain to philo-

440

Philosophical Physics

sophical physics and others because they do not involve altera­
tion, this chapter can be narrowed down to sensible qualities,
their reality, their relations, and their motion. “Narrowing down”
is a rather optimistic way of putting it. The subject of alteration
is almost as contested and certainly as complicated on the modern
scene as the discussion of substance and its changes. Hence to
simplify an otherwise colossal task, the following account of al­
terable qualities will be further localized to a discussion of color
and sound. On the basis of the principles developed and applied
in the study of color and sound, the philosophical physics of the
other qualities can be easily suggested.
EXPERIMENTALLY, COLOR AND SOUND ARE MECHANICAL

It will be fruitful to outline at the very outset what the empirio­
logical physicist says about color-and sound to align this view
with that of Aristotle, leaving experience to decide the issue.
The classical physicist regarded the color of a body as a play of
reflections, and with certain improvements, that view still holds.
Objects appear colored only in light, the most common and natu­
ral light being that of the sun.
Sunlight or white light, as it is often called, is in reality a com­
posite of about seven distinct colors: red, orange, yellow, green,
blue, indigo, and violet. Most objects in nature absorb some com­
ponents of sunlight and reflect the rest. It is the reflected light
which is actually seen and called the color of the given object.
For instance, grass absorbs all the rays except' the green; sulfur
reflects only the light near the yellow band of the spectrum. Coal
absorbs nearly all the light, and snow reflects practically all of it.
Though satisfied with its grosser picture, classical physics,
when it got down to detail, ran into difficulties. It viewed light in
terms of electromagnetic waves, and concluding that the source
of reflected waves had to be electrical in nature, it came to say, at
last, that the color of a substance must somehow be determined
by atomic electrons. Yet how the electron could fill such require­
ments was a source of difficulty, some empiriological physicists

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

441

holding that the reflected light was a factor of the orbital motion
of the electron about the nucleus, others saying that the electron
emitted light determined by its vibratory motion. Either view left
large problems unsolved.
About the time of this crisis and in the first decade of the pres­
ent century, a whole new view of empiriological physics emerged
out of the study of radiation. By assuming that light was not
emitted in continuous electromagnetic waves but in discrete en­
ergy packets, called quanta, Planck was able to work out an equa­
tion for one of the facts of radiation (the black-body problem),
unexplained by the classical system. Planck’s idea on this point
was developed especially by the work of Einstein (photoelectric
effect), and the corpuscular or particle theory of light caught up
with the wave theory that had full command of the classical high­
ways. As a result, empiriological physics, without completely dis­
carding the wave theory, came to hold that there was a particle
aspect to light and to other forms of energy.
One of the pioneers of quantum theory was Bohr, who recast
the prevailing picture of the atom to fit it into the quantum the­
ory and especially to equip the atom with a quantum apparatus
for the emission of light. According to the Bohr theory, the or­
bital electrons have certain stationary orbits in which they re­
volve without emitting light. Excited by suitable means, sunlight
or otherwise, an outer electron will move further outward to
more distant orbits, where it may be unstable. Falling back from
an unstable to a stationary orbit, the electron emits a quantum of
light whose frequency is determined by the energy differences
between the two orbits. If the electron has gone to an orbit more
removed from the nuclear center, the frequency will naturally be
higher when it falls back because the quantum of energy is big­
ger. A higher frequency means a different light since color is de­
termined by frequency (or wave length).
Hydrogen is the simplest element, and the Bohr theory has
scored its most notable successes in explaining the different colors
(spectral lines) which can be produced by apparently forcing its

442

Philosophical Physics

electrons out to remote orbits, where they snap back again toward
the center. On more complicated atoms, the mathematical com­
plexities make the Bohr theory difficult to verify, and there is evi­
dence indeed that it is not even verifiable in principle. But the
simple outline of an atom which it sketches, though modified by
succeeding developments in empiriological physics, has been
more or less retained as a qualitative working model of the atomic
profile.
The color of an object is determined by the emission of energy
when the electrons in the given atoms fall inward toward station­
ary' states from orbits to which they have been driven by suitable
excitation. And modern philosophy would have it that the
quanta, peeling off from the atoms in question, impinge on the
retina to create the psychological impression of color, much as
electrons spray on a television screen to form a picture.
The study of sound, on the other hand, has not been nearly so
fascinating to recent empiriological physics as the probing of
light. This is easy to understand since visual data, compared to
those of sound, seem much more important in nature, more meas­
urable by instruments, more stimulating to the emotions, and
often more convincing to the mind. It is as though modern man
accepted the maxim that seeing is believing, and had no other
credo. Recent engineering problems in ultrasonics have revived
interest in acoustical problems, though most of the great minds
in empiriological physics remain rooted to the study of matter
and light energy, so greatly fertilized by the quantum and rela­
tivity innovations.
Sound is considered to be a phenomenon of waves. Its students
were never prompted to posit an ether in order to account for the
nature of what is waving. The classical idea goes more or less un­
questioned that the sound waves are those of particles, like the
molecules in the air. Light waves are called transverse because
they move at right angles to the direction of propagation. Putting
it crudely, they dance up and down from the line of energy flow,
like the waves of the sea rising and falling. But sound waves are
different. They are called longitudinal waves because their crests

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

443

and troughs are not at right angles to the direction of energy trans­
fer but in the same line. This wave motion, apparently taken by
sound, can be grasped as a condensation and rarefaction of a mass
of molecules, its expansion and contraction; this is a vibratory
motion, so that sound waves may also be described as a series of
longitudinal vibrations.
For a color to appear, sunlight or some other exciting source is
of course a necessary agent, so that the color of an object is a kind
of reaction or, in the literal sense of the word, a reflection. The
same stimulus is necessary if a body is to emit sound, and the
same preference for reflecting certain frequencies, while absorb­
ing others, is shown in acoustics as in the reradiation phenomena
in atoms. A tuning fork set in motion by a hammer will emit a
musical note, depending on the material from which it is made.
Some materials absorb well at one frequency and vibrate at
others. Wood absorbs better than concrete, and glass better than
marble. All such facts indicate the importance of the identities
that are receiving and emitting sound. That importance will be
later underscored.
The kind of sound which a body emits depends on the fre­
quency of its vibrations, just as the color of an object was found
to be determined by the frequency of the reflected light. Intensity
—brilliance in the case of light and loudness in the case of sound
—is proportionate to the height of the waves or the wave ampli­
tudes. Hence, the notes on a piano scale differ from one another
by frequency alone, but the same note can be pedaled into a
louder or softer “volume.”
From the viewpoint of empiriological physics, vibrations or
wave motions are all there is to sound. Psychologists and epistemologists have on the whole come to look upon the sensation of
sound as a mental state, generated by the longitudinal waves strik­
ing the tympanum.
QUALITY CANNOT BE WHOLLY INERTIAL

From what has been said thus far, several principles can be crys­
tallized which will sum up the typical modern accounts of color

444

Philosophical Physics

and sound and make the transition to their philosophical ap­
praisal:
1. Color and sound have been shriveled to the two factors of
modern mechanism, quantity or mass, and local motion. Qual­
ity has been reduced to quantity, moving from place to place.
In nature it is nothing more.
2. Quality has been boiled down to inertia. All its principles re­
side mechanically outside the impression of quality, which is
created in the human sensorium by the machinery of particles
and waves. Besides this, the quantity and the motion which
are responsible for a given color or a given sound are deter­
mined by agencies external to them in nature, by the nuclei
of atoms in the case of color and by mass factors in the case of
sound; and such mechanical agents are in turn the inertial
sum of forces beyond them.
3. There is no distinction outside the mind between subject and
attribute. There are particles, there is motion, and there is
nothing else. Sometimes quantity and motion are called pri­
mary qualities, but since the cleavage between subject and
property or quality does not appear on modern premises, the
term “primary quality” is hardly more than a name invented
to make it easier to ignore ultimate issues.
Much has been written in these pages about the inertialism of
the modern world picture, and a repetition of its failures will
serve as a climax to a general theme in this book and at the same
time assert the reality of quality in the formal, rather than mere
mechanical, order.
A universe that was totally inert and that wholly yielded to
the assault upon it through control and the equating of cause and
effect would not be the universe that we know. It would be a
continuous, indifferent, chance, potential, indeterminate, chaotic,
and vacant reality. If there are differences at all in the things that
exist, they owe themselves to factors beyond the inertia which is
undifferentiated.
There are as many different non-inertial principles as there are

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

445

differences. One difference of principle, combined with an inert
subject, would make for one reality; two would make for two. So
we could count through the whole universe. All differences must
be non-inert; inert, they would be featureless—the same to each
other and to the subject matter that they were invited to differ­
entiate. Each differentiating principle must be different from
other such principles and from the inertia which they all vari­
ously inform. If monism is wrong and a true plurality prevails in
the universe, there is a manifold of form in the world bound up
tightly with its inertias.
THE DETERMINATE IS ALWAYS FORMAL

This does not mean, of course, that nature and inertia, form and
matter, exist side by side like a glove on a hand or a fence around
the yard. Nothing that exists is inert. At least such existence is
not actual. Inertia is compenetrated by form. The form is wholly
throughout it and affects it from within. It would be better to say
that a mobile being has formal and inertial aspects, since there is
no frontier where form ends and matter begins. Their union is
intrinsic, and they are separated not by something like fractional
distillation but only by the abstracting mind.
In a universe run not by form and law but by power and in­
ertia, action must be envisioned as a sheer brute triumph of a
greater force over a lesser one. But to what does the greater force
owe its greatness, the weaker one its surrender, and the action its
directionality? If inertia is not tacked on a subject like a rug on a
floor, the more powerful being moves the lesser one primarily by
a superiority of form. It is form, the intrinsic principle of nature,
that is the source of motion and it is form that the mover faces
in the matter to be changed. Strength and weakness, the greater
and the less, express differences, and differences, when fully
probed, cannot originate in inertia.
There is no such a freak as merely mechanical action, the meet­
ing of mere force with force, or a greater mass with a lesser one.
Nothing is merely mechanical or merely inert or merely massive

446

Philosophical Physics

or merely force in the universe that moves about us. A hot skillet
would be cooled by a pan of water; it would ignite a pan of gaso­
line. And the difference is due to the identities involved which
differ by their form. When paper is sheared in the mills by me­
chanical cutters, again it is ultimately the non-inert which de­
termines what happens or whether anything happens at all. Use
the same volume of iron, instead of paper, and use glass of the
same geometry as the knife, and this time the cutter, by shatter­
ing, is more affected than its would-be subject. It is form again,
the identities which an action involves, that regulates the result.
But such reasoning is general. It does not establish that there
are forms distinct from substance and united to a substance not as
its principles but as its attributes. In the philosophical science of
nature, where motion counts more than measurement, the dis­
cussion of qualitative form entails two proofs: first, that it is form
which means that it is non-inert, and secondly, that it is quali­
tative, changed without changing its subject of inherence. The
first proof rebukes mechanism in its quantitative references, and
the second in its references to local motion.
QUALITY IS FORMAL

The account of color and sound showed in reality that the bodies
emitting them are not mere inertias. In both cases, the body has
definite, not indeterminate, characteristics, and when it is excited,
it does not cede in unconditional surrender to the stimulus, but
responds in its own way and on its own terms.
Color and sound thus reveal a selective action on the part of
the mobile beings which originate them. But since quantity
means only an extraposition of parts, without implying what the
parts are, selectivity as such cannot come from quantity taken
alone. Quantity, carved down to the bone, is a plurality, and
plurality cannot of itself organize into the specific pattern of re­
sponse which occurs in any body reflecting color or emitting
sound.
Selectivity, specificness, patterned character, originality, dis­

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

447

crimination that results in absorptions and reflections peculiar to
the substance in question—these are the work of form, a prin­
ciple of inferiority and difference. Without the filtering by form,
in both optical and acoustical phenomena, all the bodies of na­
ture would look alike and sound alike. Originality does not arise
from inertia or difference from indifference or order from chaos.
A discussion of sensible quality ought to distinguish between
color in the copper and the color in the air where it is being trans­
mitted to the eye. There is certainly a physical disturbance in the
medium which instruments can detect and which seems to have
particle and wave aspects in the case of color. There are vibrations
in the air, associated with the transmission of sound from its
source to its percipient.
All of this the philosophical physicist does not deny. In fact he
insists on it. He only accentuates that such mechanical aspects as
empiriological physics measures do not relate what color and
sound really are. He points to the selective, hence formal, prin­
ciple of color and sound within the emitting body and reiterates
that sound and color stem not from quantity and its motion but
from quality and its form.
A denial that color and sound are formal in their sources is an
admission that they are only inertial, and what is inert does not
actually exist, let alone operate upon the human sensorium.
If inertia is bolted out of the actual world, not by an a priori
logic but because only the actual or determinate can own ex­
istence, the medium intervening between a colored or sounding
body on the one hand and the percipient on the other is also
something forma]. But as a medium, it is transmissive or tool-like
which means that without losing its own nature it somehow en­
ables the form of the transmitted reality to pass through it.
Color, for instance, though it may have particle and wave as­
pects is not only these. For if it were changed by the medium and
did not preserve its continuity with the object and hence be
somehow unaltered by the medium, the mind would never know
the source whence the color came.

448

Philosophical Physics

There are two critical junctures in the history of the medium,
the point where it receives the impression of the agent, say the
object, and the point where it imparts this impression to the per­
cipient, A medium always bears a likeness to both extremes since
its precise function is to get the extremes together.
As a first approximation, one might suspect that for this reason
alone, quality, and not merely waves and particles, is originated
in its source as a form. There must be a series of likenesses run­
ning from the thing to the medium to the percipient, and the
communication of likeness is in the order of form alone, and not
of motor (or altering) causality in its strict sense. Since the purely
quantitative and plural has no power to move and to select, no
ability to formalize, it cannot act, and it cannot communicate like­
nesses which are communications of unity. What is communi­
cated from the thing to the knower must therefore be a form.
Then too, quanta if they are ever isolated are not just “throbs
of energy,” to use a Whiteheadean phrase. They must be formal
and qualified if they exist and operate.
A fuller probing of the role played by the medium in the trans­
mission of quality and studied by empiriological physics only in
its inertial aspects must be abandoned to a more advanced and
detailed treatment of the subject than is here possible. But if any
likeness is the result not of quantity and local motion but of form,
substantial or qualitative, it can easily be deduced what directions
a deeper display of the qualified rather than merely quantified
character of the medium would take.
QUALITY IS NOT SUBSTANCE

Even if it is agreed that color and sound are forms, transmitted
by forms, and received as forms, this outline has not yet estab­
lished that they are qualities distinct from substances and hence
not substances themselves, as isolated quanta of energy would be.
An effective way of showing that a subject may be altered with­
out being corrupted is to offer an example, and the following one
is a classic from empiriological physics.

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

449

Before the advent of the quantum theory, it was a well-known
fact that hydrogen, suitably excited, could be made to emit at
least three different families of lines (spectral lines). The Balmer
series of lines is visible; the Lyman series is in the ultraviolet
region of the spectrum, invisible light of a very short wave length;
the Paschen series is in the infrared, which is light of a long
wave length and likewise invisible.
There were certain mathematical symmetries which all of
these series seemed to follow. But it was not until Bohr developed
the quantum hypothesis on atomic structure that the possible
causes of these series and the reasons for the mathematical simi­
larities took a definite shape.
Bohr, it has already been noted, posited two kinds of orbits in
atoms. In a stationary orbjt, the electron though moving about
the nucleus does not radiate, the theory runs; but when it falls
back to a stationary orbit from an unstable orbit to which it has
been excited, it emits a quantum of light, where a quantum is a
particle of energy whose magnitude is a function of frequency.
Bohr’s theory gave a tidy background to the already established
mathematics of the three series of hydrogen lines. He numbered
the orbits out from the nuclear center and suggested that when
an electron fell, for example, from the fifth orbit to the third the
Paschen series was emitted; the Balmer series could come when
the electron dropped from the fifth orbit to the second; when the
electron moved from the fourth to the first orbit, Lyman lines
were apparent.
Such a procedure sounds at first sight almost too simple to be
true. But the Bohr orbital numbers as a matter of fact fitted
neatly into mathematical equations for hydrogen lines, where
there had hitherto been terms largely unattached to physical reali­
ties. Theory gave meaning to measurements, and that is all that
is expected of it.
Bohr’s theory was a far-reaching step in the world of empirio­
logical physics, and it rings with familiar echoes in the philo­
sophic science of nature, though as analogy and not proof. On the

450

Philosophical Physics

authority of measured fact, the “color” of hydrogen can he
changed without changing the hydrogen, and this exactly is what
is meant by alteration.
In mechanical terms, by forcing an electron in hydrogen to the
first orbit and bringing it back to the third, the Paschen series of
lines can be produced, and the other two series can be provoked
in a kindred fashion. Hydrogen remains as the abiding subject
through the changes of “color.”
QUALITY REQUIRES QUANTITY

But thereby hangs a difficulty. At first sight it looks as if empirio­
logical physics has found the whole secret of “color” change in
atoms and that the secret is one of quantity and local motion,
where electrons are simply displaced with respect to their nuclei.
It has already been seen, however, that color is a form. It in­
volves selection and originality, and these spell out differences
which are truly formal. Changes of color are not changes of po­
sition alone.
This factor of form, of course, does not forbid that parts of
atoms might vary in situation because of qualitative change. It
only says that the primary fact is form, leaving ample room for
situational changes of particles as secondary phenomena.
In fact, since matter is so inert and since it is so close to quan­
tity, it might be expected that any changes in a mobile reality,
especially where virtualities are transformed, would have quanti­
tative transpositions associated with it. But quantity and local mo­
tion have already been overruled as the full and final account of
quality or any other natural phenomenon. The qualitative form,
changing without a change of subject, is primarily responsible for
color and sound in things.
If the report of the last chapter on the primacy of quantity in
matters incidental equipment is sustained, quality inheres in
quantity as in its proximate subject. Qualitative changes do not
require that the quantity remain the same but only that the sub­
stance abide uncorruptedly. If quantity is as close to the core of

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

451

matter as the last chapter argued and if matter is so impoverished
that it must be spread out to exist formally and to operate fully,
then all changes in quality ought to affect the quantity of their
subjects.
Quality could not express itself if it were shriveled up to a
point. It needs an expanse if it is to be real and mobile. It needs
such stretches at the distances of an electron from the center of an
atom emitting color. Thus, the color of hydrogen in a given state
could theoretically be computed from its cross section if the Bohr
model is correct.
But quantity is the condition of quality. It is the proximate sub­
ject by which quality inheres in mobile being. Yet quantity is not
quality despite the dependence of the second on the Erst. They
differ as unity from plurality, parts from what the parts are.
Quantity extraposes what quality modifies. Without quantity,
quality would reduce to a point and even become something spir­
itual. It would not be a property of matter.
All this stress on quality as requiring a spread and hence re­
quiring quantity can account for the empiriological victories un­
der the flag of quantity alone. But quantity and inertia, though
striking in the mobile world, are not everything, and empirio­
logical physics never succeeds in reducing reality to these terms.
If it did, the world would be vacuous, and ideas alone would be
real. Huxley speaks of a “nothing-but” attitude. Flushed with its
triumphs over matter, scientism likes to think that the world is
“nothing but” the factors which wither into the empiriological
method. In reality, pure inertia exists in the actual order only as
an abstraction, and it is the forms and finalities and qualities of
matter which make it real outside the mind. It is not philosoph­
ical physics that is anthropomorphic but the mechanists. Any art
is anthropomorphic.
Here another caution must be inserted against the mechanical
view of a subject with respect to its properties. An accident or at­
tribute is not a parasite riding on a substance like a flea on an
elephant. It is not only on the surface of the subject which it qual­

452

Philosophical Physics

ifies, but throughout it. The substance and its properties are
compenetra ted, intrinsically and immediately united, like a soul
and the body which it animates. Spaier was approaching the
truth when he wrote that quantity is “quality measured’’ and
Bergson when he called quantity “a distention of quality.” They
are bound up together. The quality may have different virtuali­
ties in one part and in another, just as the arm of man is differ­
entiated from his head though the two are parts of one substance.
Despite the differences of a virtual character, making the quality
more operative in one part than in another, it still remains one
quality.
The Bohr idea of the atom hints a confirmation of all this. If
the Bohr mode] of hydrogen is true or has some analogue in na­
ture—which is more likely—it is obvious that the electron di­
rectly has much more to do with the emission of the various spec­
tral lines than the atomic nucleus. And yet the whole atom is
somehow involved in the lines which hydrogen emits. The same
electron in another atom would behave differently under the
same excitation. It takes its specific character from the atom in
which it happens to be, a property of the whole atom but more
operative in one part than in another.
A more deductive approach to this problem might be formu­
lated thus : A substance is indivisible, and if a property qualifies
it, it must qualify the whole of it. But quantity spreads out the
substance, enabling it to be differentiated so that it can achieve by
a variety of instruments the work that it cannot do more simply.
Through the offices of quantity, quality is likewise distended, dif­
fering in the various parts while remaining the same quality. As
a form, quality is likewise indivisible, so that what it modifies it
modifies with all of itself.
ALTERATION TENDS TO SUBSTANTIAL CHANGE

Aristotle held that alteration disposes a substance to be corrupted,
and he saw in this fact the final cause of qualitative change. At
least substantial change is the ultimate goal to which alteration

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

453

points. From the viewpoints of both philosophical and empirio­
logical physics, it is easy to see that this is a well-grounded prin­
ciple.
It has already been indicated, from the philosophical point of
view, that material being is rather barren. It does not have enough
richness to change in a partial way without tending to change al­
together. Its investment is so small in the bank of nature that any
withdrawal results in closing the whole account, or rather tends
to do so.
Man, when he knows things, becomes them while remaining
himself. But matter which is acted upon tends to surrender itself
entirely rather than to remain itself and acquire the new. Matter
is almost the inert thing that empiriological physics makes it out
to be. When any part of a material thing changes, since the
part is so close to the whole, the entire thing tends to change.
Alteration thus paves the way toward generation. It provides,
as it were, a medium between the old form and the new, making
their difference less abrupt than it would otherwise be, and help­
ing the ingredient in the change to make the hurdle.
The footnotes to substantial change are extremely difficult to
read in matter, though its general principles can be known with
genuine certainty as Chapter 2 outlined. Delving into the details
of the process, since the direction of substantial change is from
being to non-being or vice versa, it is difficult to see how matter
can bridge the chasm between the thing that changes and the
thing that results.
That gap, alteration closes, or it at least tends to do so. Be­
cause it is continuous, it tends to compensate for the discreteness
between the terms of substantial change by disposing the old
substance to be destroyed and the new one to be generated. It
brings distant terms close together.
All this reasoning modern empiriological physics tends to sup­
port. In the changes of the hydrogen atom, which yield the vari­
ous spectral lines, there is a tendency not only to change quality
but to change the substance. An atom, excited like hydrogen,

454

Philosophical Physics

when its electrons recede from the nucleus to those instabilities by
which they emit “color,” acquires more energy, as empiriological
physics puts it. The atom as a whole tends in this way to become
unstable.
If the electron is excited far enough from its nuclear center, the
hydrogen will be destroyed and become a proton with the elec­
tron freed from its nuclear influence, and both proton and elec­
tron tend to sanctuary in some other atom. Changing the color
of hydrogen too much will thus result in a substantial change;
changing the color disposes the hydrogen to become something
else. Like the rest of the elements, hydrogen has only a limited
range of colors that it will take on. Going beyond this range
means going beyond hydrogen itself.
INTENSION AND REMISSION ARE ALTERATIONS

If nothing is inert and if any change in the universe is thus some­
thing more than a puff of inertia, it can easily be decided that in­
tension and remission are also alterations. Intension is the greater
possession of a given quality by the subject; and remission is the
lesser possession of it. A more intense quality is of the same type
as the less intense, only it is more firmly rooted in the subject. Re­
mission is the reverse. It is less of a radication in the subject.
On modern theories of color and sound, the first impulse is to
assign the differences in intensity to quantity alone. In both color
and sound, intensity is determined by wave amplitude while fre­
quency makes for brightness or loudness. With such measure­
ments only, it is tempting to make out a case that when a color
is made more brilliant in an object more of its atoms have been
illuminated to stack the waves, reaching the eye, into a greater
amplitude. This would mean that a brighter color is owed only
to a greater expanse illuminated in the colored object. Intension
would thus be not a matter of quality and form but of quantity
and extension.
Such an account is satisfactory as far as it goes. Two men on a
scale weigh more than one of them, and two candles of the same

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

455

size throw more light than either alone. But there is another and
more elusive intension and remission which is possible in the
single atom, the bearer of quality, and it is the increase or dimin­
ishing of quality within the single substance that is here of pri­
mary moment.
The constant mention of electrons and protons in these pages
makes it unnecessary to point out that an atom has an electrical
character. A moving charge is also a source of magnetism, and if
for no other reason, empiriological physics holds that the atom
also has magnetic properties.
By placing the source of radiation in an electric field (Stark
effect) or in a magnetic field (Zeeman effect), at least one of the
effects produced among the spectral lines emitted by the sub­
stance is a variation of intensity that depends on the strength of
the magnetism or the electricity applied. This suggests that in­
tensity of color may be varied by changes in the electrical or mag­
netic warp of the emitting body. It suggests that there is an
intension and remission of quality which is not a matter of sum­
ming up the number of atoms possessing the property but comes
from within the atom itself. As in simple alteration, there is a
limit to the amount of intension and remission that can go on
without changing the substance having the quality into a sub­
stance of a different type. Too strong an outer field would break
an atom down.
A contemporary example of intension and remission within
atoms might also be developed from the variation in spectral in­
tensity produced by heating the emitting substances.
CONDENSATION AND RAREFACTION ARE ALTERATIONS

Quite similar to intension and remission, yet differing enough to
deserve separate treatment, are the motions of condensation and
rarefaction in matter. For Aristotle, these are qualitative changes,
and it is enlightening to see whether such a verdict can be sus­
tained in the modern intellectual court.
A substance is called dense when it possesses a great amount

456

Philosophical Physics

of matter under small dimensions, and rare when it possesses a
small amount of matter under large dimensions. Density is a fa­
miliar concept in empiriological physics. It is defined as mass
per unit volume and answers the question, for instance, Which is
heavier, a cubic centimeter of water or a cubic centimeter of lead?
That condensation or contraction and rarefaction or expansion
actually take place is readily accepted in both chemistry and em­
piriological physics. In fact, according to the kinetic molecular
theory of matter, a substance is a solid when its molecules are
densely thronged together, and it is a liquid and finally a gas as
this crowding diminishes. Another way of putting it is to say with
the chemist that in a gas there is considerable free space between
the molecules, less space in liquids, and still less space in a volume
of solid material. Compression is a matter of forcing the particles
of a chemical substance into a tighter proximity. Rarefaction is a
process of separating them.
Such a phenomenon as compression is easy to understand
when dealing with aggregates of particles, like molecules. But
this is not the type of condensation in which philosophical phys­
ics is primarily interested as it searches the ultimate recesses in
things. The philosophical question is more about the fate of the
individual substance. Can a single atom, for instance, be com­
pressed or rarefied, and if so, is this a qualitative change?
From what has already been said, it is clear that there could
easily be the compression and rarefaction of a single substance
like the atom. Such changes produce different terminations of
quantity. There is a rearrangement of quantitative parts with re­
spect to each other, without an increase or decrease of their num­
ber which is potentially infinite. This potential infinity of parts
would make a body pliable to such changes as condensation and
rarefaction.
The change in extension and in situation which compression or
expansion would have for a concomitant at the level of the atom
is not the essence of condensation and rarefaction. Density and
rarity concern the termination of quantity which is not the func­

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

457

tion of quantity itself but of quality. Qualitative changes result in
such a disposition of the material in question that extensional and
positional shifts are required.
Density or rarity does not add or subtract quantity but makes a
new disposition of the quantity already present.
Apart from philosophical possibilities, there are strong argu­
ments in the empiriological world that such compression and ex­
pansion among atoms actually takes place. The Bohr theory of
the atom, expanding and contracting as the outer electrons move
from one orbit to another is a case in point. In a change from one
stationary state to another, there may be nothing else except com­
pression or its reverse. But in the shift from an unstable state to
a stable one, emissions appear, and hence condensation and rare­
faction are involved in a larger context that is dominated by sim­
ple alteration.
Another slant on condensation and rarefaction is afforded by
the theory of relativity. It argues that bodies are deformed by
their motions, with mass increasing as velocity increases and vice
versa, and the deformation is at least a suggestion of condensation
and rarefaction.
Once more a warning is needed against taking empiriological
data too literally. The difficulty with tracing out the analogues to
philosophical principles in the empiriological world view is that
empiriological physics has failed to provide certain knowledge in
many cases and especially in regard to fundamental issues, like
the behavior of individual atoms and their parts.
But here as elsewhere, it can certainly be pressed that there are
analogues of some kind in nature to what the empiriological
physicist says in his theories. Otherwise, the success of empirio­
logical physics could not be explained. As analogies, well-founded
data of empiriological physics can and do illustrate truths from
philosophical physics.
Empiriological physics has locked its door to the genuine phi­
losopher but left the windows open so that he can see in. There
are no well-grounded data of experiment that do not illustrate,

458

Philosophical Physics

when interpreted into speculative knowledge, the truly scientific
and certain principles which Aristotle kneaded out of experience
in the general parts of his Physics. What is scientific and certain
does not perish with the scientist, and certitude did not have to
delay its birth to the time of Descartes and Galileo.
This chapter has found empiriological physics fertile in anal­
ogy to illustrate what the philosophical science of nature says of
quality. It is true that many of the examples are blurred by their
cloudy theoretical status, but they must have some analogue, in
the real, at least remotely, to justify the prosperity of empirio­
logical physics in using them. It is not the light of logical theory
but the weak shadow of reality at the fringes of the beam which
philosophical physics can salvage to help identify itself.
ALTERATIONS ARE CONTINUOUS

Alteration has unity and continuity. In this respect it resembles
local motion and differs greatly from substantial change. To af­
firm the continuity of alteration means that the old form is gradu­
ally converted into the new one rather than abruptly generated
as in substantial change.
There are instantaneous changes or so-called mutations only at
the beginning and end of the alteration, at the beginning because
a substance is not altered without a cause that disturbs its equi­
librium and at the end because there is a termination or fixity of
the new form. To deny these terminal mutations would lead to
an eternal flow of quality, whereas it is a stable fixture of the be­
ing that owns it.
But the motion between the terms is not a series of leaps. It is a
movement that is continuous, preparing the way by a gradual
redisposition of the old substance for change into a new one.
Empiriological physics confirms this relation of the continuum
to quality. In fact, where empiriological physics speaks, the ex­
treme view is taken that differences in qualities are not matters
so much of kind as of degree. Thus, two colors or two sounds
differ by being higher or lower frequencies in spectra that are

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

459

continuous, and brilliance or pitch can be continuously varied by
varying continuously the wave amplitude. The Bohr theory ac­
counts for differences in color as changes of an electron s situa­
tion within an atom, thus by that exemplar of continuous motion
which is local movement. A change of situation, at least analo­
gous to what Bohr envisions, can certainly be admitted, but there
is more to alterations than.this.
THE BOHR THEORY SUPPORTS ARISTOTLE

However, there is a problem raised by the Bohr theory. Does it
not imply discontinuity in alteration since it involves the discrete
leap of an electron from an excited to a stationary state and the
liberation of a discrete parcel of energy called the quantum?
No, this Bohr idea is a vote more in favor of the philosophical
science of nature than against it. An instantaneous change, which
is mutation rather than motion in the technical vocabulary, does
occur at the beginning and end of alteration if Aristotle is correct.
A quality is not fluid but fixed, and it requires an extrinsic cause
to start it changing and a stable term at which the alteration ends.
The Bohr idea of discontinuity may be simple adumbrating
that sudden and instantaneous phenomenon which Aristotle saw
at the beginning and end of alteration. In Bohr’s idea, there is on
the part of the electrons a local motion, which is the prototype of
continuous motion; there is also discontinuity. These two aspects
of alteration were seen by Aristotle. Once again scientism, which
has deliberately spurned philosophical physics, may be entering
it by the back door. There is an abruptness at the beginning and
end of qualitative change, and Bohr’s notion of discrete orbits
may be a shadow of it.
REALISM IS DUALISTIC

The present chapter has shown that color and sound are not
simply mechanisms of particles and waves but are ultimately acci­
dental forms in the colored and sounding objects. It has not been
denied that there are waves and particles, or something like them,

460

Philosophical Physics

in both optical and acoustical phenomena. On the contrary it has
been stoutly affirmed that all material quality is radicated in
quantity as its proximate subject of inherence. What has been
said simply means that the waves and particles are the only as­
pects of color and sound that the empiriological physicist can
grasp but that reality is a larger whole, where the parts when
taken alone are sure to be distorted.
Quality is formal in the object, but it is more of a potency than
act until light, if it is color, or an impact, if it is sound, makes the
object actually emit what it is capable of emitting. Empiriological
physics never gets beyond the potential or inertial side of quality,
and without act, it can never be explained why anything at all is
seen or heard.
It has frequently been said in this book that empiriological
physics does not go far enough. In a sense, it goes too far, taking
an aspect of the real and turning it into a substitute for reality.
The Cartesian stress on quantity and local motion and Galileo’s
preference for inertia and control have distorted the study of the
universe as it is. Men are glorifying what they can make, without
knowing what they should do. They are trying to coerce the
world into their own image and likeness, and dismissing the prin­
ciples which control man as “verbalisms,” in the language of
Bridgman, “meaningless questions” in the jargon of logical posi­
tivism, "supernaturalisms” as Dewey says, or as Communism
puts it, “reactionary.”
Aristotle’s science explains why nature yields to art and yet re­
sists it by the loyal opposition of its natural form. His thought
leaves a tremendous scope to art, though exalting knowledge for
knowledge’s sake into the highest of human activities. In fact,
Aristotle’s logic is the first development of an art into systematic
principles which it can assimilate as part of itself in practice.
Aristotle’s view of things is a true dualism between nature and
art, form and matter, cause and effect, motion and its goals, place
and time, quantity and quality. Such a view of course does not
set out to study things only in terms of the control which man can

Alteration: The Motion of Quality

461

foist on them in his laboratory. It sets out not primarily to make
man the master of nature but to discover the truths and the goals
that master man, lighting his intellect and warming his will. It
seeks to discover what things are rather than the aspects which
man can make into something else.
Such a view of course does not aim principally to make men
comfortable or emotionally at ease though it welcomes such am­
bitions when subordinated to higher ones. It does not aim chiefly
at public hygiene and air-conditioned offices though it holds such
things desirable in their place. But it makes something tremen­
dously more important than machines. It makes sense.

Suggested Readings
Aristotle, Physics, Bk. VII, chs. 1-4.
John of St. Thomas, Cursus philosophicus Thomisticus, Phil. Nat.,
P. Ill, QQ. Ill, IV, VII (Turin, 1933).
Millikan, Robert Andrews, Electrons (+ and —), Protons, Photons,
Neutrons, Mesotrons, and Cosmic Rays, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1947).

Index
Abelard, 71
Abstraction, definition, 8 ff., 180, 197,
321, 355, 360, 384; divisions, 10 ff.,
129, 159, 355 ff., 409, 430; and
empiriological physics, 10, 14, 28,
29, 36; and philosophical physics,
19, 68, 159, 170, 173; and meta­
physics, 20, 21
Acceleration, 152
Accidents, 62, 64, 66, 107, 191, 192,
364, 377 ff., 402, 451
See also Form
Ackermann, 304
Act, and motion, 26 ff., 42 ff., 127,
186, 249; opposed to potency, 22,
23, 42 ff., 82 ff., 96, 284, 402; and
particulars, 23, 165, 278, 414; and
perfection, 22, 91, 96, 118, 155,
159, 191, 193
Actio in distans, 84 ff., 243 ff.
Action, 244 ff.; and reaction, 53, 216,
244 ff.
Actual entities, 217
Addition, 129, 134, 433
Albert the Great, 71
Alcmaeon, 390
Alexander, S., 31, 48, 77, 148, 164,
181, 185, 197, 211, 214 ff., 247,
255, 262, 346, 359, 364, 372,
375 ff.
Alexander of Hales, 71
Alteration, continuity of, 458 ff., defi­
nition, 436, 449, 450; divisions,
454, 455; species of motion, 7, 62,
436
Analogy, 188, 338, 339, 449, 452,
457, 458, 459
463

Analysis, 25, 128, 197, 211, 218, 239,
311
Anatomy, 224
Anaxagoras, 75, 111, 152
Anaximander, 75
Animals, 119, 182, 190, 192, 193,
206, 424
Anisotropy, 354, 359, 386, 427
Anthropomorphism, 28, 96, 143, 199,
238, 451
A priori, 24, 28, 238 ff., 305 ff., 322,
346 ff., 394 ff.
See also Form
Aquinas, 13, 19, 20, 31, 38, 51, 53,
54, 55, 65, 71, 132, 135, 162, 163,
165, 179, 184, 187, 191, 192, 193,
198, 205, 209, 211, 218, 221, 241,
245, 248, 287, 289, 318, 336, 345,
378, 403, 425, 437
Aristotle, 19, 34, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45,
55, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65. 66, 79, 80,
87, 91, 103, 111, 113, 115, 118,
119, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135,
136, 155, 165, 180, 188, 220, 221,
231, 245, 253, 254, 257, 261, 265,
284, 285, 288, 289, 316, 317, 318,
320, 323, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329,
330, 331, 333, 338, 342, 343, 345,
356, 358, 361, 362, 366, 369, 370,
371, 372, 375, 377, 382, 383, 384,
385, 388, 394, 400, 401, 407, 414,
417, 423, 426, 428, 434, 436, 437,
440, 455, 458, 459, 460, 464
Arithmetic, 112, 129, 289 ff., 308,
313, 403
Art, and chance, 56, 105, 286, 287;
definition, 54, 163, 166, 348; imi­
tation of nature, 49, 53, 169, 451;

464

Index

and inertia, 37, 56, 58, 162 ff., 451;
and logic, 52, 162 ff.; and nature,
49 ff., 77, 163, 177, 196 ff., 287,
361, 412, 461
Associationism, 235, 238
Astrophysics, 90, 325. 328, 337,
339 ff., 354, 381, 383
Atomism, 3, 21, 75 ff., 123, 263, 334,
339
Atoms, 15, 24, 28, 30, 40, 41, 45,
62, 63, 69, 104, 113, 116, 118, 119,
129, 146, 162, 187, 188 ff., 274,
280, 341 ff., 410, 414 ff., 427,
440 ff.
Augmentation, 7, 62, 431
Augustine, 54, 65, 69, 72, 372
Autology, 15 5 ff.
Automaton, 265
Bachelard, 364
Bacon, 133, 150, 155, 278, 355
Balmer lines, 449 ff.
Being, and Eleatics, 42, 43, 47; and
empiriology, 15, 25 ff., 29, 35, 36,
172, 211; and inwardness, 50, 155,
159, 165; and metaphysics, 12, 13,
113; and motion, 62, 158 ff.; nature
of, 12, 13, 30, 31, 116, 153, 219;
primary idea, 19 ff., 159, 161; as
substance, 62 ff.
Bergson, 10, 31, 32, 33, 34, 43, 48,
77, 149, 164, 182, 255, 278, 283,
364, 365, 372, 375 ff., 384, 417,
426, 452
Berkeley, 435
Berkelium, 189
Bernoulli, 266
Bikini, 31
Biology, 89, 168, 224, 364
Body, 16, 418, 423 ff.
Boethius, 399
Bohr, 6. 30, 84, 403, 428 ff., 437,
441, 442, 449 ff., 459 ff.
Boltzmann, 266, 271, 272
Bolyai, 353
Bolzano, 84, 113, 310
Bonaventure, 65, 71
Boodin, 116, 117, 248
Bom, 269
Boscovich, 77, 126, 411, 413
Bose, 272, 273

Boutroux, 285
Boyle’s law, 176
Bradley, 113, 181, 260, 264, 278, 280
Bridgman, 113, 114, 150, 460
Broad, 18
Brouwer, 289, 299, 305 ff.
Calculus, 32, 33, 236
Callahan, 400
Cantor, 112, 127, 129, 289 ff.
Carnap, 21, 48, 150, 156, 181, 299
Carnot principle, 176
Category, 66, 197 ff., 219, 382
Cause, causal efficacy, 207, 241; caus­
al knowledge, 4, 5, 7, 13, 37, 40,
81, 106, 140, 158, 233, 259 ff.,
281; equivalent to effect, 28, 29,
85 ff., 152 ff., 242 ff., 260, 418; and
explanation, 31, 99; as external, 70,
81, 83 ff., 107, 121, 153, 191, 193,
239 ff.; and functionality, 32, 172,
236 ff.; and induction, 23, 99 ff.,
174; instrumental, 121, 123 ff.,
141; as internal, 85 ff., 152, 185,
200, 239 ff.; as nature, 54, 63, 257,
420; necessity of, 82 ff., 98, 335;
and potency, 44, 460; as principle,
58, 200, 270; as succession, 48, 49,
65, 84, 99, 148, 234 ff., 242, 264,
314, 409
Certitude, 146, 147, 176, 356, 358
Chamberlin, 88
Chance, and final cause, 93 ff., 203,
265 (See also Final cause); laws of,
30, 255, 266 ff.; and nature, 94 ff.,
103 ff., 203, 239 ff.; and potential
world, 95, 103, 114ff., 160, 203,
264, 411 ff.; and randomness, 157,
275 ff.
See also Art
Change, 40, 62, 64, 68, 73, 181 ff.,
453
See also Motion
Chemistry, 168, 456
Chesterton, 404
Chronometer, 363
Class, 23, 24, 162, 173, 197, 295,
299 ff.
Color, 51, 53, 146, 189, 195, 214,
219, 404, 436, 437, 440 ff.
Common sense, 19, 21, 25 ff., 35, 36,

Index
41, 104, 142, 148, 156, 161, 176,
177, 182 ff., 322 ff.
Communism, 115, 126, 141, 460
Compounds, 116, 193, 207, 223
Comte, 175, 198
Condensation, 437, 455 ff.
Conservation, 153, 208 ff., 246, 330
Construct, 188, 199
Contact, 84 ff., 242 ff.
Contextualism, 214 ff.
Continuum, as aggregate, 30, 129 ff.,
290 ff.; divisibility of, 128 ff.,
421 ff.; in extension, 75, 128 ff.,
388, 402, 410, 418 ff.; as indetermi­
nate, 29, 30, 116 ff., 165, 220, 237,
250, 311 ff.; in motion, 380, 419,
459; of number, 127, 129 ff.,
290 ff., 309; as potency, 118, 129,
130, 164, 165; space-time, 117,
165, 167, 181, 185, 217, 220,
239 ff., 352 ff., 358, 360, 364, 375,
384, 385, 391 ff.; in time, 171,
372 ff., 419
Conventionalism, 348, 379
Copernicus, 325, 327, 328
Correspondence, 289 ff., 310
Corruption, 62 ff., 98
Cosmic image, 176
Cosmogony, 87 ff., 216
Cosmology, 6, 7
Courant, 319
Cratylus, 43
Creation, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 92, 154
Croce, 142
Crystallography, 222 ff.
Cyclotron, 38

D’Alembert, 216
Dantzig, 15, 205
Darwin, C. G., 232
Darwin, Charles, 87, 108, 256
de Broglie, 269, 270
Dedekind, 112, 115, 127, 291 ff.
Deduction, 19. 25, 41, 154, 173, 267,
268, 356, 452
de Finance, 257
Deism, 91, 254
De Koninck, 178 ff.
Demiurge, 155
Democritus, 75, 111, 334, 344
de Munnynck, 262

465

Derivative, 33
Descartes, 15, 19, 69, 75 ff., 85 ff.,
112, 133, 150, 155, 208, 228, 234,
235, 241 ff., 256, 263, 266, 270,
282, 310, 320, 345, 350, 356, 401,
409, 425, 435, 458, 460
Description, 172, 173, 180, 209, 239
Destruction, 62 ff., 453
Determinism, 34, 61, 98, 102 ff.,
191 ff., 239, 270 ff.
Dewey, 14, 21, 48, 52, 77, 113, 125,
139, 141, 148, 149, 152, 154, 157,
163, 171, 180, 198, 256, 266, 316,
460
Dialectical materialism, 47, 48, 254 ff.
Dialectics, 178 ff., 252 ff.
Differential equations, 32, 33, 48
Dimension, 321, 333, 347 ff., 361,
364, 375, 391 ff., 408
Diminution, 7, 62
Dimorphism, 222 ff.
Diogenes, 31
Dirac, 272, 273
Discovery, 174, 303
Displacement, 69, 70
Disposition, 65, 73, 438
Distance, 84, 347 ff.
Doppler effect, 340
Dostoyevsky, 94
Dualism, 59 ff., 64, 73, 80, 127,
181 ff., 241, 251, 256, 257, 284,
319, 395, 399, 437, 460, 461
Du Bois-Reymond, 76
Dynamism, 43, 74, 77 ff., 115, 183,
254 ff., 331, 346, 378, 393, 411 ff.
Economy, 153
Eddington, 15, 19, 334, 364, 416
Eduction, 69, 71, 98, 127
Efficient cause, see Motor cause
Einstein, 4, 6, 77, 79, 117, 126, 142,
143, 144, 146, 153, 154, 158, 159,
165, 167, 208, 220, 224 ff., 237,
241, 272, 273, 326 ff., 352 ff., 364,
379, 384 ff., 427, 441
Eleatics, 42, 47, 260, 416
Electromagnetism, 168, 326, 359, 363,
440, 455
Electron, 24, 30, 84, 114, 115, 118,
119, 126, 128, 142, 187 ff., 254,
271 ff., 333, 410 ff„ 420, 440 ff.

466

Index

Electronics, 334
Elements, 115, 116, 129, 189, 194,
206 IF.
Eliot, 7
Elliptic geometry, 353 ff.
Emanationism, 244
Emergents, 71, 77 ff., 234, 255 ff.
Empedocles, 75, 216
Empiricism, 21, 164
See also Logical empiricism
Empiriological physics, and abstrac­
tion, 14, 24, 28, 131, 159; as art,
36, 37, 56, 57, 144, 151, 162 ff.,
199, 283, 286 ff., 316, 348, 359,
396, 412; and being, 26, 28, 30 ff.,
35, 36, 77, 169, 176, 229 ff., 268;
and common sense, 18, 19, 29, 36,
41, 148, 156, 157, 161, 177; de­
scription of, 6, 15, 16, 32, 40, 91,
124, 139 ff., 279 ff.; and logic, 58,
99, 149, 150, 155 ff., 162 ff.,
209 ff., 281, 348; name, 5, 6, 139;
popularity of, 3, 4, 139 ff., 144,
145, 212; and quantity, 32 ff., 40,
48, 49, 64, 76, 85, HOff., 152,
208, 241, 410
Ends, see Final cause
Energy, 39, 40, 44, 45, 76 ff., 195,
208 ff., 248 ff., 267, 326, 337 ff.,
364, 448 ff.
Enjoyment, 148
Engels, 31, 254
Ens rationis, 150, 151, 346, 348, 349,
350, 351, 352, 378
Entropy, 28, 29, 40, 208 ff., 248 ff.,
259, 364, 379, 381
Epicurus, 75
Equation, 58, 85, 90, 98, 119, 152,
208, 231, 239, 253, 311, 337
Essence, 63, 68, 74, 75
Eternal return, 390, 391
Eternity, 92, 376, 398 ff.
Ether, 167, 336 ff., 352 ff.
Ethnology, 364
Euclidian geometry, 305, 321, 322,
346, 347, 352 ff.
Event, 197, 377, 387
Evidence, 17, 152, 173
Evolution, 69, 71, 77 ff., 86 ff., 108,
183, 197, 217, 234, 255 ff., 259 ff.,
286, 364

Excluded middle, 307, 308
Existence, 44, 74, 75
Existentialism, 25, 48, 126, 159, 183,
346, 396 ff.
Expanding universe, 340 ff.
Expectation, 237
Experience, contrasted with experi­
ment, 16 ff., 36 ff., 116, 149, 176,
413; and motion, 31, 41, 42, 63, 77,
84 ff., 104, 109, 123, 247, 248,
273, 320; at origin of knowledge,
4, 19 ff., 149, 348; and substance,
63, 78, 182, 192; and time, 389 ff.
Experiment, as control, 13, 17, 36,
139 ff., 166 ff., 176, 211, 263, 411;
as method, 3, 4, 6, 14, 18, 28, 31,
34, 36, 45, 77, 101, 168 ff., 174
See also Experience
Explanation, 4, 29, 31, 42, 158, 172,
193, 258, 389
Extension, 9, 14, 129, 226 ff., 301,
302, 313, 339 ff., 346 ff., 361, 383,
384, 385, 386, 388, 392, 411 ff.,
424, 431, 438

Fabry, 146
Faith, 156
Faraday, 84
Feeling, 148, 262
Fermi, 272, 273
Feuerbach, 115
Fichte, 254
Fictions, 348
Field, 40, 77, 167, 168, 337 ff.,
352 ff., 427, 432, 455
Figure, 425, 434, 439
Final cause, of art, 55, 159; and
chance, see Chance; and explana­
tion, 133, 389; and form, 68, 103,
409; necessity of, 93 ff., 258 ff.,
330; and place, 321, 329 ff„ 336,
387
Finitism, 125 ff.
Form, a ■priori, 24, 152, 155, 199, 211,
346 ff., 394; accidental, 65, 437,
446; as act, 68, 96, 114, 119,
131 ff., 191, 201, 423, 436; cause
of, 81 ff., 351; as indivisible, 73,
74, 420; in mathematics, 357, 403;
principle of motion, 58 ff., 96, 101,

Index
210 ff., 261, 445; as substance,
68 ff„ 207, 344
See also Matter-form; Privation
Formalism, 289, 299, 302 ff.
Fortune, 104
Freedom, 169 ff., 218, 251
Frege, 199, 299
Friendship, 200
Function, 32, 33, 172, 173, 236 ff.

Galileo, 4, 6, 26, 83, 140 ff.. 165, 208,
228, 246, 247, 270, 338, 339, 425,
435, 458, 460
Gamow, 88, 340
Garrigou-Lagrange, 257
Gauss, 353
Geiger, 13
Generation, 7, 62 ff., 67, 68, 106, 114,
453
Geodesic, 354
Geology, 88, 364
Geometry, 70, 164, 305, 313, 346 ff.,
355, 384, 403, 409
Geophysics, 90
God, as Archetype, 113, 170, 171,
172, 192, 196, 200, 251, 376, 399;
as Creator, 34, 92, 143, 431; as
Designer, 96, 105, 261, 262, 279;
as Prime Mover, 31, 87, 91 ff.,
121 ff., 184, 250, 254, 260; wrong
conceptions of, 3, 15, 83, 91, 143,
181, 254, 262, 263
Gôdel, 155, 303 ff.
Goldstein, 183
Gravitation, 146, 167, 220, 337, 338,
353
Grelling, 155 ff.
Habit, 438
Hahn, 224
Haldane, 198
Hartshorne, 190, 191, 262
Heat, 195, 213, 274, 351
Hegel, 21, 31, 34, 48, 77, 79, 115,
181, 216, 219, 234, 252 ff., 360
Heidegger, 25, 126, 159, 346, 364,
372, 375, 396 ff.
Heisenberg, 6, 30, 57, 58, 84, 117,
143, 144, 158, 159, 165, 208, 213,
218, 259, 268 ff., 428
Helmholtz, 76

467

Heraclitus, 29, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48
77, 80, 96, 124, 129, 164, 183’
250, 252 ff., 256, 257, 310, 323,
325, 328, 334, 359, 393
Heterology, 155 ff.
Hierarchy, 48, 192, 193 ff., 231, 249
252, 258, 259 ff., 300, 302, 305’
357, 392
Hilbert, 156, 289, 299, 302 ff.
Hiroshima, 224
Hobbes, 21
Holt, 217
Hooke, 28
Hubble, 340, 341
Hume, 32, 33, 40, 48, 65, 66, 84 ff.
99, 181, 233 ff., 256, 264, 377, 409,
410
Husserl, 172
Huxley, 451
Hylosystemism, 77
Hypothesis, 41, 146, 153
See also Theory
Idealism, 165, 364
Immanence, 102, 182, 186, 189, 198,
244, 251 ff., 425
Impenetrability, 403, 431 ff.
Impotency, 439
Indeterminism, as potency, 47, 67, 97,
103, 114 ff., 162, 165, 171, 185,
233, 239, 263, 307, 411ft'., prin­
ciple of, 30, 157, 159, 258, 268 ff.;
in statistics, 85, 86, 203, 266 ff.
Induction, 14, 16, 23, 24, 25, 41, 173,
174, 179, 267
Inertia, and empiriology, 15, 28, 29,
52, 56, 75 ff., 162, 165, 179,
258 ff.: law of, 26, 112, 140 ff.,
166, 183, 246 ff., 344, 382; opposed
to form, 15, 26, 56, 75 ff., 96,
184ff., 191, 195, 201 ff., 411 ff.,
444 ft’.; as potency, 45, 75 ff., 97,
162, 185, 262 ff.
Infield, 362
Infinity, divisions of, 113, 125 ff., 311,
414; leads to dynamism, 119, 157,
158, 164, 184 ff., 249, 411; not
explanatory, 90 ff., 147, 157, 249,
278; in extension, 340 ff., 356 ff.;
and immobility, 110 ff., 118, 120,
185, 411; and indeterminacy,

468

Index

110 ff., 118, 120, 185, 411; in
mathematics, 112, 288 ff., 417
Instant, 46, 47, 398 ff., 459
Instrumentalism, 125, 149
Intension, 197, 301, 302, 424 ff., 437,
454 ff.
Intention, 94 ff., 148, 196
Interference, 17, 58, 141, 143, 176,
378
Inferiority, see Inwardness
Intuitionism, 284, 299, 305 ff.
Intussusception, 182
Involution, 217
Inwardness, 50, 51, 56, 102, 114, 121,
182, 191 ff., 263, 333, 339, 351,
446
Isotope, 203, 422, 423

James, 21, 123, 125, 158, 181, 315
Jaspers, 126
Jeans, 15, 19, 88, 340
Jeffreys, 88
John of St. Thomas, 59, 407, 461
Kant, 15, 21, 26, 27, 40, 58, 77, 84,
87, 112, 142, 149, 150, 152, 154,
197, 210, 211, 234, 238 ff., 252,
305, 315, 322, 346, 348 ff., 356,
364, 375, 378, 394 ff., 435
Kierkegaard, 126, 192, 375, 397, 399
Kinetic energy, 230, 248
Kirchhoff, 172
Knowledge, nature of, 86, 101, 106,
108, 143, 147 ff., 176, 183, 210,
243 ff., 278, 453
Kronecker, 305

Lachelier, 197
Lalande, 216
Laplace, 87 ff., 266
Lavelle, 364, 375, 398 ff.
Law, 58, 59, 93 ff., 117, 140 ff.,
146 ff., 348
Leibniz, 77, 79, 84, 112, 126, 152,
153, 236, 238, 241, 294, 336, 364,
394
Lenin, 78, 139, 254
Le Rov, 77
Life, 89, 182, 186, 192, 197
Limit, 32, 33, 85, 133 ff.
Lloyd Morgan, 77, 255

Lobachevsky, 353
Local motion, 7, 62, 208, 320 ff.
Locke, 147, 435
Logic, 15, 52, 54, 60, 89, 99, 149,
150, 153, 155, 162ff„ 171, 198,
219, 277, 281, 299 ff., 306 ff.
Logical empiricism, 15, 58, 139, 150,
198
Logicalism, 14, 15, 199, 289, 299 ff.
Lorentz, 326
Lyman lines, 449 ff.
MacDougall, 255
Mach, 158, 172, 246, 385
Machine, 35, 54, 159, 199, 461
Malebranche, 260
Maritain, 5, 6, 20, 26, 34, 38, 139,
148, 178 ff., 348, 430
Mars, 405
Marx, 21, 31, 34, 78, 79, 115, 126,
181, 198, 216, 254 ff.
Mass, 224 ff., 445
Mathematics, and abstraction, 9, 10,
18, 42, 141, 288 ff., 309, 310, 325,
355, 356, 386, 403, 409; and anpiriology, 5, 15, 16, 32, 35, 112,
152, 269 ff.; and infinity, 110 ff.,
288 ff., 356; and motion, 34, 42,
49, 112, 333, 346, 355, 359, 369,
318, 379
See also Number
Matter, as eternal, 87, 91, 111; in­
telligible, 11 ff., 405; second, 65;
sensible, 8, 10, 11 ff.; signate, 63
See also Matter-form; Prime mat­
ter
Matter-form, cause of union, 82 ff.,
98, 187; principles of motion, 58 ff.,
110, 114, 181 ff., 331, 370, 395 ff.;
in science, 35, 194 ff.
See also Motion
Maxwell, 76, 168, 266, 326
McWilliams, 113, 136, 171
Measurement, aim of empiriology, 13,
16, 27, 33, 39, 40, 48, 76, 157,
229 ff., 321, 349; and being, 36,
101, 132, 430; as only knowledge,
4, 139; and law, 99 ff., 379; and
motion, 39, 40, 237, 348, 384; and
place, 320 ff., 379

Index
Mechanism, 56, 64, 75 ff., 159, 173,
189, 196ff, 211, 254, 261, 271,
285, 333, 444, 446, 451
Medium, 71, 84, 86, 121 ff., 163,
335 ff., 447, 448
Meehan, 109
Meitner, 224
Mercury, 354, 355
Meson, 114, 119, 186 ff., 410, 427
Metaclass, 300
Metalanguage, 300
Metalogic, 300
Metanumber, 300
Metaphysics, and abstraction, 12 ff.;
and being, 12 ff., 19, 21, 244, 399;
director of sciences, 15, 356; of
knowledge, 16, 40, 238, 349, 435;
and philosophical physics, 19, 20,
244, 262, 430; and potency-act, 44,
74, 75, 92; and substance, 62, 68
Method as such, 149 ff., 153, 154,
159 ff., 288
Meyerson, 28, 85, 152, 161
Michelangelo, 61, 66
Michelson, 326, 336, 337, 345
Mill, 8, 21, 32, 235, 236
Millikan, 232, 413, 461
Minkowski, 220
Molecule, 24, 189, 211, 273 ff., 413,
416 ff.
Momentum, 87, 153, 204, 246
Monads, 77, 112, 241
Monism, 43, 181 ff., 244, 341, 445
Morley, 326, 336, 337, 345
Morris, 150, 181, 214 ff.
Motion, and change, 40, 73 (See also
Change); conditions of, 405 ff.,
451; definition of, 25, 43 ff., 81,
119, 127, 284, 339, 342; and em­
piriological physics, 26, 31 ff., 77,
139 ff., 263; and experience, 11,
39 ff., 63, 77, 84 ff., 104, 109, 123,
158, 320; principles of, 58 ff.,
110 ff., 181 ff., 211; and quantity,
14, 16, 33, 34, 36, 42, 48, 49, 70,
75, 86, 165, 221, 241 ff., 320, 358,
386, 401 ff.; source of, 54, 63,
121 ff., 249 ff.; species, 6, 7, 62
Motor cause, 81 ff., 233 ff.
See also God

469

Moulton, 88
Murphy, 214 ff.

Nagel, 434
Naturalism, 14, 40, 77, 113, 141, 144,
148, 256
Nature, and abstraction, 8, 358; and
art, 49 ff., 77, 163, 177, 196 ff.,
287, 361, 412, 461; and being, 19,
20. 25; as cause, 54, 63, 93 ff.,
121 ff., 184, 249 ff., 257, 260, 261,
270, 286, 330, 348, 420; definition
of, 54, 96, 100, 114, 219; as dy­
namic, 40, 58, 183, 189, 191, 210,
286, 378, 395, 405; and finality,
93 ff., 100, 208, 281; form, matter,
or composite, 61, 62, 68, 101, 135,
188, 344; and mobile being, 26;
order of, 99 ff., 105, 117, 239,
258 ff., 270 ff.; and quantity, 14,
16, 77, 208, 223, 248, 395 ff.; and
substance, 62 ff., 201, 222, 332,
333, 419
Nebular Theory, 87 ff.
Neoplatonism, 244
Nested intervals, 293
Neutrino, 410
Neutron, 24, 58, 114, 119, 188 ff.,
410ff.
Newton, 4, 6, 26, 83, 91, 112, 140 ff.,
153, 208, 216, 224, 228, 236, 246,
247, 337, 338, 339, 344, 350, 354,
356, 359, 360, 395, 425
Nietzsche, 34, 364, 390, 391
Nihilism, 116, 126, 152 ff., 168, 184,
185, 411
Non-contradiction, 25, 42, 116, 310 ff.
Northrop, 19, 21, 44, 149
Noumenon, 15, 26
Now, the, 364 ff.
Nucleon, 114, 119, 187 ff.
Nucleus, 40, 58, 113, 195 ff., 410,
420
Number, 3, 66, 126 ff., 288 ff., 365 ff.
Objective immortality, 98
Objective relativism, 214 ff.
Ockham, 71, 303
Ohm’s law, 99, 176
Ontological principle, 125
Ontologism, 185, 260

470

Index

Ophelia, 384
Order, 99 ff., 186, 239 ff., 258 ff.,
270 ff., 357, 408 ff.
Ostwald, 77

Paleontology, 364
Pantheism, 181, 185, 260
Paradoxes, 301 ff., 416
Parallelogram law, 246
Parmenides, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 80,
96, 181, 257
Paschen lines, 449 ff.
Passion, 244 ff., 439
Passivity, 29, 31, 45, 74, 95, 119,
151 ff., 159 ff., 188, 189, 203, 211,
261, 283, 411, 423
Paulsen, 112
Peano, 66, 299
Pearson, 172
Perfection, 22, 59
Perspectivism, 214 ff.
Phenomena, 16, 26, 146, 181, 241
Phenomenology, 172
Philip of Spain, 49 ff.
Photoelectric effect, 428
Photon, 195, 214
Physiology, 147, 183, 224
Place, circumscriptive and non-circumscriptive, 345; defined hy mo­
tion, 62, 321, 323, 347; definitive
and non-definitive, 345; not quality
or substance, 70, 436; not space,
321, 346, 351, 386; as term,
285 ff., 321, 329 ff., 347, 361, 365,
386 ff.; of universe, 339 ff.
Planck, 4, 6, 76, 84, 269, 270, 395,
428, 429, 441
Planetesimals, 87 ff.
Plants, 119, 182, 190, 192, 193, 206,
424
Plato, 16, 34, 60, 77, 87, 92, 111,
135, 152, 154, 155, 168, 198, 199,
350, 354, 365, 375 ff.
Plenum, 322, 339, 353, 383, 384,
385, 388
Plotinus, 372
Pluralism, 43, 95, 118, 119, 123, 133,
159, 181 ff., 198, 211, 244, 263,
265, 433
Plurality, 31, 43, 117, 183 ff., 289,
317, 438, 445

Poincaré, 36, 48, 215, 305, 348, 354,
357
Pointillism, 429
Polymorphism, 222 ff.
Pompeii, 107
Porphyry, 172, 300
Positivism, 139, 143, 144, 198, 379,
460
Potency, and impotency, 439 ff.; in
knowledge, 22, 23, 117, 308, 318;
as matter, 65 ff., 114, 176, 202,
211, 308, 359, 414; and motion,
25, 26, 42 ff., 82 ff., 91, 127, 186,
249 ff., 284; pure, 65 ff., 96, 117 ff.,
129, 135, 166, 171; as universal,
22, 165, 360
Pragmatism, 57, 125
Prediction, 99, 100, 108, 146, 171,
175, 237, 239, 240, 276
Preestablished harmony, 241
Prehension, 217, 262
Prime matter, 65 ff., 103, 114, 118,
155, 162, 203, 211, 278, 280, 283,
423, 424
See also Matter-form
Principles, 58 ff.
Privation, 58 ff., 108, 109, 110, 113,
279
See also Matter-form
Probability, 30, 173, 266 ff.
Progress, 47, 98, 248, 258 ff., 390
Prometheus, 140
Protagoras, 163, 165
Proton, 24, 114, 115, 118, 121,
188 ff., 341, 410 ff., 454
Psychology, 6, 22, 26, 62, 89, 147,
183, 206, 372
Pythagoreans, 111, 184, 220

Quality, divisions, 439, 440; as nature,
437 ff., 446 ff.; as perfective, 201,
434, 437, 450 ff.; primary and sec­
ondary, 147, 435, 444; and quan­
tity, 9, 12, 17, 18, 62, 66, 147
See also Alteration
Quantity, and being, 15, 36, 403,
406 ff.; as discrete, 63, 124 ff., 165,
289, 311, 361, 370, 410, 417, 428,
429, 439; effects of, 431 ff.; and
empiriological physics, 14, 17, 32,
34, 35, 48, 70, 165, 263; and ex-

Index
perience, 18, 263, 288 ff., 401; as
first accident, 423 ff., 450, 451,
460; and infinite, 110 ff., 164,
288 ff.; in mathematics, 12 ff.,
289 ff., 355, 379; and matter, 66,
112, 194, 208, 241 ff., 320, 401,
405 ff.; and measurement, 13, 33,
173, 289 ff., 430; and philosophical
physics, 16, 62, 75, 403 ff.
See also Quality
Quantum physics, 30, 41, 76, 77, 84,
143, 146, 154, 165, 167, 168, 213,
239, 259, 268 ff., 320, 321, 327,
361, 364, 395, 403, 428 ff.
Quiddity, 68
Radar, 363
Radioactivity, 85, 88, 108, 203 ff.,
242, 268
Randall, 149
Raphael, 360
Rarefaction, 437, 455 ff.
Reaction, 245 ff.
Realism, 14, 30, 36, 41, 56, 68, 104,
110, 114, 127, 181 ff., 245, 338,
395, 400, 415, 459 ff.
Reichenbach, 150
Reid, 236
Relations, 132, 133, 157, 161, 191,
192, 210, 222, 251, 306, 332, 349,
351, 359, 378
Relativity, theory of, 49, 77, 79, 117,
143, 146, 152ff., 159, 167, 168,
181, 195, 224 ff„ 320, 321, 325 ff.,
346, 352 ff., 364, 377, 381, 383,
384 ff., 416
Remission, 437, 454 ff.
Renaissance, 57, 140, 149
Renouvier, 125
Resonance, 195, 214
Reversibility, 239, 378, 386 ff.
Riemann, 353 ff.
Riezler, 232
Robbins, 319
Rose, 257
Rousseau, 7
Rules, 130 ff., 301, 302, 303, 308 ff.,
314, 356 ff.

471

Russell, 14, 19, 27, 32, 48, 125, 149,
150, 156, 158, 181, 188, 197, 198,
218, 236, 289, 299 ff., 346
Rutherford, 207, 420, 427
Santayana, 31, 44, 48, 77, 123, 181,
216, 255, 334
Sartre, 25, 126, 375, 396 ff.
Schroedinger, 6, 84, 117, 165, 269,
270, 271, 277
Science, age of, 5, 139; and causes
and principles, 20, 37, 118, 140,
233; and explanation, 31, 144, 358;
and mathematics, 15, 34, 319, 355;
and realism, 14, 41, 104, 319,
400; and universals, 10, 23, 25
See also Explanation; Knowl­
edge
Scientism, 27, 30, 37, 69, 80, 99, 100,
114, 131, 139, 143, 157, 239, 255,
270, 334, 335, 399, 417
Scotus, 205
Sellars, 255
Seminal existence, 69, 72
Sensible matter, see Matter
Sensism, 8, 80, 157, 238, 242, 302,
378
Sentimentalism, 157
Set theory, 290 ff., 306
Shakespeare, 123
Shape, 434, 439
Simon, 109, 171, 176, 280
Skepticism, 41, 100, 145, 234, 236,
238
Smith, N., 142
Smuts, 77, 255
Sociology, 168
Solipsism, 156
Sorel, 174
Soul, 50, 452
Sound, 147, 219, 440 ff.
Spaier, 405, 452
Space, as abstract, 9, 34, 305, 345 ff.;
as extension, 321, 328 ff.; as real,
74, 75, 186, 350
See also Continuum
Speculation, 37, 143, 144, 169, 172,
238, 360, 400
Spencer, 48, 77, 217, 220
Spinoza, 181, 183, 185, 193, 218, 254
Stark effect, 455

72

Index

Statistics, 8, 24, 76, 84, 208, 259,
266 ff.
Strassmann, 224
Suarez, 71, 245
Subjectivism, 53, 149 ff., 156, 183,
277
Substance, 15, 62 ff., 110 ff., 181 ff.,
204, 364, 375, 409, 421
Systematic, 174

being, 50, 74, 75, 96, 132 ff., 186,
207, 448; of cause 107; of method,
154; of number, 130, 131, 198,
431, 432; predicamental, 403, 431,
432; of time, 383 ff.; of universe,
109, 118, 383 ff., 445
Uranium, 88, 89, 108

Vacuum, 86, 118, 152, 153, 254,
319, 322, 327, 334 ff., 419
Vaihinger, 348
Vanni Rovighi, 179
Variable, 32, 361
Velasquez, 49, 50
Velocity, 152, 184, 188, 209, 218,
231, 249, 268 ff., 320, 327, 395
Venus de Milo, 54
Vesuvius, 107
Vico, 142
Violence, 231
Virtual presence, 73, 205 ff., 213,
426 ff., 452
von Laue, 153
von Mises, 287

Tarawa, 51, 52
Tautology, 158
Teleology, see. Final cause
Tennant, 171
Tensor, 41
Theology, 92, 124, 143, 149
Theory, 5, 6, 13, 88, 89, 99 ff., 141,
146 ff., 154, 164, 166, 171, 197,
346
Thermodynamics, 208 ff., 259, 270 ff.,
350
Tidal Theory, 88
Time, and abstraction, 10, 367 ff.,
391; definition, 365, 392; as direc­
tional, 99, 378, 386 ff.; and eter­
nity, 92, 376, 398 ff.; and magni­
tude, 373 ff., 384; reality of, 43, 74,
75, 371, 378, 394; time-telling, 34,
363, 377, 378, 384
See also Continuum
Tool, 125 ff., 141, 146, 170
Transeunce, 147, 152 ff., 249, 264,
349, 425
Transfinite number, 293 ff.
Transit time, 205
Types, theory of, 301 ff.

Wave equations, 30, 269 ff.
Weight, 18, 195, 225 ff.
Weyl, 299, 305, 308
Whitehead, 31, 48, 74, 98, 123, 125,
126, 148, 165, 181, 188, 207, 217,
223, 236, 241-, 255, 261, 262, 314,
330, 411, 415, 448
Whyte, 216
William of Champeaux, 71
Wolff, 6, 19
Wyser, 13

Undecidables, 155 ff.
Uniformity of nature, 99 ff.
Unity, of art, 50, 51, 52, 218; of

Zeeman effect, 455
Zeno, 31, 42, 43, 48, 111, 388, 402,
416 ff., 429