Theodicy | Page 5

side by side.
If one had asked any 'modern' of the seventeenth century to name the
'ancient' doctrine he most abominated, he would most likely have
replied, 'Substantial form'. Let us recall what was rejected under this
name, and why.
The medieval account of physical nature had been dominated by what
we may call common-sense biology. Biology, indeed, is the science of
the living, and the medievals were no more inclined than we are to
endow all physical bodies with life. What they did do was to take living
bodies as typical, and to treat other bodies as imperfectly analogous to
them. Such an approach was a priori reasonable enough. For we may
be expected to know best the physical being closest to our own; and we,
at any rate, are alive. Why not argue from the better known to the less
known, from the nearer to the more remote, interpreting other things by
the formula of our own being, and allowing whatever discount is
necessary for their degree of unlikeness to us?
Common-sense biology reasons as follows. In a living body there is a
certain pattern of organized parts, a certain rhythm of successive
motions, and a certain range of characteristic activities. The pattern, the
sheer anatomy, is basic; but it cannot long continue to exist (outside a
refrigerator) without accompanying vital rhythms in heart, respiration
and digestion. Nor do these perform their parts without the intermittent
support of variable but still characteristic activities: dogs not only
breathe and digest, they run about, hunt their food, look for mates, bark
at cats, and so on. The anatomical pattern, the vital rhythm, and the
characteristic acts together express dogginess; they reveal the specific
form of the dog. They reveal it; exactly what the specific form
consisted in was the subject of much medieval speculation. It need not
concern us here.
Taking the form of the species for granted, common-sense biology
proceeds to ask how it comes to be in a given instance, say in the dog
Toby. [15] Before this dog was born or thought of, his form or species
was displayed in each of his parents. And now it looks as though the

form of dog had detached itself from them through the generative act,
and set up anew on its own account. How does it do that? By getting
hold of some materials in which to express itself. At first it takes them
from the body of the mother, afterwards it collects them from a wider
environment, and what the dog eats becomes the dog.
What, then, is the relation of the assimilated materials to the dog-form
which assimilates them? Before assimilation, they have their own form.
Before the dog eats the leg of mutton, it has the form given to it by its
place in the body of a sheep. What happens to the mutton? Is it without
remainder transubstantiated from sheep into dog? It loses all its
distinctively sheep-like characteristicsm but there may be some more
basically material characteristics which it preserves. They underlay the
structure of the mutton, and they continue to underlie the structure of
the dog's flesh which supplants it. Whatever these characteristics may
be, let us call them common material characteristics, and let us say that
they belong to or compose a common material nature.
The common material nature has its own way of existing, and perhaps
its own principles of physical action. We may suppose that we know
much or that we know little about it. This one thing at least we know,
that it is capable of becoming alternatively either mutton or dog's flesh.
It is not essential to it to be mutton, or mutton it would always be; nor
dog's flesh, or it would always be dog's flesh. It is capable of becoming
either, according as it is captured by one or other system of formal
organization. So the voters who are to go to the polls are, by their
common nature, Englishmen; they are essentially neither Socialist curs
nor Conservative sheep, but intrinsically capable of becoming either, if
they become captured by either system of party organization.
According to this way of thinking, there is a certain looseness about the
relation of the common material nature to the higher forms of
organization capable of capturing it. Considered in itself alone, it is
perhaps to be seen as governed by absolutely determined laws of its
own. It is heavy, then it will fall unless obstructed; it is solid, then it
will resist intrusions. But considered as material for organization by
higher forms, it is indeterminate. It acts in one sort of way under the

persuasion of the sheep-form, and in another sort of way under the
persuasion of the [16] dog-form, and we cannot tell how it will act until
we