  Although he has been persistently criticized for his commitment to such natural ends, Aristotle is not susceptible to a fair number of the objections standardly made to his view.  Indeed, it is evident that whatever the merits of the most penetrating of such criticisms, much of the contumely directed at Aristotle is stunningly  illiterate.[20]    To take but one of any number of mind-numbing examples, the famous American psychologist B. F. Skinner reveals that ‘Aristotle argued that a falling body accelerated because it grew more jubilant as it found itself nearer its home’ (1971, 6). To anyone who has actually read Aristotle, it is unsurprising that this ascription comes without an accompanying textual citation.  For Aristotle, as Skinner would portray him, rocks are conscious beings having end states which they so delight in procuring that they accelerate themselves in exaltation as they grow ever closer to attaining them. There is no excuse for this sort of intellectual slovenliness, when already by the late-nineteenth century, the German scholar Zeller was able to say with perfect accuracy that ‘The most important feature of the Aristotelian teleology is the fact that it is neither anthropocentric nor is it due to the actions of a creator existing outside the world or even of a mere arranger of the world, but is always thought of as immanent in nature’ (1883, §48).