O 1. I. 



with this or that form ; so that its shape and structure must be 

 included in our description. For the formal nature is of much 

 greater importance than the material nature. 



Does, then, configuration and colour constitute the essence of 

 the various animals and of their several parts ? P^or if so, what 

 Democritus says will be strictly correct. For such appears to 

 have been his notion. At any rate he says that it is evident to 

 every one what form it is that makes the man ; as if man were 

 constituted by a certain recognisable shape and colour. And yet 

 a dead body has exactly the same configuration as a living one ; 

 but for all that is not a man. So also no hand of bronze or wood 

 or of any but the appropriate materials can possibly be a hand 

 in more than name. For like a physician in a painting, or like 

 a flute in a sculpture, in spite of its name, it will be unable to do 

 the office which that name implies. Precisely in the same way 

 no part of a dead body, such I mean as its eye or its foot, is 

 really an eye or a foot. To say, then, that shape and colour 

 constitute the animal is an inadequate statement, and is much 

 the same as if a woodcarver were to insist that the hand he 

 had cut out was really a hand. Yet the physiologists, when 

 they give an account of the development and causes of the 

 animal form, speak very much like such a craftsman. What, 

 however, I would ask, are the forces by which the hand or the 

 body was fashioned into its shape ? The woodcarver will perhaps 

 say, by the axe or the auger ; the physiologist, by air and by 

 earth. Of these two answers the artificer's is the better, but it 

 is nevertheless insufficient.^^ For it is not enough for him to say 

 that by the stroke of his tool this part was formed into a con- 

 cavity, that into a flat surface ; but he must state the reasons 

 why he struck his blow in such a way as to effect this, and what 

 his final object was; namely, that the piece of wood should develop 

 eventually into this or that shape. It is plain, then, that the 

 teaching of the old physiologists is inadequate, and that the 

 true method is to state what the definitive characters are that dis- 

 tinguish the animal as a whole ; to explain what it is both in 

 substance and in form, and to deal after the same fashion with 

 its several organs ; in fact, to proceed in exactly the same way 

 as we should do, were we giving a complete description of a couch. 



If now this something that constitutes the form of the living 

 being be the souV* or part of the soul, or something that without 

 641a. 



