Natural Versus Artificial

Things can exist:

• by nature, or
• not by nature [i.e. man-made].

Examples of those that exist ‘by nature’ are:

• the animals and their parts exist
• the plants and the simple bodies (earth, fire, air, water)

We say that these and the like exist ‘by nature’. These are different from artificial.

Each of them has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness in respect of:

• place, or
• growth and decrease
• alteration

On the other hand, a bed and a coat are products of art that have no innate impulse to change.

• But they do have such an impulse as they are composed of stone, earth, or a mixture of the two.

Nature is a source or cause of a natural thing.

• A natural thing has nature as its primary attribute and not as a concomitant attribute

I say ‘not in virtue of a concomitant attribute’, because for instance,

For example, a doctor can cure himself.

• In this case, he is both a doctor and a patient.
• These 2 attribute are not always found together.

The art of medicine is in the doctor. It merely has happened that he is also his patient.

But all other artificial products exist not from nature.

• None of them has in itself the source of its own production.

In some things, like a house and other products of manual labour, self-production is in something else that is external.

In other things those which may cause a change in themselves in virtue of a concomitant attribute-it lies in the things themselves, but not in virtue of what they are.

Things ‘have a nature’ which have a principle of this kind. Each of them is a substance. For it is a subject, and nature always implies a subject in which it inheres.

The term ‘according to nature’ is applied:

• to all these things and
• to the attributes which belong to them in virtue of what they are
  • For instance, the property of fire to be carried upwards-which is not a ‘nature’ nor ‘has a nature’ but is ‘by nature’ or ‘according to nature’.

It would be absurd to try to prove that nature exists.

Some identify the nature or substance of a natural object with that immediate constituent of it which taken by itself is without arrangement.

For example:

• the wood is the ‘nature’ of the bed
• the bronze the ‘nature’ of the statue

Antiphon points out that if you planted a bed and the rotting wood acquired the power of sending up a shoot, it would not be a bed that would come up. Instead, it would be the wood. This shows that:

• the arrangement by art is merely an incidental attribute
• the real nature is the other which persists continuously through the process of making.

But they say if the material of objects has the same relation to something else, such as bronze to water, bones to earth, etc then that would be their nature and essence.

Consequently some assert earth, fire, air, or water, or some or all of these, to be the nature of existing things.

• They think that the whole of substance of existing things is made up of these.
• All other things are its affections, states, or dispositions.

Every such thing they held to be eternal because it could not pass into anything else.

• But other things can exist and stop existing.

What is Nature?

This is one account of ‘nature’: it is the immediate material substratum of things which have in themselves a principle of motion or change.

Another account is that ‘nature’ is the shape or form which is specified in the definition of the thing.

The word ‘nature’ is applied to what is according to nature and the natural in the same way as ‘art’ is applied to what is artistic or a work of art.

In artificial works, something that is a bed potentially is still not an artificial work, nor artificial.

The same is true of natural compounds. What is potentially flesh or bone has not yet its own ‘nature’. It still does not exist until it receives the form specified in the definition, which we name in defining what flesh or bone is.

Thus in the second sense of ‘nature’ it would be the shape or form (not separable except in statement) of things which have in themselves a source of motion. (The combination of the two, e.g. man, is not ‘nature’ but ‘by nature’ or ‘natural’.)

The form is ‘nature’ rather than the matter. A thing is what it is when it has attained to fulfilment than when it exists potentially.

Man is born from man, but not bed from bed.

That is why people say that the shape is not the nature of a bed, but the wood is-if the bed sprouted not a bed but wood would come up.

But even if the shape is art, then on the same principle the shape of man is his nature. For man is born from man.

We also speak of a thing’s nature as being exhibited in the process of growth by which its nature is attained.

The ‘nature’ in this sense is health, and not the art of doctoring.

• Doctoring must start from the art, not lead to it.

But it is not in this way that nature (in the one sense) is related to nature (in the other).

What grows qua growing grows from something into something.

Into what then does it grow?

Not into that from which it arose but into that to which it tends. The shape then is nature.

‘Shape’ and ‘nature’ are in two senses.

For the privation too is in a way form.

But whether in unqualified coming to be there is privation, i.e. a contrary to what comes to be, we must consider later.