Textbook Making Objects and Events A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts Actions and Organisms 1St Edition Simon J Evnine Ebook All Chapter PDF

Making Objects and Events: A
Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts,

Actions, and Organisms 1st Edition
Simon J. Evnine
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/making-objects-and-events-a-hylomorphic-theory-of-a
rtifacts-actions-and-organisms-1st-edition-simon-j-evnine/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/
Theory Formulation and Realization of Artifacts Science

3M I Body System Masayuki Matsui
https://textbookfull.com/product/theory-formulation-and-
realization-of-artifacts-science-3m-i-body-system-masayuki-
matsui/
Event Studies: Theory and Management for Planned Events

(Events Management) 5th Edition Getz
https://textbookfull.com/product/event-studies-theory-and-
management-for-planned-events-events-management-5th-edition-getz/
Theory of stochastic objects probability stochastic

processes and inference 1st Edition Micheas
https://textbookfull.com/product/theory-of-stochastic-objects-
probability-stochastic-processes-and-inference-1st-edition-
micheas/
Advances in Paleoimaging-Applications for
Paleoanthropology, Bioarchaeology, Forensics, and
Cultural Artifacts 1st Edition Gerald J. Conlogue
(Author)
https://textbookfull.com/product/advances-in-paleoimaging-
applications-for-paleoanthropology-bioarchaeology-forensics-and-
cultural-artifacts-1st-edition-gerald-j-conlogue-author/
Theory of stochastic objects: probability, stochastic

processes, and inference First Edition Micheas
https://textbookfull.com/product/theory-of-stochastic-objects-
probability-stochastic-processes-and-inference-first-edition-
micheas/
Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality

Simon Ceder
https://textbookfull.com/product/towards-a-posthuman-theory-of-
educational-relationality-simon-ceder/
Dormancy in Aquatic Organisms Theory Human Use and

Modeling Victor R. Alekseev
https://textbookfull.com/product/dormancy-in-aquatic-organisms-
theory-human-use-and-modeling-victor-r-alekseev/
Making Sense Cognition Computing Art and Embodiment

Simon Penny
https://textbookfull.com/product/making-sense-cognition-
computing-art-and-embodiment-simon-penny/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/08/2016, SPi
Making Objects and Events

Making Objects and

Events
A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts,
Actions, and Organisms
Simon J. Evnine
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Simon J. Evnine 2016
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2016
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959279
ISBN 978–0–19–877967–4
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To Giovanna Pompele
Contents
Preface xi
1. Hylomorphism and its Related Metaphysics 1

1.1 Some Varieties of Hylomorphism 3
1.1.1 A sufficient but minimal condition for hylomorphism 3
1.1.2 Aristotelian hylomorphism 7
1.1.3 Principle-based hylomorphism 10
1.2 Amorphic Hylomorphism 12
1.2.1 A brief overview 12
1.2.2 The methodological priority of matter to complex object 13
1.2.3 The metabolic priority of a complex object to its matter 15
1.2.4 Artifacts 17
1.2.5 Historical ontology 19
1.2.6 Vagueness 21
1.3 Mereology 23
1.4 Three- and Four-Dimensionalism 27
2. Some Contemporary Varieties of Hylomorphism 32
2.1 Judith Thomson 32
2.1.1 An initial non-hylomorphic definition of constitution 32
2.1.2 A subsequent hylomorphic definition of constitution 37
2.2 Lynne Baker 42
2.2.1 Baker’s definition of constitution 43
2.2.2 Problems with Baker’s definition 44
2.3 Kit Fine 50
2.3.1 Qua objects and rigid embodiments 51
2.3.2 Variable embodiments 53
2.3.3 Ontological inflation 55
2.3.4 Which object is which? 56
2.3.5 Matter and parthood 57
2.3.6 Functions and extensionalism 59
2.3.7 Rules and artifacts 62
3. Artifacts: The Basic Metaphysics 66
3.1 Artifacts 66
3.2 Making and Making out of 70
3.2.1 The process of making 70
3.2.2 The matter relation and making out of 73
3.2.3 The grounding problem 78
3.3 Morphic Construals 82
3.3.1 A Marxist theory of artifacts 83
3.3.2 Qua objects and variable embodiments again 84
viii Contents
3.4 Questions of Identity 85

3.4.1 Individual essence and the necessity of origin 86
3.4.2 Mass production 97
3.4.3 Individuation 103
3.4.4 Identity over time: the Ship of Theseus 106
3.5 Speaking and Thinking Things into Existence 110
3.5.1 Speaking or thinking into existence objects of a given kind 110
3.5.2 Making it the case that there are Ks 112
4. Artifacts: Functions, Artworks, and Abstract Artifacts 119
4.1 Functions, Intentions, and Prototypes 119
4.1.1 How do artifacts acquire their functions? 119
4.1.2 Failure 125
4.1.3 Do all artifacts have kind-dependent functions? 128
4.2 Thomson’s Artifact Thesis 129
4.3 Works of Art 133
4.4 Abstract Artifacts 136
4.4.1 Musical works 136
4.4.2 Fictional characters 139
4.4.3 Languages 145
5. Organisms 160
5.1 Organisms and Artifacts in Aristotle 161
5.2 An Artifactual Model of the Creation of Organisms in Sexual Reproduction 165
5.2.1 The agents in sexual reproduction 166
5.2.2 The matter in sexual reproduction 167
5.2.3 Identity conditions for organisms 171
5.3 Teleology 176
5.3.1 Functions of organism parts 177
5.3.2 Whole organisms 180
5.3.3 The (conditional) necessity of evolution 182
5.3.4 Animal artifacts 183
5.4 Organisms and Principle-Based Hylomorphism 185
6. Natural Non-Organic Objects 188
6.1 The Case for Rejection 189
6.1.1 The methodological priority of matter to hylomorphically
complex object 189
6.1.2 Spelke objects 191
6.1.3 The scope of the rejection 193
6.2 Arguments for NNOs 194
6.2.1 Universalism 195
6.2.2 Conceptualism 197
6.2.3 Ontological minimalism 199
6.3 Fictionalism 202
6.3.1 The view 202
6.3.2 The point of fictionalism about NNOs 204
Contents ix
7. Actions as Artifacts 207

7.1 Some Metaphysical Preliminaries 208
7.1.1 Are actions events? 208
7.1.2 Hylomorphism for events 208
7.2 Actions and Artifacts: Preliminary Considerations 209
7.3 Hylomorphism in Existing Theories of Events and Actions 212
7.3.1 Kim’s views on events 212
7.3.2 Fine’s theory of action 214
7.3.3 Goldman and level-generation 216
7.3.4 Davidson and anti-hylomorphism about action 218
7.4 Actions as Artifacts 219
7.4.1 The role of intentions 219
7.4.2 Unintentional action 221
7.4.3 Basic action and bodily movements 225
7.5 Artifacts, Action, and Creativity 229
7.6 Actions: Individuation, Identity over Time, and Individual Essences 234
7.6.1 Individuation 234
7.6.2 Change over time 235
7.6.3 Individual essence: action type 237
7.6.4 Individual essence: originating intention 243
7.6.5 The essentiality of times to events 247
7.7 Expression and Mass Production 249
7.7.1 Expressive versus instrumental actions 249
7.7.2 Mass production and action 250
Conclusion 253
Bibliography 255
Index 265
Preface
This is a book about what I call hylomorphically complex entities, things that are made
out of matter but are not identical to that matter. Because these entities are not identi-
cal to their matter, many of them can change their matter over time; and even those
that cannot change their matter might have been made of different matter. My treat-
ment of hylomorphically complex entities is largely inspired by Aristotle’s claim that
the efficient, formal, and final causes of hylomorphically complex entities often coin-
cide. By this, I take it, he means that such entities can only be properly understood if we
tie together an account of what they are (their formal causes) with an account of how
they come to exist (their efficient causes) and an account of their functions (their final
causes). From a metaphysical point of view, the most striking and illuminating case of
entities for which we can tie together these three accounts are artifacts, things that
people (and perhaps some other animals) literally make out of matter. Artifacts, there-
fore, are at the very core of this book. It is, indeed, mostly a book about artifacts.
(Among artifacts, I have quite a lot to say specifically about works of art.) I also argue
that intentional actions should be seen as artifacts too, artifactual events rather than
objects. Finally, biological organisms, Aristotle’s paradigm of substances that display a
coincidence of efficient, formal, and final causes, are treated here.
In chapter 1, I outline the basic ideas of hylomorphism—the metaphysics of form
and matter—as it features in Aristotle and some contemporary philosophers, and pre-
view my own approach to it. I also explore its connection to some other major meta-
physical themes: part–whole relations and persistence in time. Chapter 2 provides a
detailed look at the views of three contemporary hylomorphists (though not all would
describe themselves as such): Judith Jarvis Thomson, Lynne Baker, and Kit Fine.1
Chapters 3 and 4 constitute the heart of the book. Chapter 3 develops a theory of arti-
facts, with detailed discussions of their nature, their identity conditions, and their
essential properties. Chapter 4 deals with a number of more specialized issues around
artifacts. In chapter 5, I extend and adapt the theory of artifacts developed in chapter 3
to biological organisms, and in chapter 6, I argue that it cannot be further extended to
include non-biological, non-artifactual entities (such as rivers, planets, and rocks).
1
This chapter bears a complex relation to my paper “Constitution and Composition: Three Approaches
to Their Relation” (2011). The first section of each is on Thomson and the book version differs from the
earlier version only in being slightly improved. The second section of each is on Baker. While the exposition
of Baker is substantially the same, the critical discussions that follow deal with entirely different issues. The
final section of the paper is on Mark Johnson and Kathrin Koslicki, while the final section of chapter 2 is on
Fine. However, these three figures have much in common and the critical parts of the earlier paper find an
echo in the chapter 2 discussion, along with many things that have no counterpart at all in the paper.
xii Preface
Finally, chapter 7 takes up the topic of actions and adapts the theory of chapter 3 to
these artifactual events.
For many of the ideas in this book I owe a great debt to two of my teachers when
I was a graduate student at UCLA from 1989 to 1996. The first is Montgomery Furth.
When I arrived, Monty was just returning to work after having had his larynx removed.
He had learned esophageal speech and gave a class on Plato’s early and middle dia-
logues for which I was lucky enough to be his teaching assistant. Later that year, he
gave a graduate seminar on Aristotle’s philosophy of biology, no doubt discussing
themes from his just published book Substance, Form and Psyche: An Aristotelian
Metaphysics. At the time, I had no interest in the topic and did not take the seminar.
Years later, long after Monty’s untimely death, I was preparing to teach a class in ancient
philosophy and finally read his book. Reading it was one of the most exciting philo-
sophical experiences I have had and I recommend the book to anyone who will listen.
But even then, my own research interests were in quite a different place. When I began
to work on this book, some time in 2008, however, I realized I needed to reread Monty’s
work. It was just as exciting, if not more so, the second time around, now that I was able
to draw on what I was learning there for my own ideas. My understanding of Aristotle,
and, with that, my understanding of what I am doing here, is largely due to his wonder-
ful book. And if you’re listening, I strongly recommend it to you!
The other wellspring of ideas deriving from my days at UCLA is Kit Fine. Kit’s
attempts to formalize various aspects of Aristotle’s hylomorphism were important to
me, but much more important were his own views on qua objects and rigid and varia-
ble embodiments in general. So assured are Kit's treatments of his topics that it took
me forever to come to understand why I did not accept them and what I found trou-
bling about them. It has often felt, in writing this book, that my views were tracking his,
like a shadow, always shaped by them, but forever not-them. Or, to change the image, it
has seemed to me that my views are distinguished from his by a space that is, to use
Duchamp’s term, infrathin; and yet that almost non-existent space has been enough to
catapult me into an altogether different philosophical world. Kit’s influence is not con-
fined to his published work. During the writing of this book, I have often consulted
with him; he has read parts of it in progress and has been generous with his comments
and with helping me to understand his views.
As I mention in footnote 21 in chapter 7, this book began with what I took to be an
original insight achieved while working on a now abandoned paper. That insight was
that one could understand what it is to do one thing by doing another in terms of the
constitution relation (or, as I would now call it, the matter relation). As work on the
book developed, I reread Kit’s paper “Acts, Events and Things.” I realized that Kit there
suggests understanding the by relation in terms of constitution. I knew his article well,
having written a term paper on it in, I think, Fall 1989 for a seminar of Kit’s, but I had
forgotten this detail. I do not know, when I had my “insight,” whether I was uncon-
sciously remembering Kit’s view or whether I was reinventing the wheel, but either
way, the story illustrates just how much I owe to him here.
Preface xiii
At UCLA, I had the great good fortune to have my dissertation supervised by Tyler
Burge. His integrity and care as a philosopher have been a constant inspiration to me
and I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have studied with him. He also warned
me (as did Kit, and both of them ineffectually) against the views I espouse in 6.1 of the
present work.
During the long period through which this book was being written, I have had help
from many people. Papers delivered at the University of Turku, Bar Ilan University,
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, the University of Haifa, the Serious Metaphysics
Group at the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, the Institute of
Philosophy in London, University College London, and the University of Florida pre-
sented work in progress and I benefited from discussion and questions from the always
interested and sympathetic audiences at these events.
The University of Miami has been an excellent home during the writing of this book.
In 2011–2, I was a Fellow at the University’s Center for the Humanities and my fellow
fellows inspired me to as great a clarity as I could muster in chapter 1. Many thanks to
them, and to the center. Leonidas Bachas, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences,
awarded me a semester of leave in Fall 2013 to work towards finishing the manuscript
that was sent to the publisher for initial review. This was under a policy aimed at help-
ing associate professors finish manuscripts of a second (or in my case, third) book. He
also instituted a policy of providing honoraria to members of the profession from
other institutions to read and comment on manuscripts written by UM faculty and
I was lucky enough to benefit from this. These are both enlightened policies and I thank
the dean and the college for them. The just-noted policy enabled me to have almost the
entire manuscript read through by Daniel Z. Korman and I could not have asked for a
better reader. His comments were copious and extremely helpful.
Colleagues and friends at the University of Miami have been a great source of
help. Among our many talented students, Ben Burgis and, especially, Rina Tzinman
have provided a lot of help and feedback. Among faculty, Caleb Everett in
Anthropology and Peter Luykx in Biology were invaluable sources of specialist
information about topics that loom large in this book. Otávio Bueno, Risto Hilpinen,
Peter Lewis, Mark Rowlands, Nick Stang, and Matt Walker all offered much-needed
help at various points. Elijah Chudnoff was a constant go-to person when I had
problems thinking things through and he read and talked with me about many parts
of the work. Most of all I wish to thank Amie Thomasson. In Spring 2010 I co-taught
a graduate seminar with Amie on artifacts (with Risto Hilpinen often sitting in, so it
felt like Artifacts Central there for a while). At the time, I thought that I was simply
mimicking Amie’s views about artifacts and it was during that seminar that I began
to realize how the many similarities between our views were a veneer covering up
much greater differences. Nonetheless, thinking about Amie’s work has been invalu-
able to me and has helped me understand my own views much better. She also read
large parts of the manuscript and gave many detailed comments on my work in
progress.
xiv Preface
Other friends and colleagues have also been generous in reading and commenting
on parts of the work or in answering questions: Roberta Ballarin, Sherri Irvin, Kathrin
Koslicki, Giovanna Pompele, Guy Rohrbaugh, Johanna Rubba, and Susanna Siegel.
Two referees for Oxford University Press offered a wealth of good advice and I thank
them for helping make the book better. Many thanks also to all those at Oxford
University Press (or working with the press in the production of this book): Peter
Momtchiloff, Eleanor Collins, Sarah Parker, Mohana Annamalai, and Kim Richardson
(and any others whom I get to know only after writing this).
Material from Simon Evnine, “Ready-Mades: Ontology and Aesthetics,” British
Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 53, no. 4, 2013, pp. 407–23 is used by permission of the British
Society of Aesthetics. Material from Simon Evnine, “Constitution and Composition:
Three Approaches to Their Relation,” ProtoSociology, vol. 27, 2011, pp. 212–35 is used
by permission of Gerhard Preyer. The excerpt from C. L. Moore’s ”No Woman Born” is
reprinted with the permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. © 1944 by Street and
Smith Publications, renewed 1972 by Conde Nast. The epigraphs by Helen Humphreys
and Adam Johnson appear by kind permission of their authors.
The process of writing the book has been long and, at times, painful. I would like to
thank Otávio Bueno, Barbara Held, Manuela Menendez, and most especially Giovanna
Pompele for their consistent sympathy, encouragement, and support.
“Work? The quantity of done and forgotten work that lies silent under my feet in
this world, and escorts and attends me, and supports and keeps me alive, whereso-
ever I walk or stand, whatsoever I think or do, gives rise to reflection!”
(Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, NYU Press, 2000, 135)
“I believe there’s an affinity between men and the machines they make. They
make them out of their own brains, really, a sort of mental conception and gesta-
tion, and the result responds to the minds that created them and to all human
minds that understand and manipulate them.”
(C. L. Moore, “No Woman Born,” reprinted in Pamela Sargent (ed.),
Women of Wonder: The Classic Years, Mariner Books, 1995, 32)
“What we make doesn’t recover from us.”

(Helen Humphreys, “Installation,” Anthem, Brick Books, 1999)
“The reason we are drawn to the artifact is to know, without judgment, the heart
of another.”
(Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us, Penguin Books, 2004, 26)

1
Hylomorphism and its Related
Metaphysics
Everything is water. So began the history of western philosophy, soon to be amplified

by the dissenting voices that everything is air, or fire, or earth, or some combination of
earth, air, fire, and water now mixed by Love, now separated by Strife. These were the
theories of the Presocratic physikoi, philosophers of nature, and they were intended to
provide comprehensive explanations of the world we find ourselves in. There are
important features of this world, however, that Aristotle thought these philosophies
could not explain. Montgomery Furth (1988, 72–4) provides a list of seven very famil-
iar yet, if one reflects a little, striking facts about this world, specifically about its bio-
logical aspects, which must have impressed Aristotle and seemed to him beyond the
explanatory reach of his Presocratic predecessors:
1. Biological objects are individuals or “thisses.”1
2. Each one of these biological individuals is permanently endowed with a highly
definite specific nature.
3. These biological individuals are by a wide margin and without exception the
most complex and highly organized objects to be found on the Earth.
4. The intricate constitutive nature that typifies such things is very highly species-
specific, to the extent that a detailed examination of relatively few specimens is
sufficient to smooth out the variation attributable to environmental influence.
5. Offspring virtually invariably share their specific character with a pair of
parents.
6. These natural types are profuse in number and of enormous diversity.
7. These objects are subject to temporal as well as spatial limitations.2
What was it about the theories of the physikoi that Aristotle thought rendered them
unable to deal with these, and related, phenomena? These nature philosophers, says
Aristotle, “thought the principles which were of the nature of matter (hyle) were the
only principles of all things” (Metaphysics I, 3 983b6; Ross 1984, 1555). Water, earth,
1
“Thisses” is the philosopher’s plural of the demonstrative pronoun “this,” where the latter is used to
render Aristotle’s technical term tode ti, “a this something.”
2
The seven points are all direct quotation from Furth, though they are separated there by further expo-
sition. There are two minor silent ellipses in my quotation. The previous footnote is mine.
2 hylomorphism and its related metaphysics
air, fire, these were the “principles of the nature of matter.” But it seems all but unimag-
inable that the mere sloshing around of water, or its mixing with earth, air, and fire, as
determined by the actions on them of attractive and repulsive forces (Love and Strife),
could explain the existence of many different kinds of complex individual organisms,
each reproducing their kind and only their kind, living according to uniform patterns,
in a world to which they appear to be very well adapted. To get the biological phe-
nomena from the principles of the nature of matter, something else would have to be
operative, working up the matter, mixing it in the right proportions, and guiding its
development. This something Aristotle called form. A comprehensive account of the
natural phenomena, Aristotle argued, would have to be couched in terms of “princi-
ples” of the nature of both matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Thus was born the first,
and still the prototypical and most impressive, variety of hylomorphism, the meta-
physics of form and matter.3
In adding form to his theoretical account of nature, Aristotle also enriched or recon-
figured the role of matter. Originally, matter was simply some kind or kinds of stuff:
earth, air, water, fire. But once we start talking of matter as organized by form, a relative
notion of matter is introduced. Into the vast soup of the elements, we have added dis-
cernible individual things, each a combination of form and matter, and so we can talk
about the matter of such and such an individual—the earth that is the matter of this
particular rock, for example. And this introduces the further possibility that some-
thing that is itself a combination of matter and form, a hylomorphically complex
object, may be the matter of a yet more complex object. That is, something may be
matter in the relative sense—the matter of something—without being matter in the
absolute sense—mere earth, air, or any of the rest of them. Just so are nails, planks, and
windows the matter of a house; or the vital organs the matter of an animal body. They
stand to the house or the body in something like the same relation as that in which the
earth stands to the rock of which it is the matter; but they themselves are not matter
simpliciter. They themselves are combinations of matter and form.
This book is an exercise in contemporary hylomorphic metaphysics. In section 1.1,
I shall describe a minimal condition for a view’s counting as hylomorphism and look at
two powerful ways in which this minimal view has been amplified. In 1.2, I shall give a
brief description of the approach to hylomorphism I will be developing in this book
and comment on a few general features of my approach. Since hylomorphism touches
issues that are so central to metaphysics, it is impossible to discuss it in isolation from
some other important parts of the discipline. In section 1.3, I discuss the relations of
hylomorphism to the theory of parts and wholes (mereology) and in 1.4, I assess the
relations of hylomorphism to the debate between three- and four-dimensionalism as
rival theories of the persistence of objects in time.
3
Here, and throughout, I am heavily indebted for my understanding of Aristotle to Montgomery
Furth (1988) and Sarah Waterlow (1982). Neither, of course, is responsible for my misunderstanding of
Aristotle.
hylomorphism and its related metaphysics 3
1.1 Some Varieties of Hylomorphism

1.1.1 A sufficient but minimal condition for hylomorphism
I take commitment to the following as sufficient for a view’s counting as a variety of
hylomorphism:
HYL) some things stand in the relation of being the matter of to other things and
this relation (the matter relation) is irreflexive and asymmetric.
Since the relation is irreflexive, nothing is its own matter, hence a thing and its matter
are always distinct entities. And because it is asymmetric, the domain of things to
which it applies has a hierarchical structure. If x is the matter of y, then y cannot be the
matter of x (though it may be the matter of some further thing z) and hence x and y are
in some sense on different ontological levels.4 Though this formulation does not cap-
ture the required asymmetry of the matter relation, one could express HYL succinctly
as the view that some things have matter to which they are not identical.
To give a concrete example, take the case, to be discussed many times in the course
of this book, of a statue. HYL itself does not demand any particular view of this
example, since it merely holds that some objects have matter to which they are not
identical. But a statue is in fact a good example of the kind of objects that hylomor-
phic theories are concerned with. If a view is committed to HYL, and the example
falls within the scope of that view, there are two distinct entities involved, a statue
and a quantity, or lump, or piece of, say, bronze.5 The statue has the bronze as its
matter but is not identical to it. They exist on different ontological levels, ordered
by the matter relation. There are many potentially puzzling features of this state of
affairs. What, exactly, one finds puzzling will depend on other philosophical views
one holds, but here is a brief conspectus of some of the issues. (I do not mean, here,
to give an exhaustive account of the potential issues, or even to formulate any of the
alleged problems definitively.)
1) Why think that there are two objects here rather than one? There are actually two
ways of formulating this worry. First, we might wonder, given that we have a quantity
of bronze before we get to work, in virtue of what is a distinct, further object brought
into existence? Or supposing that we think that we do bring a new object, a statue, into
4
I do not take it to be impossible for objects of the same kind to be on different ontological levels. For
example, the Pope’s triregnum is a crown the matter of which is three other crowns. In allowing this, I differ
from Lynne Baker (2000, 2007), whose views on this example I discuss in 2.2.1.
5
“Quantity” is a technical term here, coined by Helen Cartwright (1970), denoting not a measure or
amount, such as five pounds or eight cubic inches, but a particular portion of something. So, if I melt a
bronze statue and recast the bronze as a door knocker, the statue and the door knocker are made from the
same quantity of bronze (and that would be true even if, per impossibile, the weight or volume of the bronze
changed in the process), but two five-pound statues on a table together are not made from the same quan-
tity of bronze, though the amount of bronze in each is identical. I say a bit more about quantities of matter
in 1.3 and 6.1.3. They are distinct from pieces and lumps.
existence, why think the quantity or piece of bronze continues to exist?6 Secondly, we
might agree that we have a statue and a quantity or piece of bronze and then go on to
wonder whether the statue and the bronze are identical or not. Whereas the first way of
putting this worry assumes that the statue and bronze would be distinct, but wonders
why one should be committed to the existence of both of them, this second way of for-
mulating the worry assumes that both the statue and the bronze do exist, but wonders
whether one should take them to be distinct.
2) Supposing that there are two objects (that there is both a statue and a quantity of
bronze and that they are not identical), it seems as if they are made up of exactly the
same molecules of bronze. Does that mean that they have all the same parts? And if so,
how can two different objects be made out of the same parts at the same time?
3) Again, supposing that there two objects, these objects have many of their prop-
erties in common. They are both bronze, they both have the same weight, the same
location; if you drop one, you drop the other; and so on. Do they have all their proper-
ties in common? If not, how are the properties with respect to which they differ related
to those with respect to which they agree?
My preferred answers to some of these questions will emerge over the course of this
book. But for now, let us assume that there is a statue and a quantity of bronze and ask
why one should not hold that the statue simply is the bronze.7
The reasons for taking the statue and the bronze to be distinct lie in a range of tem-
poral, modal, and essential properties that may or do distinguish them. First, there are
very likely to be actual temporal differences. The bronze, in typical cases, will have
existed before the statue did. The sculptor will have taken a quantity of bronze and
made a statue out of it. And if we melt the statue down, it will cease to exist but the
quantity of bronze that is its matter will continue to exist. Other possible changes may
also militate against identifying the statue with the bronze. If a small amount of the
bronze is worn away, then we will no longer have the very same quantity of bronze on
the plinth that we originally had. But we will have exactly the same statue there, albeit a
statue that has undergone some change in its properties. These are temporal differ-
ences concerning existence and location between the statue and the bronze. Still, one
might wonder what to say about cases in which there are no such temporal differences.
For surely there might be none. To take a case of Kit Fine’s (2003), suppose we mix
quantities of tin and copper in a statue mold, thereby simultaneously bringing into
existence both the statue and the bronze that is its matter. And suppose at some point
6
Questions about the existence of two objects are far more commonly fueled by skepticism about the
higher-level object than about the lower-level object. Peter van Inwagen (1990) has been an influential
proponent, simultaneously, of skepticism about higher-level objects, in the case of artifacts (see 1.2.2),
and lower-level objects, in the case of organisms. Michael Burke (1992, 1994) has championed skepticism
about lower-level objects. (For Burke, the lower-level entity that ceases to exist when the statue comes into
existence is not a quantity but a piece or a lump.) See also Jaworski (2014).
7
It will become clear, in 1.4, that hylomorphic views are not the only views that countenance both the
existence and distinctness of the statue and the bronze.
we put the statue into an acid bath, thereby simultaneously destroying the statue and
the bronze. And suppose, finally, that during their existence, no part of the bronze is
worn away or detached. There are, then, no temporal differences of the kind surveyed.
Why insist, now, that the statue and the bronze are distinct?
There are three reasons. First, if the statue and bronze must be taken to be distinct
in cases where there are temporal differences, uniformity of treatment suggests they
be taken to be distinct even in cases where there are no such temporal differences.
Secondly, and more importantly, even if there are no such differences, there could be.
The sculptor could have first mixed the copper and tin, making the bronze, and then
subsequently used the bronze to make the statue; or she could have destroyed the
statue by melting it down, rather than putting it in an acid bath, and thereby not have
simultaneously destroyed the bronze. Or some of the bronze might have worn away
or become detached. Thus, there are actual modal differences between the statue and
the bronze, even when there are no actual temporal differences. The bronze can survive
being melted down; the statue cannot. And hylomorphically complex objects like the
statue are modally flexible in that they can change their matter over time, losing some as
they are worn away or damaged, gaining some as they are repaired and restored.
Why are there modal differences between the statue and the bronze (and hence,
why can there be actual temporal differences between them)? What makes it true
that a statue cannot withstand being melted down but a quantity of bronze can? Why
is it that a statue can persist while losing some of its original matter or gaining some
new matter? The answer (and this provides the third reason for distinguishing the
statue and the bronze even where there are no temporal differences) is that it lies
in the nature of what it is to be a statue. That’s what a statue is—something that is essen-
tially a product of human activity, which has been shaped in a certain way, something
that does not continue to exist when it radically and suddenly loses its shape, by
being melted down, for example. And it lies in the nature of what it is to be a (mere)
quantity of bronze that it does not depend on having any particular shape to con-
tinue to exist. What it is to be a statue, the essence of a statue, and what it is to be a
quantity of bronze, the essence of a quantity of bronze, are quite different and under-
lie the modal differences between the statue and the bronze. Since it is the modal
differences that make possible any actual temporal differences that exist, the reasons
for distinguishing the statue and the bronze ultimately trace back to the differences
in the natures or essences of the objects.8
These are positive reasons for taking the statue and the bronze to be distinct. The
reverse side of this coin is the undesirable consequences of taking them to be identical.
If the statue is identical to the bronze, then the statue exists whenever the bronze does.
But then, the statue must exist before it is cast and after it is melted (since the bronze
exists then). If that were true, we would have to say that a statue might exist even when
8
See Fine (2008) for a good statement of how modal and other differences between a hylomorphically
complex object and its matter are to be explained in terms of the essences of the entities involved.
it is not a statue, i.e., even when it has not been cast into statue form by a sculptor.
Statues would not be necessarily statue-like. This would be to treat statue as what is
called a phasal sortal rather than a substance sortal. Phasals are categories like child,
mayor, and reigning champion. A child is a substance, but what she is, the substance, is
a human being. The same human being can exist both as a child and as an adult. So,
when a child ceases to be a child, nothing thereby stops existing. The child continues to
exist, but as an adult. A human being, however, is not a phase of something else; when
a human being stops being a human being, it is not that she continues to exist as some-
thing other than a human being.9 An entity genuinely ceases to exist. Lot’s wife does
not continue to exist as a pillar of salt; she stops existing when she turns into a pillar of
salt.10 We could sum this distinction up by saying that humans are essentially humans
but children are not essentially children. A human must be a human at any time at
which she exists; but a child need not be a child at any time at which she exists. Human
being, therefore, is a substance sortal and child a phasal sortal. Identifying the statue
with the bronze requires us to say that statue is like child rather than human being and
that statues are not essentially statues and need not be statues at all times at which they
exist. This, I believe, is implausible.11
The problem of the statue and the bronze, and related problems, are often discussed
in the philosophical literature under the rubric of constitution. The relation I have
called the matter relation is referred to as the relation of one thing’s constituting
another—the statue is said to be constituted by the bronze. There is a range of positions
that are argued for in the debates over constitution but there is a big divide between
those who take constitution to be an irreflexive and asymmetric relation, as I have
characterized the matter relation, and those who take it to be reflexive and antisym-
metric (i.e., aRb and bRa only if a = b). These differences are usually allied to other
fundamental metaphysical differences that I shall say something about in sections 1.3
and 1.4. For now, I simply want to note that all those who accept a constitution relation
that is irreflexive and asymmetric are, whatever their terminology, in fact committed
to HYL and therefore their views count as varieties of hylomorphism, on my usage.
Thus Lynne Baker (2000, 2007), Frederick Doepke (1982), Mark Johnston (1992),
Peter Simons (1987), and David Wiggins (1980) are all constitution theorists who are
hylomorphists in spirit though not in letter. Harold Noonan (1993), Theodore Sider
(2001), and Dean Zimmerman (1995), by contrast, speak the language of constitution
but in rejecting the asymmetry and irreflexivity requirements are in fact opponents of
9
This does not preclude that some part of her, such as a soul, may continue to exist, if you are inclined
to such views.
10
So the turning into that is characteristic of Ovidian metamorphosis is to be distinguished from the
becoming involved in becoming an adult, a mayor, or a reigning champion. Wiggins (1980, 60–1, 66–7)
introduces the example of Lot’s wife and I follow his verdict on it.
11
My point is a general one about a whole range of sortals, not just statue. Which sortals is something
that occupies chapters 3–7. With respect to statue, I say why I think it is implausible to treat it as a phasal
sortal in 4.2 and 4.3; see also my 2013.
hylomorphism. (In the following, when I talk about constitution, I shall always mean
constitution taken as asymmetric and irreflexive.)12
HYL is a sufficient condition for a view’s counting as a variety of hylomorphism. But
by itself it does not offer any resources for addressing the kinds of issues at which we
have just taken a cursory look. Most philosophers who accept it will therefore supple-
ment it in some way. One obvious way of supplementing it is by postulating the exist-
ence of forms.13 Indeed, the very name “hylomorphism” might lead one to think that it
should be a necessary condition for a view’s being a variety of hylomorphism that it be
committed to both matter and form, and hence that HYL cannot be sufficient.
This is largely a matter of terminology. In giving a sufficient condition for a view’s
being a variety of hylomorphism, I am classifying a whole range of philosophical views
in a way that serves my own interests in this book. That is why I am happy to treat views
expressed in the language of constitution as types of hylomorphism, why I am happy to
apply the term “hylomorphism” to views that do not postulate forms, and why I am
inclined to treat HYL as providing a necessary as well as sufficient condition for count-
ing a view as hylomorphist, even though that would exclude several positions that are
taken explicitly by their authors to be forms of hylomorphism. I will, however, hold off
from taking HYL as necessary. I shall have more to say about this in 1.1.3, and more to
say about hylomorphic positions, like my own, that do not postulate forms in 1.2.
1.1.2 Aristotelian hylomorphism

Aristotle argues for the existence of a kind of entity, form, such that the objects that fall
within the domain of the theory are in some way composites of their matter and a
form. The form and matter enter into some special kind of relation—the form is
embodied in, or informs, the matter (though this simply names, and does nothing to
explain, that special relation)—and the result is the hylomorphically complex entity.
A form thus has two distinct relations of interest, one to the matter it informs (the
bronze, for example), and a distinct relation to the composite of which it is the form
(the statue). (A third relation will emerge shortly.) The elaboration of Aristotle’s theory
is multi-faceted, often highly obscure, and subject to almost endless commentary and
controversy. I wish here only to focus on one aspect of it, the intersection of the theory
of form and matter with the theory of the four types of causes. (And when I speak of
Aristotelian hylomorphism, it is specifically this intersection I shall be referring to.)
Aristotle develops a framework for the explanation of phenomena that identifies four
factors or causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The material and formal causes
of something are the matter and form that we have already identified. The efficient
12
The literature on constitution is now vast. In addition to the authors cited in the text, see Rea (1997)
for a good selection of papers on the topic.
13
Fine (1992) provides an interesting account of just the matter relation in Aristotle’s metaphysics. His
paper provides a rich, formal sketch of two versions of a view that satisfies HYL but says nothing about
form. It is largely to this paper that I owe the idea of detaching the matter relation from any discussion
of form.
cause is “the primary source of the change [that is the object’s coming into existence] or
the staying unchanged,” the final cause “the end . . . what something is for” (Physics II,
3 194b30–5; Charlton 1970, 29). Without getting bogged down in the details of
Aristotelian exegesis, we may gloss the efficient cause as that which brings about the
existence of something and the final cause with the developed, characteristic behavior
of something (the typical life cycle and behavior patterns of an organism) or its func-
tion (in the case of artifacts). What is remarkable in Aristotle’s framework is that he
says of the formal, efficient, and final causes that they “often coincide. What a thing is
[the formal cause], and what it is for [the final cause], are one and the same, and that
from which the change originates [the efficient cause] is the same in form as these”
(Physics II, 7 198a25; Charlton 1970, 38).
Since this point about the unity of the formal, efficient, and final causes is so impor-
tant, I will give two illustrations, one of an artifact, the other of a biological organism.
Starting with the biological case, here is a highly schematic version of Aristotle’s
account of sexual reproduction in humans. An individual human is a composite of
matter and the form human (which is therefore the individual’s formal cause).14 The
efficient cause of the coming to be of this individual is the male parent. “Men come to
be from men,” as Aristotle says (Physics II, 1 193b8; Charlton 1970, 25). The parent is
able to generate the offspring, a composite of form and matter, because he himself
has that form (he is himself a human). So besides identifying the efficient cause with
the male parent, Aristotle also identifies it with the form, acting in or through the
parent. Thus, the formal cause of our individual is also its efficient cause. But what is
the mechanism whereby this generation takes place? The semen of the male parent
carries the form in question to the matter provided by the female parent—blood in
the uterus. This union creates a composite of matter and form that either is, or
becomes, the individual offspring. But clearly, at the point of union, the resulting
composite is a long way from being a fully developed exemplar of the human species.
It is the form, once again, now informing the matter of the generated individual, that
guides the development of the individual through the various stages it must traverse
until it becomes a developed, adult human, a completed and exemplary manifesta-
tion of the form. Thus the final cause, the end state towards which development is
directed, is the form, and hence coincident with the formal and efficient causes of
the individual.15
There is one further crucial observation to be made about this whole process
concerning the transmission of the form from the male parent to the offspring. This
14
There is dispute over whether Aristotle took the form to be the generic form of the species or a par-
ticular form of the individual. I will present my picture in terms of the species interpretation because
I think it is intrinsically more plausible, and because it makes for a simpler account of how the three
non-material causes coincide. See Furth (1988, 133–5) for discussion of how this impacts the theory of
reproduction.
15
Waterlow (1982, 65–6) gives an excellent account of the identity of final and efficient causes in the
development of the organism.
form, I said, is carried in the semen; but the semen itself is not a human being at all,
even in an undeveloped state (and not the matter of a human being). Montgomery
Furth comments:
A striking aspect of Aristotle’s account is the certainty and clarity of its appreciation of the fact
that the biological phenomena require there to be two different ways in which specific form
occurs: one the way in which it is exemplified by specimens of the species, and a different way
that figures in the copying process from forebear to offspring . . . [T]he recognition that the
second way must indeed be different is perhaps Aristotle’s most remarkable single insight,
biological or otherwise. (1988, 113, emphasis in the original)16
Furth is surely not wrong to stress the importance of this view for understanding
Aristotle since it underlies and renders unmysterious the teleological character of
his outlook. The final cause is explanatory of the process that leads up to its attain-
ment not because it reaches back spookily into the past but because it is already
present in the past: as efficient cause in the parent, in one way, and in the semen, in
the other way.
As an artifactual example, consider a bicycle.17 The bicycle has matter—steel, rub-
ber, chrome, etc. (or perhaps wheels, frame, tires, etc.); these are what the bicycle is
made out of, they are that “out of which as a constituent a thing comes to be” (Physics II,
3 194b23; Charlton 1970, 28). This matter is informed by something, the form of a
bicycle, which makes the bicycle what it is. This is its formal cause. What is the bicycle’s
efficient cause? Aristotle sometimes implies it is the maker and sometimes the art of
bicycle making. What this adds up to is that the maker is able to make the bicycle
because of the art of bicycle making that is ‘in’ her in some way, the art of bicycle mak-
ing that includes the form of a bicycle. Furthermore, it is in virtue of having the form of
the bicycle in it that the bicycle functions as a bicycle, that its wheels turn as the pedals
do, that changing the gears can make it easier to go uphill, and so on. Thus we have the
coincidence of the efficient, formal, and final causes of the bicycle. We also see, once
again, Aristotle’s striking insight at work: the teleological explanation here too, in this
artifactual case, depends on the possibility of the form of the finished product’s being
in things in two different ways. It can be in the bicycle and it can be in the mind of the
maker in a way that does not make an actual bicycle out of her mind but enables it to
play a role in bringing bicycles into existence.18
16
The distinction Furth speaks of here is different from the distinction between the relation of the form
to the composite and the relation of the form to the matter of the composite (for which latter I have
reserved the word “inform”). There are, therefore, not two but three different and significant ways in which
forms can relate to non-forms, the modes of relation to the complexes of which they are components, to
the matter of those complexes, and to things that transmit them.
17
In fact, Aristotle does not consider artifacts to be substances subject to the theory of the four causes
but he so often uses them as examples that it is easy to treat them as if. See 1.2.4 for a brief discussion of
Aristotle’s view of artifacts.
18
Again, the relation that the form of the bicycle has to the matter of the bicycle is something else,
distinct from the relation of the form to the bicycle and the form to the mind of the maker.
1.1.3 Principle-based hylomorphism

Despite the ingenuity of Aristotle’s physics and biology, they turned out to be wrong.
We no longer think that there are things that answer precisely to Aristotle’s rich con-
ception of form. But a number of contemporary philosophers have sought to pick up
on various of Aristotle’s insights and so there is a variety of competing, more or less
explicitly neo-Aristotelian hylomorphisms in the current landscape of metaphysics.
My own view, which I will preview in 1.2 and begin to explore in more detail from
chapter 3 on, is one such. Among the remainder, I discern, as others have, two broad
currents. Robert Koons (2014) calls them “stalwart” and “fainthearted” hylomor-
phism. Since those terms are invidious, I shall have, regrettably, to multiply terminol-
ogy. I shall refer to the two currents, respectively, as “powers-based hylomorphism”
and “principle-based hylomorphism.” Since each of these currents includes a consid-
erable amount of diversity and disagreement among those who follow it, it is hard to
sum them up succinctly. Powers-based hylomorphists include Jaworski (2014), Koons
(2014), Marmodoro (2013), Oderberg (2002), and Rea (2011). As its name suggests,
the view looks to powers, or dispositions, to discharge some of the work assigned by
Aristotle to his notion of form. Powers-based hylomorphists also often invoke
Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality, which Aristotle connects to
matter and form respectively. Some, such as Jaworski and Koons, are particularly con-
cerned with Aristotle’s notion of the soul as the form of an organism and are mainly
addressing problems in the philosophy of mind. Not all of them subscribe to HYL.19
(Making HYL a necessary condition might thus exclude some of them from counting
as hylomorphists at all, in my sense, though as I have indicated, this is purely a point
about how I am using terminology here.) Although I shall make occasional references
to powers-based hylomorphists in the following, I mention them here largely to set
them to one side. This is because my own views have developed in thinking about prin-
ciple-based hylomorphism and I simply do not see how to put my views into dialogue,
in a general way, with the interests and presuppositions behind the work of the pow-
ers-based hylomorphists. They are, it seems to me, largely concerned with different
problems from those that concern principle-based hylomorphists.
Principle-based hylomorphists include Kit Fine (1982, 1999, 2008), Mark Johnston
(2005, 2006), and Kathrin Koslicki (2008).20 All are clearly committed to HYL, they do
not engage in the metaphysics of powers or invoke the distinction between potentiality
and actuality, and they all see hylomorphically complex objects as involving both mat-
ter and either a principle, property, relation, function, or structure. Fine (1999) uses
the term “principle” for functions that play the role of form in certain hylomorphically
19
Jaworski probably does not, largely following van Inwagen (1990), who, in respect of his positive
views about organisms, is very close to powers-based hylomorphism. Rea arguably does not accept HYL
since he takes the “matter” of whatever things are at the fundamental level of the hylomorphic structure of
the world to be spatio-temporal regions.
20
Sattig (2015) also belongs in this group. Unfortunately, his work came to my attention only as I was
making the final edits to my own and so I have not been able to consider it here.
complex objects and I extend that use to cover properties, relations, and structures too.
Hence my description of this current as “principle-based hylomorphism.” The sketch
of principle-based hylomorphism to follow is a composite of Fine’s and Koslicki’s views
but some of it applies to Johnston too.21
Going back to the statue and the bronze, one might very naturally want to say some-
thing like this: the statue is the bronze shaped in a certain way.22 The expression “the
bronze shaped in a certain way,” however, is ambiguous. On one reading, the bronze
shaped in a certain way is just the bronze. This is what I call the “comma” reading since
one might express it more clearly by writing “the bronze, shaped in a certain way.”
Consider, by way of a different example, the sentence “Socrates, resting after his meal,
smiled at Alcibiades, stumbling through the door.” The sentence concerns two things,
Socrates and Alcibiades, says that the first smiled at the second, and further describes
each of those two things with qualifying phrases. Socrates, resting after his meal, sim-
ply is Socrates and Alcibiades, stumbling through the door, simply is Alcibiades (and
not to be confused with the fact or state of affairs of Alcibiades’ stumbling through
the door, something at which Socrates might, but might not, also have smiled).23 On
the comma reading, to hold that the statue is the bronze, shaped in a certain way, is to
hold that the statue is the bronze. That is not a hylomorphic view at all. Besides the
comma reading, though, is what I call the hyphen reading: the bronze-shaped-in-a-
certain-way. The expression is now a single complex noun phrase that might refer to
something distinct from the bronze. But what would the nature of such an object be?
According to principle-based hylomorphism, the statue is something appropriately
described as the bronze-shaped-in-a-certain-way and its nature is a hylomorphic
complex consisting of the bronze, as matter, and something like the property of being
shaped in a certain way, as form.
Like Aristotle, this approach takes hylomorphically complex entities to be composites
of two components, form and matter.24 An object’s form will be a particular property, or
quality, or way of being that the matter exemplifies. The view, therefore, seems to have
the resources to tackle the issues about the difference between a complex object and its
matter with respect to parts and properties. There is a component of the statue, namely
the property of being shaped in a certain way, that, while itself a property that the
bronze has, is not something that is a component of the bronze as such. The bronze
and the statue materially coincide but the statue is not just its matter. But although
21
I shall have frequent occasion to refer to Fine and Koslicki in the course of the book, but in 2.3 I exam-
ine Fine’s views extensively and in detail. See my (2011) for discussion of Johnston and Koslicki.
22
I shall assume here, for the sake of simplicity, that “shaped in a certain way” is the appropriate qualifier.
In fact, it almost certainly is not sufficient, for reasons given in 1.2.4 and 1.2.5, but nothing in the present
section turns on the exact nature of the qualifier.
23
As Johnston puts it, “holy water is water and occupied Paris was Paris” (1997, 567).
24
As we shall see in 1.3 and 2.3, there may be more than one material component, hence the total num-
ber of components of a complex entity may be higher than two. This can be ignored for present purposes.
The claim that the formal element is a part of the complex object is denied by Johnston (2006). It also
cannot unqualifiedly serve as a description of Fine’s position—see 2.3.1 and 2.3.5 for discussion of this.
principle-based hylomorphism agrees with Aristotle in taking hylomorphically com-

plex things to be composites of matter plus some further form-like entity, the things it
identifies as forms are much diminished with respect to the functions that forms are
supposed to perform in Aristotle’s version. (Just try running through the examples of
sexual reproduction and the building of a bicycle with the idea that the formal cause is
simply a property possessed by the matter.) While one cannot assert, a priori and with-
out investigation, that identifying forms with things like properties leaves them unable
to function as efficient and final causes, in the neat package that constitutes Aristotle’s
view, it does in fact turn out to be hard to emulate that richness with the more meager
conception of form.
1.2 Amorphic Hylomorphism

1.2.1 A brief overview
Aristotle’s hylomorphism sees (at least the central cases of) the objects in its domain as
having two features. First, they are composites of some matter and a further entity, a
form. Secondly, they exhibit a tight interconnection between their formal, efficient,
and final causes, or, as we might put it in less distinctively Aristotelian language, between
their essences, their origins, and their behaviors or functions. Principle-based hylo-
morphists, I have suggested, seek to preserve the first feature of Aristotle’s approach but
have difficulty with the second because forms, on their view, are much less metaphysi-
cally potent than the Aristotelian variety. In this book, I aim to explore a different path,
one that abandons the first feature of Aristotle’s view but embraces the second.
On my approach, hylomorphically complex entities are sui generis entities that have
matter to which they are not identical, but there is no further component of them that
plays the role of form. Such objects fall essentially under certain kinds and must be
understood in terms of the kind-related processes of work on their (original) matter by
which they come to exist. When these processes are effectively directed at some matter,
a further object of the kind related to those generative processes comes into existence
with that matter as its matter, and this further object is associated, in virtue of the kind
of thing it is, with certain functions or characteristic behaviors. Thus, the kinds to
which the entities in the domain of the theory belong are necessarily tied to particular
ways of coming to be and particular functions and modes of behavior. This, I take it,
could serve as a (partial) description of Aristotle’s view though not of principle-based
hylomorphism.
I shall call my own view, which does not advert to forms as components of hylo-
morphically complex entities, amorphic hylomorphism (with the “a” in “amorphic”
long and stressed, to avoid the resonance with “amorphous”). When I wish to contrast
my own approach to all those, like Aristotle and both powers-based and principle-based
hylomorphists, who take hylomorphically complex entities as being composites of both
form and matter, I shall refer to those others collectively as “morphic hylomorphists.”
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
CHAPTER VI
MRS. SEDLEY’S TALE

It is very strange how a moral weakness in her child gives a mother
the same sense of yearning pity that she has for a bad bodily
infirmity. I wonder if that is how God feels for us when we go on year
by year doing the thing we hate? I think a mother gets to understand
many things about the dealings of God that are not plain to others.
For instance, how it helps me to say, “I believe in the forgiveness of
sins,” when I think of my poor little Fanny’s ugly fault. Though there
is some return of it nearly every day, what could I do but forgive?
But forgiveness that does not heal is like the wretched ointments
with which poor people dress their wounds. In one thing I know I
have not done well; I have hardly said a word to John about the poor
little girlie’s failing, though it has troubled me constantly for nearly a
year. But I think he suspects there is something wrong; we never talk
quite freely about our shy pretty Fanny. Perhaps that is one reason
for it. She is such a nervous timid little being, and looks so
bewitching when the long lashes droop, the tender mouth quivers,
and the colour comes and goes in the soft cheek, that we are shy of
exposing, even to each other, the faults we see in our graceful fragile
little girl. Perhaps neither of us quite trusts the other to deal with
Fanny, and to use the knife sparingly.
But this state of things must not go on: it is a miserable thing to
write down, but I cannot believe a word the child says! And the evil is
increasing. Only now and then used Fanny to be detected in what
we called a fib, but now the terrible doubt lest that little mouth may
be at any moment uttering lies takes the delight out of life, and
accounts for the pale looks which give my kind husband so much
concern.
For example, only within the last day or two I have noticed the
following and other such examples:—
“Fanny, did you remember to give my message to cook?”
“Yes, mother.”
“And what did she say?”
“That she wouldn’t be able to make any jam to-day because the
fruit had not come.”
I went into the kitchen shortly after, and found cook stirring the
contents of a brass pan, and, sad to say, I asked no questions. It
was one of Fanny’s circumstantial statements of the kind I have had
most reason to doubt. Did she lie because she was afraid to own
that she had forgotten? Hardly so: knowing the child’s sensitive
nature, we have always been careful not to visit her small
misdemeanours with any punishment whenever she “owned up.”
And then, cowardice would hardly cause her to invent so reasonable
an answer for cook. Again:
“Did you meet Mrs. Fleming’s children?”
“Oh, yes, mother! and Berty was so rude! He pushed Dotty off the
curb-stone!”
Nurse, who was sitting by the fire with baby, raised her eyebrows
in surprise, and I saw the whole thing was an invention. Another
more extraordinary instance:
“Mother, when we were in the park we met Miss Butler, just by the
fountain, you know; and she kissed me, and asked me how my
mother is”—said à-propos of nothing, in the most quiet, easy way.
I met Miss Butler this morning, and thanked her for the kind
inquiries she had been making through my little girl; and—“Do you
think Fanny grown?”
Miss Butler looked perplexed; Fanny was a great favourite of
hers, perhaps because of the loveliness of which her parents could
not pretend to be unaware.
“It is more than a month since I have seen the little maid, but I
shall look in soon, and gladden her mother’s heart with all the
praises my sweet Fan deserves!”
Little she knew that shame, and not pride, dyed my cheek; but I
could not disclose my Fanny’s sad secret to even so near a friend.
But to talk it out with John is a different matter. He ought to know.
And, certainly, men have more power than women to see into the
reasons and the bearings of things. There had I been thinking for
months in a desultory kind of way as to the why and wherefore of
this ingrained want of truthfulness in the child, and yet I was no
nearer the solution.
A new departure in the way of lying made me at last break the ice
with John; indeed, this was the only subject about which we had ever
had reserves.
“Mother, Hugh was so naughty at lessons this morning! He went
close up to Miss Clare while she was writing, nudged her elbow on
purpose, and made her spill the ink all over the table-cloth.”
I chanced to meet Miss Clare in the hall, and remarked that I
heard she had found Hugh troublesome this morning.
“Troublesome? Not at all; he was quite industrious and obedient.”
I said nothing about the ink, but went straight to the schoolroom to
find the table neat as Miss Clare always leaves it, and no sign of
even a fresh inkspot. What possessed the child? This inveterate and
inventive untruthfulness was like a form of madness. I sat in dismay
for an hour or more, not thinking, but stunned by this new idea—that
the child was not responsible for her words; and yet, could it be so?
None of our children were so merry at play, so intelligent at lessons.
Well, I would talk it over with John without the loss of another day.
“John, I am miserable about Fanny. Do you know the child tells

fibs constantly?”
“Call them lies; an ugly thing deserves an ugly name. What sort of
lies? What tempts her to lie?”
John did not seem surprised. Perhaps he knew more of this
misery than I supposed.
“That’s the thing! Her fi—lies are so uncalled-for, so
unreasonable, that I do not know how to trust her.”
“Unreasonable? You mean her tales don’t hang together; that’s a
common case with liars. You know the saying—‘Liars should have
good memories’?”
“Don’t call the poor child a liar, John; I believe she is more to be
pitied than blamed. What I mean is, you can’t find rhyme or reason
for the lies she tells.” And I gave my husband a few instances like
those I have written above.
“Very extraordinary! There’s a hint of malice in the Hugh and the
ink-bottle tale, and a hint of cowardice in that about the jam; but for
the rest, they are inventions pure and simple, with neither rhyme nor
reason, as you say.”
“I don’t believe a bit in the malice. I was going to correct her for
telling an unkind tale about Hugh, but you know how she hangs on
her brother, and she told her tale with the most innocent face. I am
convinced there was no thought of harming him.”
“Are you equally sure that she never says what is false to cover a
fault; in fact, out of cowardice?”
“No; I think I have found her out more than once in ingenious
subterfuges. You know what a painfully nervous child she is. For
instance, I found the other day a blue cup off that cabinet, with
handle gone, hidden behind the woodwork. Fanny happened to
come in at the moment, and I asked her if she knew who had broken
it.
“‘No, mother, I don’t know, but I think it was Mary, when she was
dusting the cabinet; indeed, I’m nearly sure I heard a crash.’
“But the child could not meet my eye, and there was a sort of
blenching as of fear about her.”
“But, as a rule, you do not notice these symptoms?”
“As a rule, poor Fanny’s tarradiddles come out in the most quiet,
easy way, with all the boldness of innocence; and even when she is
found out, and the lie brought home to her, she looks bewildered
rather than convicted.”
“My dear, I wish you would banish the whole tribe of foolish and
harmful expressions whose tendency is to make light of sin. Call a
spade a spade. A ‘tarradiddle’ is a thing to make merry over; a fib
you smile and wink at; but a lie—why, the soul is very far gone from
original righteousness that can endure the name, even while guilty of
the thing.”
“That’s just it; I cannot endure to apply so black a name to the
failings of our child; for, do you know, I begin to suspect that poor
little Fanny does it unawares—does not know in the least that she
has departed from the fact. I have had a horrible dread upon me
from time to time that her defect is a mental, and not a moral one.
That she has not the clear perception of true and false with which the
most of us are blessed.”
“Whe—ew!” from John; but his surprise was feigned. I could see
now that he had known what was going on all the time, and had said
nothing, because he had nothing to say; in his heart he agreed with
me about our lovely child. The defect arose from a clouded
intelligence, which showed itself in this way only, now; but how dare
we look forward? Now I saw why poor John was so anxious to have
the offence called by the blackest moral name. He wished to save us
from the suspicion of an evil—worse because less open to cure. We
looked blankly at each other, John trying to carry it all off with a light
air, but his attempt was a conspicuous failure.
I forgot to say that my sister Emma was staying with us, the
‘clever woman of the family,’ who was “going in” for all sorts of
things, to come out, we believed, at the top of her profession as a
lady doctor. She had taken no part in the talk about Fanny—rather
tiresome of her, as I wanted to know what she thought; but now,
while we were vainly trying to hide from each other our dismay, she
broke out into a long low laugh, which, to say the least of it, seemed
a little unfeeling.
“Oh, you absurd parents! You are too good and earnest, and
altogether too droll! Why in the world, instead of sitting there with
blank eyes—conjuring up bogeys to frighten each other—why don’t
you look the thing in the face, and find out by the light of modern
thought what really ails Fan? Poor pet! ‘Save me from my parents!’ is
a rendering which might be forgiven her.”
“Then you don’t think there’s any mental trouble?” we cried in a
breath, feeling already as if a burden were lifted, and we could
straighten our backs and walk abroad.
“‘Mental trouble?’ What nonsense! But there, I believe all you
parents are alike. Each pair thinks their own experiences entirely
new; their own children the first of the kind born into the world. Now,
a mind that had had any scientific training would see at once that
poor Fanny’s lies—if I must use John’s terrible bad word—
inventions, I should have called them, are symptomatic, as you
rightly guessed, Annie, of certain brain conditions; but of brain
disease—oh, no! Why, foolish people, don’t you see you are
entertaining an angel unawares? This vice of ‘lying’ you are
mourning over is the very quality that goes to the making of poets!”
“Poets and angels are well in their places,” said John, rather
crossly, “but my child must speak the truth. What she states for a
fact, I must know to be a fact, according to the poor common-sense
view of benighted parents.”
“And there is your work as parents. Teach her truth, as you would
teach her French or sums—a little to-day, a little more to-morrow,
and every day a lesson. Only as you teach her the nature of truth will
the gift she has be effectual. But I really should like to know what is
your notion about truth—are we born with it, or educated up to it?”
“I am not sure that we care to be experimented upon, and held up
to the world as blundering parents,” said I; “perhaps we had better
keep our crude notions to ourselves.” I spoke rather tartly, I know, for
I was more vexed for John than for myself. That he should be held
up to ridicule in his own house—by a sister of mine, too!
“Now I have vexed you both. How horrid I am! And all the time, as
I watch you with the children, I don’t feel good enough to tie your
shoes. Don’t I say to myself twenty times a day, ‘After all, the insight
and love parents get from above is worth a thousandfold more than
science has to teach’?”
“Nay, Emma, ’tis we who have to apologise for being jealous of
science—that’s the fact—and quick to take offence. Make it up,
there’s a good girl! and let Annie and me have the benefit of your
advice about our little girl, for truly we are in a fog.”
“Well, I think you were both right in considering that her failing had
two sources: moral cowardice the first; she does something wrong,
or wrong in her eyes, and does not tell—why?”
“Aye, there’s the difficulty; why is she afraid to tell the truth? I may
say that we have never punished her, or ever looked coldly on her
for any fault but this of prevarication. The child is so timid that we
feared severe measures might make the truth the more difficult.”
“There I think you are right. And we have our fingers on one of the
weak places: Fanny tells lies out of sheer fear—moral weakness;
causeless it may be, but there it is. And I’m not so sure that it is
causeless; she is always in favour for good behaviour, gentleness,
obedience, and that kind of thing; indeed, this want of veracity
seems to me her one fault. Now, don’t you think the fear of having
her parents look coldly on her and think less well of her may be, to
such a timid, clinging child, a great temptation to hide a fault?”
“Very likely; but one does not see how to act. Would you pass
over her faults altogether without inquiry or notice?”
“I’m afraid you must use the knife there boldly, for that is the
tenderest way in the end. Show little Fan the depth of your love—
that there is no fault you cannot forgive in her, but that the one fault
which hurts you most is, not to hear the exact truth.”
“I see. Suppose she has broken a valuable vase and hides the
fact, I am to unearth her secret—not, as I am very much inclined to
do, let it lie buried for fear of involving her in worse falsehood, but
show her the vase and tax her with hiding it.”
“And her immediate impulse will be to say, ‘I didn’t.’ No; make
sure of your ground, then show her the pieces; say the vase was
precious, but you do not mind about that; the thing that hurts you is
that she could not trust her mother. I can imagine one of the lovely
scenes you mothers have with your children too good for outsiders to
look in upon.”
The tears came into my eyes, for I could imagine the scene too. I
could see the way to draw my child closer and closer by always
forgiving, always comprehending and loving her, and always
protesting against the falsehood which would rise between us. I was
lost in a delicious reverie—how I might sometime come to show her
that her mother’s ever-ready forgiveness was but a faint picture of
what some one calls the “all-forgiving gentleness of God,” when I
heard John break in:—
“Yes, I can see that if we both make a point of free and tender
forgiveness of every fault, on condition that she owns up, we may in
time cure her of lying out of sheer fear. But I don’t see that she gets
the principle of truth any more. The purely inventive lies go on as
before, and the child is not to be trusted.”
“‘Purely inventive,’ there you have it. Don’t you see? The child is
full of imagination, and figures to herself endless scenes, evolved
like the German student’s camel. The thousand and one things
which might happen are so real to her that the child is, as you said,
bewildered; hardly able to distinguish the one which has happened.
Now, it’s perfect nonsense to lament over this as a moral failing—it is
a want of mental balance; not that any quality is deficient, but that
her conceptive power runs away with her perceptive; she sees the
many things that might be more readily than the thing that is. Doesn’t
she delight in fairy tales?”
“Well, to tell the truth, we have thought them likely to foster her
failing, and have kept her a good deal on a diet of facts.”
“I shouldn’t wonder if you are wrong there. An imperious
imagination like Fanny’s demands its proper nourishment. Let her
have her daily meal: ‘The Babes in the Wood,’ ‘The Little Match-Girl,’
‘The Snow-Maiden,’ tales and legends half-historic, above all, the
lovely stories of the Bible; whatever she can figure to herself and live
over and over; but not twaddling tales of the daily doings of children
like herself, whether funny or serious. The child wants an opening
into the larger world where all things are possible and where
beautiful things are always happening. Give her in some form this
necessary food, and her mind will be so full of delicious imaginings,
that she will be under no temptation to invent about the
commonplaces of every-day life.”
My husband laughed: “My dear Emma, you must let us do our
best with the disease; the cure is too wild! ‘Behold, this dreamer
cometh!’—think of sending the child through life with this label.”
“Your quotation is unfortunate, and you have not heard me out. I
do believe that to starve her imagination would be to do real wrong
to the child. But, at the same time, you must diligently cultivate the
knowledge and the love of the truth. Now, the truth is no more than
the fact as it is; and ’tis my belief that Fanny’s falsehoods come
entirely from want of perception of the fact through pre-occupation of
mind.”
“Well, what must we do?”
“Why, give her daily, or half-a-dozen times a day, lessons in truth.
Send her to the window: ‘Look out, Fanny, and tell me what you see.’
She comes back, having seen a cow where there is a horse. She
looks again and brings a true report, and you teach her that it is not
true to say the thing which is not. You send a long message to the
cook, requiring the latter to write it down as she receives it and send
you up the slate; if it is all right, the kiss Fanny gets is for speaking
the truth: gradually, she comes to revere truth, and distinguishes
between the facts of life where truth is all in all, and the wide realms
of make-believe, where fancy may have free play.”
“I do believe you are right, Emma; most of Fanny’s falsehoods
seem to be told in such pure innocence, I should not wonder if they
do come out of the kingdom of make-believe. At any rate, we’ll try
Emma’s specific—shall we, John?”
“Indeed, yes; and carefully, too. It seems to me to be reasonable,
the more so, as we don’t find any trace of malice in Fanny’s
misleading statements.”
“Oh, if there were, the treatment would be less simple; first, you
should deal with the malice, and then teach the love of truth in daily
lessons. That is the mistake so many people make. They think their
children are capable of loving and understanding truth by nature,
which they are not. The best parents have to be on the watch to
hinder all opportunities of misstatement.”
“And now, that you may see how much we owe you, let me tell
you of the painful example always before our eyes, which has done
more than anything to make me dread Fanny’s failing. It is an open
secret, I fear, but do not let it go further out of this house. You know
Mrs. Casterton, our friend’s wife? It is a miserable thing to say, but
you cannot trust a word she utters. She tells you, Miss So-and-So
has a bad kind of scarlet fever, and even while she is speaking you
know it is false; husband, children, servants, neighbours, none can
be blind to the distressing fact, and she has acquired the sort of
simpering manner a woman gets when she loses respect and self-
respect. What if Fanny had grown up like her?”
“Poor woman! and this shame might have been spared her, had
her parents been alive to their duty.”
CHAPTER VII
ABILITY
“Be sure you call at Mrs. Milner’s, Fred, for the address of her
laundress.”
“All right, mother!” And Fred was half-way down the path before
his mother had time to add a second injunction. A second? Nay, a
seventh, for this was already the sixth time of asking; and Mrs.
Bruce’s half-troubled expression showed she placed little faith in her
son’s “All right.”
“I don’t know what to do with Fred, doctor; I am not in the least
sure he will do my message. Indeed, to speak honestly, I am sure he
will not. This is a trifling matter; but when the same thing happens
twenty times a day—when his rule is to forget everything he is
desired to remember—it makes us anxious about the boy’s future.”
Dr. Maclehose drummed meditatively on the table, and put his lips
into form for a whistle. This remark of Mrs. Bruce’s was “nuts” to him.
He had assisted, professionally, at the appearance of the nine young
Bruces, and the family had no more esteemed friend and general
confidant. For his part, he liked the Bruces. Who could help it? The
parents intelligent and genial, the young folk well looking, well grown,
and open-hearted, they were just the family to make friends. All the
same, the doctor found in the Bruces occasion to mount his pet
hobby:—“My Utopia is the land where the family doctor has leave to
play schoolmaster to the parents. To think of a fine brood like the
young Bruces running to waste in half-a-dozen different ways
through the invincible ignorance of father and mother! Nice people,
too!”
For seventeen years Dr. Maclehose had been deep in the family
counsels, yet never till now had he seen the way to put in his oar
anent any question of bringing up the children. Wherefore he
drummed on the table, and pondered:—“Fair and softly, my good
fellow; fair and softly! Make a mess of it now, and it’s my last chance;
hit the nail on the head, and, who knows?”
“Does the same sort of thing go on about his school work?”
“Precisely; he is always in arrears. He has forgotten to take a
book, or to write an exercise, or learn a lesson; in fact, his school life
is a record of forgets and penalties.”
“Worse than that Dean of Canterbury, whose wife would make
him keep account of his expenditure; and thus stood the entries for
one week:—‘Gloves, 5s.; Forgets, £4, 15s.’ His writing was none too
legible, so his wife, looking over his shoulder, cried, ‘Faggots!
Faggots! What in the world! Have you been buying wood?’ ‘No, my
dear; those are forgets;’—his wife gave it up.”
“A capital story; but what is amusing in a Dean won’t help a boy to
get through the world, and we are both uneasy about Fred.”
“He is one of the ‘Boys’ Eleven,’ isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes, and is wild about it: and there, I grant you, he never
forgets. It’s, ‘Mother, get cook to give us an early dinner: we must be
on the field by two!’ ‘Don’t forget to have my flannels clean for Friday,
will you mumsy?’ he knows when to coax. ‘Subscription is due on
Thursday, mother!’ and this, every day till he gets the money.”
“I congratulate you, my dear friend, there’s nothing seriously
amiss with the boy’s brain.”
“Good heavens, doctor! Whoever thought there was? You take my
breath away!”
“Well, well, I didn’t mean to frighten you, but, don’t you see, it
comes to this: either it’s a case of chronic disease, open only to
medical treatment, if to any; or it is just a case of defective
education, a piece of mischief bred of allowance which his parents
cannot too soon set themselves to cure.”
Mrs. Bruce was the least in the world nettled at this serious view
of the case. It was one thing for her to write down hard things of her
eldest boy, the pride of her heart, but a different matter for another to
take her au sérieux.
“But, my dear doctor, are you not taking a common fault of youth
too seriously? It’s tiresome that he should forget so, but give him a
year or two, and he will grow out of it, you’ll see. Time will steady
him. It’s just the volatility of youth, and for my part I don’t like to see a
boy with a man’s head on his shoulders.” The doctor resumed his
drumming on the table. He had put his foot in it already, and
confounded his own foolhardiness.
“Well, I daresay you are right in allowing something on the score
of youthful volatility; but we old doctors, whose business it is to study
the close connection between mind and matter, see our way to only
one conclusion, that any failing of mind or body, left to itself, can do
no other than strengthen.”
“Have another cup of tea, doctor? I am not sure that I understand.
I know nothing about science. You mean that Fred will become more
forgetful and less dependable the older he gets?”
“I don’t know that I should have ventured to put it so baldly, but
that’s about the fact. But, of course, circumstances may give him a
bent in the other direction, and Fred may develop into such a careful
old sobersides that his mother will be ashamed of him.”
“Don’t laugh at me, doctor; you make the whole thing too serious
for a laughing matter.” To which there was no answer, and there was
silence in the room for the space of fully three minutes, while the two
pondered.
“You say,” in an imperious tone, “that ‘a fault left to itself must
strengthen.’ What are we to do? His father and I wish, at any rate, to
do our duty.” Her ruffled maternal plumage notwithstanding, Mrs.
Bruce was in earnest, all her wits on the alert. “Come, I’ve scored
one!” thought the doctor; and then, with respectful gravity, which
should soothe any woman’s amour propre,
“You ask a question not quite easy to answer. But allow me, first,
to try and make the principle plain to you: that done, the question of
what to do settles itself. Fred never forgets his cricket or other
pleasure engagements? No? And why not? Because his interest is
excited; therefore his whole attention is fixed on the fact to be
remembered. Now, as a matter of fact, what you have regarded with
full attention, it is next to impossible to forget. First get Fred to fix his
attention on the matter in hand, and you may be sure he won’t forget
it.”
“That may be very true; but how can I make a message to Mrs.
Milner as interesting to him as the affairs of his club?”
“Ah! There you have me. Had you begun with Fred at a year old
the thing would have settled itself. The habit would have been
formed.”
To the rescue, Mrs. Bruce’s woman’s wit:—“I see; he must have
the habit of paying attention, so that he will naturally take heed to
what he is told, whether he cares about the matter or not.”
“My dear madam, you’ve hit it; all except the word ‘naturally.’ At
present Fred is in a delightful state of nature in this and a few other
respects. But the educational use of habit is to correct nature. If
parents would only see this fact, the world would become a huge
reformatory, and the next generation, or, at any rate, the third, would
dwell in the kingdom of heaven as a regular thing, and not by fits and
starts, and here and there, which is the best that happens to us.”
“I’m not sure I see what you mean; but,” said this persistent
woman, “to return to this habit of attention which is to reform my Fred
—do try and tell me what to do. You gentlemen are so fond of going
off into general principles, while we poor women can grasp no more
than a practical hint or two to go on with. My boy would be cut up to
know how little his fast friend, the doctor, thinks of him!”
“‘Poor women,’ truly! and already you have thrown me with two
staggering buffets. My theories have no practical outcome, and, I
think little of Fred, who has been my choice chum ever since he left
off draperies! It remains for the vanquished to ‘behave pretty.’ Pray,
ma’am, what would you like me to say next?”
“To ‘habit,’ doctor, to ‘habit’; and don’t talk nonsense while the
precious time is going. We’ll suppose that Fred is just twelve months
old to-day. Now, if you please, tell me how I’m to make him begin to
pay attention. And, by the way, why in the world didn’t you talk to me
about it when the child really was young?”
“I don’t remember that you asked me; and who would be pert
enough to think of schooling a young mother? Not I, at any rate.
Don’t I know that every mother of a first child is infallible, and knows
more about children than all the old doctors in creation? But,
supposing you had asked me, I should have said—Get him each day
to occupy himself a little longer with one plaything than he did the
day before. He plucks a daisy, gurgles over it with glee, and then in
an instant it drops from the nerveless grasp. Then you take it up, and
with the sweet coaxings you mothers know how to employ, get him
to examine it, in his infant fashion, for a minute, two minutes, three
whole minutes at a time.”
“I see; fix his thoughts on one thing at a time, and for as long as
you can, whether on what he sees or what he hears. You think if you
go on with that sort of thing with a child from his infancy he gets
accustomed to pay attention?”
“Not a doubt of it; and you may rely on it that what is called ability
—a different thing from genius, mind you, or even talent—ability is
simply the power of fixing the attention steadily on the matter in
hand, and success in life turns upon this cultivated power far more
than on any natural faculty. Lay a case before a successful barrister,
an able man of business, notice how he absorbs all you say; tell your
tale as ill as you like, he keeps the thread, straightens the tangle,
and by the time you have finished, has the whole matter spread out
in order under his mind’s eye. Now comes in talent, or genius, or
what you will, to deal with the facts he has taken in. But attention is
the attribute of the trained intellect, without which genius makes
shots in the dark.”
“But, don’t you think attention itself is a natural faculty, or talent, or
whatever we should call it?”
“Not a bit of it; it is entirely the result of training. A man may be
born with some faculty or talent for figures, or drawing, or music, but
attention is not a faculty at all; it is simply the power of bending such
faculties as one has to the work in hand; it is a key to success within
the reach of every one, but the power to turn it comes of training.
Circumstances may compel a man to train himself, but he does so at
the cost of great effort, and the chances are ten to one against his
making the effort. For the child, on the other hand, who has been
trained by his parents to fix his thoughts, all is plain sailing. He will
succeed, not a doubt of it.”
“But I thought school-work, Latin and mathematics, and those
sorts of things, should give this kind of intellectual training?”
“They should; but it’s the merest chance whether the right spring
is touched, and from what you say of Fred’s school-work, I should
say it was not touched in his case. ’Tis incredible how much solid
learning a boy will contrive to let slip by him instead of into him! No;
I’m afraid you must tackle the difficulty yourself. It would be a
thousand pities to let a fine fellow like Fred run to waste.”
“What can I do?”
“Well, we must begin where we are; Fred can attend, and
therefore remember: and he remembers what interests him. Now, to
return to your question, How are you to make a message to Mrs.
Milner as interesting to him as the affairs of his cricket club? There is
no interest in the thing itself; you must put interest into it from
without. There are a hundred ways of doing this: try one, and when
that is used up, turn to another. Only, with a boy of Fred’s age, you
cannot form the habit of attention as you could with a child. You can
only aid and abet; give the impulse; the training he must do for
himself.”
“Make it a little plainer, doctor; I have not yet reduced your
remarks to the practical level of something I can do.”
“No? Well, Fred must train himself, and you must feed him with
motives. Run over with him what we have been saying about
attention. Let him know how the land lies; that you cannot help him,
but that if he wants to make a man of himself he must make himself
attend and remember. Tell him it will be a stand-up fight, for this habit
is contrary to nature. He will like that; ’tis boy nature to show fight,
and the bigger and blacker you make the other side, the more will he
like to pitch in. When I was a boy I had to fight this very battle for
myself, and I’ll tell you what I did. I stuck up a card every week,
divided down the middle. One side was for ‘Remembers’; the other
side for ‘Forgets.’ I took myself to task every night—the very effort
was a help—and put a stroke for every ‘Remember’ and ‘Forget’ of
the day. I scored for every ‘Remember,’ and ‘t’other fellow’ for every
‘Forget.’ You don’t know how exciting it got. If by Thursday I had
thirty-three ‘Remembers’ and he thirty-six ‘Forgets’ it behoved me to
look alive; it was not only that ‘Forget’ might win the game, which
was up on Saturday night, but unless ‘Remember’ scored ten in
advance, the game was ‘drawn’—hardly a remove from lost.”
“That’s delicious! But, I wish, doctor, you would speak to Fred
yourself. A word from you would go a long way.”
“I’ll look out for a chance, but an outsider cannot do much;
everything rests with the boy himself, and his parents.”
CHAPTER VIII
POOR MRS. JUMEAU!

“Now, young people, when I go out, let there be no noise in the
house; your mother is ill, so let her little folk be thoughtful for her!”
“Oh, is mother sick again?” said little Ned with falling
countenance.
“Poor Neddie! he doesn’t like mother to be ill. We all have to be so
quiet, and, then, there’s nowhere to be! It isn’t like home when
mother isn’t about.”
“Mary is right,” chimed in Charlie, the eldest of the family; “if I
were big enough, I should run away and go to sea, mother’s so often
bad! But, father, isn’t it funny? Yesterday she was quite well, and
doing all sorts of horrid things, helping the maids to clear out
cupboards; and now, I dare say, she is too ill to move or speak, and
to-morrow, perhaps, she’ll be our jolly mother again, able to go
shrimping with us, or anything else.”
“That’s because your dear mother has no self, Charlie, boy; no
sooner does she feel a bit better than she does more than she can
for us all, and then she is knocked up again. I wish we could teach
her to be selfish, for our sakes as well as hers, for to have her with
us is better than anything she can do for us; eh, Charlie?”
“Indeed, yes! We’d take lots of care of her if she’d let us. But her
illness must be queer. You know when we had scarlet fever, father?
Well, for weeks and weeks, after the fever was gone, I had no more
strength than a tom-tit; and you know I could not go about and do
things, however unselfish I was (but I’m not, though). That’s what is
so queer. Do you think Dr. Prideau understands about mother?”
“Much better than you do, depend upon it, Charlie; but I confess
your mother’s illness is puzzling to all of us. There, children, off with
you! I must write a letter or two before I go out.”
Mr. Jumeau forgot to write his letters, and sat long, with his head
between his hands, pondering the nature of his wife’s ailments. What
Charlie had put with a boy’s rude bluntness had already occurred to
him in a dim way. Mrs. Jumeau’s illness certainly did not deprive her
of bodily vigour; the attacks came on suddenly, left her as suddenly,
and left her apparently in perfect health and gay spirits. And this was
the more surprising, because, while an “attack” lasted, the extreme
prostration, pallid countenance, and blue lips of the sufferer were
painful to behold. Besides, his wife was so absolutely truthful by
nature, so unselfish and devoted to her husband and family, that it
was as likely she should be guilty of flagrant crime as that she
should simulate illness. This sort of thing had gone on for several
years. Mr. Jumeau had spent his substance on many physicians,
and with little result. “No organic disease.” “Overdone.” “Give her
rest, nourishing food, frequent change of scene and thought; no
excitement; Nature will work the cure in time—in time, my good sir.
We must be patient.” This sort of thing he had heard again and
again; doctors did not differ, if that were any consolation.
He went up to have a last look at the sufferer. There she lay,
stretched out with limbs composed, and a rigidity of muscle terribly
like death. A tear fell on the cold cheek of his wife as Mr. Jumeau
kissed it, and he went out aching with a nameless dread, which, if
put into words, would run—some day, and she will wake no more out
of this death-like stillness.
And she? She felt the tear, heard the sigh, noted the dejected
footfalls of her husband, and her weak pulse stirred with a movement
of—was it joy? But the “attack” was not over; for hours she lay there
rigid, speechless, with closed eyes, taking no notice of the gentle
opening of the door now and then when one or another came to see
how she was. Were not her family afraid to leave her alone? No; we
get used to anything, and the Jumeaus, servants and children, were
well used to these “attacks” in the mistress of the house. Dr. Prideau
came, sent by her husband, and used even violent measures to
restore her, but to no effect; she was aware of these efforts, but was
not aware that she resisted them effectually.
Business engagements were pressing, and it was late before Mr.
Jumeau, anxious as he was, was able to return to his wife. It was
one of those lovely warm evenings we sometimes get late in May,
when even London windows are opened to let in the breath of the
spring. Nearly at the end of the street he heard familiar strains from
Parsifal, played with the vigour Wagner demands. His wife? It could
be no one else. As he drew nearer, her exquisite touch was
unmistakable. The attack was over, then? Strange to say, his delight
was not unmixed. What were these mysterious attacks, and how
were they brought on?
The evening was delightful. Mrs. Jumeau was in the gayest
spirits: full of tenderness towards her husband, of motherly thought
for her children, now fast asleep; ready to talk brightly on any subject
except the attack of the morning; any allusion to this she would laugh
off as a matter of too little consequence to be dwelt upon. The next
morning she was down bright and early, having made up her mind to
a giro with the children. They did not go a-shrimping, according to
Charlie’s forecast, but Kew was decided upon as “just the thing,” and
a long day in the gardens failed to tire mother or children.
“I must get to the bottom of this,” thought Mr. Jumeau.
“Your question is embarrassing; if I say, Mrs. Jumeau is suffering

from hysteria, you will most likely get a wrong notion and discredit
my words.”
Mr. Jumeau’s countenance darkened. “I should still be inclined to
trust the evidence of my senses, and believe that my wife is
unfeignedly ill.”
“Exactly as I expected: simulated ailments and hysteria are
hopelessly confounded; but no wonder; hysteria is a misnomer, used
in the vaguest way, not even confined to women. Why, I knew a man,

Textbook Making Objects and Events A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts Actions and Organisms 1St Edition Simon J Evnine Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Textbook Making Objects and Events A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts Actions and Organisms 1St Edition Simon J Evnine Ebook All Chapter PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Making Objects and Events: A

Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts,

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

Theory Formulation and Realization of Artifacts Science

Event Studies: Theory and Management for Planned Events

Theory of stochastic objects probability stochastic

Theory of stochastic objects: probability, stochastic

Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality

Dormancy in Aquatic Organisms Theory Human Use and

Making Sense Cognition Computing Art and Embodiment

Making Objects and Events

Making Objects and

1. Hylomorphism and its Related Metaphysics 1

3.4 Questions of Identity 85

7. Actions as Artifacts 207

“What we make doesn’t recover from us.”

(Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us, Penguin Books, 2004, 26)

Everything is water. So began the history of western philosophy, soon to be amplified

2 hylomorphism and its related metaphysics

hylomorphism and its related metaphysics 3

1.1 Some Varieties of Hylomorphism

4 hylomorphism and its related metaphysics

hylomorphism and its related metaphysics 5

6 hylomorphism and its related metaphysics

hylomorphism and its related metaphysics 7

1.1.2 Aristotelian hylomorphism

8 hylomorphism and its related metaphysics

hylomorphism and its related metaphysics 9

10 hylomorphism and its related metaphysics

1.1.3 Principle-based hylomorphism

hylomorphism and its related metaphysics 11

12 hylomorphism and its related metaphysics

principle-based hylomorphism agrees with Aristotle in taking hylomorphically com-

1.2 Amorphic Hylomorphism

MRS. SEDLEY’S TALE

“John, I am miserable about Fanny. Do you know the child tells

POOR MRS. JUMEAU!

“Your question is embarrassing; if I say, Mrs. Jumeau is suffering

You might also like

1. Hylomorphism and its Related Metaphysics 1

3.4 Questions of Identity 85

7. Actions as Artifacts 207