Parting ways with Aristotle. Malebranche and Le Grand

In the previous step, you have read two, anonymised passages by two early modern authors. Here, we will briefly return to these passages to identify their authors, and to assess to what extent, and how, these authors part ways with the Aristotelian tradition that analysed natural phenomena and events in terms of the two key notions of matter and form.

When wood perishes by Fire, … it is not resolved into any other, but those very same things, which were really pre-existent and contained therein, and consequently, … nothing thereof perisheth, but only that determinate Connection and situation [i.e. position] of its parts.

But I should point out here in passing that there is nothing wrong with the terms form and essential difference. Honey is undoubtedly honey through its form, and in this lies its essential difference from salt. But this form or essential difference is a matter of the different configuration of its parts. This different configuration makes honey and salt what they are.

This is a passage from the Search after Truth (1674) by Descartes’s follower, Nicolas Malebranche. Malebranche retains the word ‘form’ here, but reduces the form of a body to a configuration of its material parts. Here, he departs from Aristotelian tradition, where the form of a body could not be so reduced, and was sometimes taken to be kind of soul.