292 ROMAN A. KOCOUREK 



Aristotle, while admitting that " Nature loves to hide " and 

 recognizing that knowledge in any scientific way would be very 

 difficult to attain here, nevertheless held to its objective reality. 

 The modern approach to Nature is well brought out by Cassirer 

 in another of his works. After pointing out that modem science 

 has exercised a great influence in a practical way on the modern 

 world, he says: 



The real achievement of science lies elsewhere; it is not so much in 

 the new objective content which science has made accessible to 

 the human mind as in the new function which it attributes to the 

 mind of man. The knowledge of nature does not simply lead us out 

 into the world of objects; it serves rather as a medium in which 

 the mind develops its own self-knowledge. . . . One world and one 

 Being are replaced by an infinity of worlds constantly springing 

 from the womb of becoming. . . . But the important aspect of the 

 transformation does not lie in this boundless expansion, but in the 

 fact that the mind now becomes aware of a new force within 

 itself. . . . The highest energy and deepest truth of the mind do not 

 consist in going out into the infinite, but in the mind's maintaining 

 itself against the infinite and proving in its pure unity equal to 

 the infinity of being. 



10 



If all that is intended here is to show that man's intellect is 

 capable of producing an infinity by which it can equal and 

 thus in some way overcome the infinity in the processes of 

 Nature, there could be no dispute about this. That this is going 

 to be used to find out how things are in Nature is easily seen 

 by following Cassirer's arguments in the remainder of his book. 

 He holds that: 



Both (nature and knowledge) must be understood in terms of their 

 own essence, and this is no dark, mysterious ' something,' impene- 

 trable to intellect; this essence consists rather in principles which 

 are perfectly accessible to the mind since the mind is able to educe 

 them from itself and to enunciate them systematically.^^ 



Thus where Aristotle finds something " dark " and " myster- 

 ious " in Nature which escapes the power of man's intellect, 



^° Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Univ. Press, 1951), p. 37. 

 " Ibid., p. 45. 



