MOTIONLESS MOTION 287 



not prepared to use St. Thomas' Summa Theologiae in place of 

 the more natural exposition of these principles. However, while 

 there are only a few who give much more than lip service to 

 Aristotle's treatment of Nature today, the number of those 

 who stand ready to expound his metaphysics or first philosophy 

 is legion. Some even go further and, with the vague and 

 ambiguous notions of metaphysical principles derived from such 

 an anti-Aristotelian procedure, attempt to find out how things 

 are in Nature. This is truly an attempt to proceed from the 

 unknown to the known. Swift's comment on these disciples is 

 apt: 



Having a desire to see those ancients, who were most renowned 

 for wit and learning, I set apart one day on purpose. I proposed 

 that Homer and Aristotle might appear at the head of all their 

 commentators; but these were so numerous, that some hundreds 

 were forced to attend in the court and outward rooms of the palace. 

 I knew, and could distinguish those two heroes at first sight, not 

 only from the crowd, but from each other. Homer was the taller 

 and comelier person of the two, walked very erect for one of his 

 age, and his eyes were the most quick and piercing I ever beheld. 

 Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a staff. His visage was 

 meager, his hair lank and thin, and his voice hollow. I soon dis- 

 covered, that both of them were perfect strangers to the rest of the 

 company, and had never seen or heard of them before. And I had 

 a whisper from a ghost, who shall be nameless, that these commen- 

 tators always kept in the most distant quarter from their principals 

 in the lower world, through a consciousness of shame and guilt, 

 because they had so horribly misrepresented the meaning of those 

 authors to posterity. . . . But Aristotle was out of all patience 

 with the account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented 

 them to him; and he asked them whether the rest of the tribe 

 were as great dunces as themselves.* 



In the study of Being the human intellect also finds diffi- 

 culties, according to Aristotle. The obstacle here is not matter 

 and its basic unintelligibility, as it was in the science of Nature. 

 Rather the very intelligibility of the object studied here so far 

 exceeds man's nature that our intellect looking at these objects 



* Jonathan Swift, Gullivers Travels, Part III, ch. VIH. 



