[1064b]
[1]
Evidently, then,
there are three kinds of speculative science: physics, mathematics,
and theology. The highest class of science is the speculative, and of
the speculative sciences themselves the highest is the last named,
because it deals with the most important side of reality; and each
science is reckoned higher or lower in accordance with the object of
its study.The question might be raised
as to whether the science of Being qua Being
should be regarded as universal or not.Each of the mathematical sciences deals with
some one class of things which is determinate, but universal
mathematics is common to all alike. If, then, natural substances are
the first of existing things, physics will be the first of the
sciences; but if there is some other nature and substance which exists
separately and is immovable, then the science which treats of it must
be different from and prior to physics, and universal because of its
priority. Since the term Being in its
unqualified sense is used with several meanings, of which one is
accidental Being, we must first consider Being in this sense.1
Clearly none of the traditional sciences concerns itself with the
accidental; the science of building does not consider what will happen
to the occupants of the house,
[20]
e.g. whether they will find it unpleasant or the
contrary to live in; nor does the science of weaving or of shoemaking
or of confectionery.Each
of these sciences considers only what is proper to it, i.e. its
particular end. As for the question whether "the cultured" is also
"the lettered," or the quibble2 that "the man who is cultured, when he has become
lettered, will be both at once although he was not before; but that
which is but was not always so must have come to be; therefore he must
have become at the same time cultured and lettered"—none of the recognized
sciences considers this, except sophistry. This is the only science
which concerns itself with the accidental, and hence Plato was not far
wrong in saying3 that the sophist spends
his time in the study of unreality. But that it is not even possible
for there to be a science of the accidental will be apparent if we try
to see what the accidental really is. Of some things we
say that they are so always and of necessity (necessity having the
sense not of compulsion, but that which we use in logical
demonstration4), and of others
that they are so usually, but of others that they are so neither
usually nor always and of necessity, but fortuitously. E.g., there
might be a frost at midsummer, although this comes about neither
always and of necessity nor usually;
1 Sections 1-9 of this chapter correspond to Aristot. Met. 6.2-4.
2 This is a different form of the "quibble" in Aristot. Met. 6.2.4. Here the fallacy obviously consists in the wrong application of the word ἅμα("at once" or "at the same time").
4 Cf. Aristot. Met. 6.2.6.
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