Part of the philosophy of this personal relation between a man and a fact is very simple. For instance what do you know at present of the inner life of the Patagonians? Probably no more than your Mitchell's or Cornell's Geography told you at school. But if a government expedition is soon to carry you to the interior of that country, a personal relation arises which will probably set you to searching all the libraries at your command for such travels or treatises as may enlarge your knowledge of Patagonia. It is easy to give a thousand illustrations of this lack of intellectual conscience in Greek thought, which continued indeed up to the time of the Renaissance. For example: it would seem that nothing less than a sort of amateur mental attitude towards nature, an attitude which does not bind the thinker to his facts with such iron conscientiousness that if one fact were out of due order, it would rack him, could account for Aristotle's grave exposition of the four elements. "We seek," he says "the principles of sensible things, that is of tangible bodies. We must take therefore not all the contrarieties of quality but those only which have reference to the touch.... Now the contrarieties of quality which refer to the touch are these: hot, cold; dry, wet; heavy, light; hard, soft; unctuous, meagre; rough, smooth; dense, rare." Aristotle then rejects the last three couplets on several grounds and proceeds: "Now in four things there are six combinations of two; but the combinations of two opposites, as hot and cold, must be rejected; we have therefore four elementary combinations which agree with the four apparently elementary bodies. Fire is hot and dry; air is hot and wet; water is cold and wet: earth is cold and dry." And thus we comfortably fare forward with fire, air, earth and water for the four elements of all things.