Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/90

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE soul with its distinguishing properties. The motor or efficient cause must be subordinate to the final cause, and never the reverse. To illustrate by a famous instance: " Stand- ing thus erect, man has no need of legs in front, and in their stead has been endowed by nature with arms and hands. Now it is the opinion of Anaxagoras that the possession of these hands is the cause of man being of all animals the most intelligent. But it is more rational to suppose that his endowment with hands is the consequence rather than the cause of his superior intelligence. For the hands are instruments or organs, and the in- variable plan of nature in distributing the organs is to give each to such animal as can make use of it; nature acting in this matter as any prudent man would do., . . We must con- clude that man does not owe his superior in- telligence to his hands, but his hands to his superior intelligence." ** Modern biology finds other factors entering this problem, which is part of a large cont'-o- versy still. Our biologists might not decide for Aristotle here, yet would be well disposed toward another deduction which he drew from his teleological creed: aberrant or occasional [68]