In Contrast to Plato Unlike Plato, Aristotle believed that sensory perceptions in the human soul are reflections of objects, and thoughts in consciousness are based on what we have already seen. He believed that humans have the innate power of reason, and the innate faculty of organizing things into categories and classes, but no innate ideas.

No Innate Ideas Plato believed that the idea “chicken” came before the sensory world’s chicken, but Aristotle refused this theory. The form of chicken is eternal, but every chicken “flows,” meaning it can’t live forever. The form chicken is made up of a chicken’s characteristics, such as cackling and laying eggs. Therefore the form can not exist on its own, and can not be separated from any chicken. According to Aristotle, reality consists of separate things that constitute a unity of form and substance, which is what the object is made of. A chicken’s substance, for example, would be its feathers, flesh, beak, etc. Unlike form, substance still remains when a creature dies, and it as well has the potential to realize a specific form. Every change in nature is transformation from potential to the actual. For eggsample, a chicken’s egg has the potentiality to become a chicken, or to realise its form. In the case of nonliving organisms, an example to think about is that a stone’s form is to fall to the ground.

The Final Cause Aristotle believed that there were four causes for the occurrences of life: the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause. When rain falls, the material cause is that the moisture is there when the air is cooling. The efficient cause is that moisture cools, the formal cause is the
“form” of water is to fall, and the final cause is that so that