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Aristotle - On The Parts Of Animals
Atec Февраль 16 2008 20:01:06
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For a couch is such and such a form embodied in this or that matter,
or such and such a matter with this or that form; so that its shape
and structure must be included in our description. For the formal
nature is of greater importance than the material nature.
Does, then, configuration and colour constitute the essence of the
various animals and of their several parts? For 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, seeing that he is recognizable by his
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 constituted in any but the
appropriate way 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 hand, is really an eye or a hand. 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
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