Therefore the
object of scientific knowledge is of necessity. Therefore it is
eternal; for things that are of necessity in the unqualified sense are
all eternal; and things that are eternal are ungenerated and
imperishable. Again, every science is thought to be capable of being
taught, and its object of being learned. And all teaching starts
from what is already known, as we maintain in the Analytics also;
for it proceeds sometimes through induction and sometimes by
syllogism. Now induction is the starting-point which knowledge even of
the universal presupposes, while syllogism proceeds from universals.
There are therefore starting-points from which syllogism proceeds,
which are not reached by syllogism; it is therefore by induction
that they are acquired. Scientific knowledge is, then, a state of
capacity to demonstrate, and has the other limiting characteristics
which we specify in the Analytics, for it is when a man believes in
a certain way and the starting-points are known to him that he has
scientific knowledge, since if they are not better known to him than
the conclusion, he will have his knowledge only incidentally.
Let this, then, be taken as our account of scientific knowledge.
4
In the variable are included both things made and things done;
making and acting are different (for their nature we treat even the
discussions outside our school as reliable); so that the reasoned
state of capacity to act is different from the reasoned state of
capacity to make.
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