Page:Aristotelous peri psuxes.djvu/208



198 bronze is said to be the nature of a statue or of bronze utensils, wood of wooden articles, and so of other materials and products. There were some who spoke of the essence of natural bodies as nature, and as they made the primal combination of particles, that is affinity, to be essence, Empedocles maintained that "the nature spoken of by men is only the combination of and change among particles." So that Aristotle confined the term nature to existing beings and the processes by which they are supported and perpetuated, to living and organised matter that is, while others widened its acceptation, and made it applicable to the changes continually going on through and by elementary substances. With him, in fact, it was a living principle; with others, a property or force, whereby change is a law.

"The term nature," says Cuvier, "in our own and most other tongues, signifies, sometimes the properties which a being derives from its birth (hereditarily) in contradistinction to those which it may derive from adventitious circumstances; sometimes the whole of the beings which compose the universe, and sometimes, again, the laws to which those beings are subjected. It is in this last sense that we are accustomed to personify nature, and out of respect to employ its name for that of its author."

Note 2, p. 11. Its essence as well as its accidents.] Aristotle observes that essence seems, most manifestly,