MOTIONLESS MOTION 293 



the modern philosophers and scientists who follow Cassirer 

 will see Nature as " perfectly accessible to the mind." 



In his study of Nature and Nature's ways Aristotle often 

 uses the principle that " art imitates Nature." In this way 

 he was able to discern, in an analogous way, some of the pro- 

 cesses by which Nature achieves her end. In fact, even the 

 notion that Nature operates for an end is arrived at by this 

 reasoning in // Physics. Many moderns, if they are aware of 

 this method in his works, often characterize it as " anthropo- 

 morphic " and reject it out of hand. This is indeed curious 

 because if we compare the results obtained by the " anthropo- 

 morphic " method of Aristotle with those of the modern phi- 

 losophers for whom Nature is an open book, we should expect 

 that the former would find its end in man while the latter would 

 have some extrinsic focus. That this is not the case, as least 

 for Aristotle, was shown earlier when it was pointed out that 

 for him man would have an end in something divine. Man's 

 happiness was to be found in the contemplation of that divine 

 principle which is the source of all being. When those for whom 

 nature is " perfectly accessible to the mind " turn their atten- 

 tion to questions of ethics and politics they use notions 

 indicating that man is supreme in his determination of his 

 goal and that society exists only by some sort of a " social 

 contact." With respect to this last notion Fr. Charles McCoy 

 has said: 



It may seem curious that the idea of contract be employed to 

 express a natural relation. However, the secret of its appropriateness 

 is to be found in the fact that the naturalism of this political phi- 

 losophy demanded an innate social propensity which could be raised 

 to the level of a sufficient explanation of social groupings in such 

 a way as to leave no law to be observed which in any sense is 

 imposed from without, but to leave only a ' natural law ' which the 

 moral subject gives to itself. And nothing is better designed to 

 express this kind of naturalness than the idea of contract.^- 



""The Turning Point in Political Philosophy, Avi. Pol. Sc. Rev., XLIV (1950), 

 678 ff. 



