shall find them out by observing it in relation to different 'natures'. It
turns out to be combustible by fire, resistant to water, tractable to the
carpenter's tools, intractable to his digestive organs, harmless to
ostriches, nourishing to wood-beetles. Each of these capacities of the wood
is distinct; we cannot relate them intelligibly to one another, nor deduce
them from the assumed fundamental 'woodiness'.

We can now see why 'substantial forms' were the _bêtes noires_ of the
seventeenth-century philosophers. It was because they turned nature into an
unmanageable jungle, in which trees, bushes, and parasites of a thousand
kinds wildly interlaced. There was nothing for it, if science was to
proceed, but to clear the ground and replant with spruce in rows: to
postulate a single uniform nature, of which there should be a single
science. Now neither probatology nor cynology could hope to be [18]
universal--the world is not all sheep nor all dog: it would have to be
hylology; for the world is, in its spatial aspect, all material. Let us
say, then, that there is one uniform material nature of things, and that
everything else consists in the arrangements of the basic material nature;
as the show of towers and mountains in the sunset results simply from an
arrangement of vapours. And let us suppose that the interactions of the
parts of matter are all like those which we can observe in dead manipulable
bodies--in mechanism, in fact. Such was the postulate of the new
philosophers, and it yielded them results.

It yielded them results, and that was highly gratifying. But what,
meanwhile, had happened to those palpable facts of common experience from
which the whole philosophy of substantial forms had taken its rise? Is the
wholeness of a living thing the mere resultant of the orderly operations of
its parts? Is a bee no more essentially one than a swarm is? Is the life of
a living animal indistinguishable from the rhythm of a going watch, except