Chapter VII: The Systematic Philosophy of Aristotle (3)

We cannot, then, agree with those critics who attribute to Aristotle a recognition of such things as ‘laws of nature,’ in the sense of uniform co-existences and sequences.[279] Such an idea implies a certain balance and equality between subject and predicate which he would never have admitted. It would, in his own language, be making relation, instead of substance, the leading category. It must be remembered also that he did not acknowledge the existence of those constant conjunctions in Nature which we call laws. He did not admit that all matter was heavy, or that fluidity implied the presence of heat. The possession of constant properties, or rather of a single constant property—circular rotation—is reserved for the aether. Nor is this a common property of different and indefinitely multipliable phenomena; it characterises a single body, measurable in extent and unique in kind. Moreover, we have something better than indirect evidence on this point; we have the plain statement of Aristotle himself, that all science depends on first principles, about which it is impossible to be mistaken, precisely because they are universal abstractions not presented to the mind by any combination,[280]—a view quite inconsistent with the priority now given to general laws.

Answering to the first principles of demonstration in logic, if not absolutely identical with them, are what Aristotle calls causes in the nature of things. We have seen what an important part the middle term plays in Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism. It is the vital principle of demonstration, the connecting link by which the two extreme terms are attached to one another. In the theory of applied logic, whose object is to bring the order of thought into complete parallelism with the order of things, the middle term through which a fact is demonstrated answers to the cause through which it exists. According to our notions, only two terms, antecedent and consequent, are involved in the idea of causation; and causation only becomes a matter for reasoning when we perceive that the sequence is repeated in a uniform manner. But Aristotle was very far from having reached, or even suspected, this point of view. A cause is with him not a determining antecedent, but a secret nexus by which the co-existence of two phenomena is explained. Instead of preceding it intercedes; and this is why he finds its subjective counterpart in the middle term of the syllogism. Some of his own examples will make the matter clearer. Why is the moon eclipsed? Because the earth intervenes between her and the sun. Why is the bright side of the moon always turned towards the sun? Because she shines by his reflected light (here light is the middle term). Why is that person talking to the rich man? Because he wants to borrow money of him. Why are those two men friends? Because they have the same enemy.[281]

Aristotle even goes so far as to eliminate the notion of sequence from causation altogether. He tells us that the causes of events are contemporary with the events themselves; those of past events being past; of present events, present; and of future events, future. ‘This thing will not be because that other thing has happened, for the middle term must be homogeneous with the extremes.’[282] It is obvious that such a limitation abolishes the power of scientific prediction, which, if not the only test of knowledge, is at any rate its most valuable verification. The Stagirite has been charged with trusting too much to deductive reasoning; it now appears that, on the contrary, he had no conception of its most important function. Here, as everywhere, he follows not the synthetic method of the mathematician, but the analytic method of the naturalist. Finally, instead of combining the notions of cause and kind, he systematically confuses them. It will be remembered how his excellent division of causes into material, formal, efficient, and final, was rendered nugatory by the continued influence of Plato’s ideas. The formal cause always tended to absorb the other three; and it is by their complete assimilation that he attempts to harmonise the order of demonstration with the order of existence. For the formal cause of a phenomenon simply meant those properties which it shared with others of the same kind, and it was by virtue of those properties that it became a subject for general reasoning, which was interpreted as a methodical arrangement of concepts one within another, answering to the concentric disposition of the cosmic spheres.

Owing to the slight importance which Aristotle attaches to judgments as compared with concepts, he does not go very deeply into the question, how do we obtain our premises? He says, in remarkably emphatic language, that all knowledge is acquired either by demonstration or by induction; or rather, we may add, in the last resort by the latter only, since demonstration rests on generals which are discovered inductively; but his generals mean definitions and abstract predicates or subjects, rather than synthetic propositions. If, however, his attention had been called to the distinction, we cannot suppose that he would, on his own principles, have adopted conclusions essentially different from those of the modern experiential school. Mr. Wallace does, indeed, claim him as a supporter of the theory that no inference can be made from particulars to particulars without the aid of a general proposition, and as having refuted, by anticipation, Mill’s assertion to the contrary. We quote the analysis which is supposed to prove this in Mr. Wallace’s own words:—

We reason that because the war between Thebes and Phocis was a war between neighbours and an evil, therefore the war between Athens and Thebes, being also a war between neighbours, will in all probability be also an evil. Thus, out of the one parallel case—the war between Thebes and Phocis—we form the _general_ proposition, All wars between neighbours are evils; to this we add the minor, the war between Athens and Thebes is a war between neighbours—and thence arrive at the conclusion that the war between Athens and Thebes will be likewise an evil.[283]

On the strength of this Mr. Wallace elsewhere observes:—

His [Aristotle’s] theory of syllogism is simply an explicit statement of the fact that all knowledge, all thought, rests on universal truths or general propositions—that all knowledge, whether ‘deductive’ or ‘inductive,’ is arrived at by the aid, the indispensable aid, of general propositions. We in England have been almost charmed into the belief that reasoning is perpetually from particular to particular, and a ‘village matron’ and her ‘Lucy’ have been used to express the truth for us in the concrete form adapted to our weaker comprehension (Mill’s _Logic_, bk. ii. ch. 3). We shall next be told, forsooth, that oxygen and hydrogen do not enter into the composition of water, because our village matron ‘perpetually’ drinks it without ‘passing through’ either element, and the analysis of the chemist will be proved as great a fiction as the analysis of the logician. Aristotle has supplied the links which at once upset all such superficial analysis. He has shown that even in analogy or example, which _apparently_ proceeds in this way from one particular instance to another particular instance, we are only justified in so proceeding in so far as we have transformed the particular instance into a general proposition.[284]

Now, there is this great difference between Aristotle and Mill, that the former is only showing how reasoning from examples can be set forth in syllogistic form, while the latter is investigating the psychological process which underlies all reasoning, and the real foundation on which a valid inference rests—questions which had never presented themselves clearly to the mind of the Greek philosopher at all. Mill argues, in the first instance, that when any particular proposition is deduced from a general proposition, it is proved by the same evidence as that on which the general itself rests, namely, on other particulars; and, so far, he is in perfect agreement with Aristotle. He then argues that inferences from particulars to particulars are perpetually made without passing through a general proposition: and, to illustrate his meaning, he quotes the example of a ‘village matron and her Lucy,’ to which Mr. Wallace refers with a very gratuitous sneer.[285]

However, as we have seen, he is not above turning it against Mill. The drift of his own illustration is not very clear, but we suppose it implies that the matron unconsciously frames the general proposition: My remedy is good for all children suffering from the same disease as Lucy; and with equal unconsciousness reasons down from this to the case of her neighbour’s child. Now, it is quite unjustifiable to call Mill’s analysis superficial because it leaves out of account a hypothesis incompatible with the nominalism which Mill professed. It is still more unjustifiable to quote against it the authority of a philosopher who perfectly agreed with those who disbelieve in the possibility of unconscious knowledge,[286] and contemptuously rejected Plato’s opinion to the contrary. Nor is this all. The doctrine that reasoning is from particulars to particulars, even when it passes through general propositions, may be rigorously deduced from Aristotle’s own admissions. If nothing exists but particulars, and if knowledge is of what exists, then all knowledge is of particulars. Therefore, if the propositions entering into a chain of reasoning are knowledge, they must deal with particulars exclusively. And, quite apart from the later developments of Aristotle’s philosophy, we have his express assertion, that all generals are derived from particulars, which is absolutely incompatible with the alleged fact, that ‘all knowledge, all thought, rests on universal truths, on general propositions; that all knowledge, whether “deductive” or “inductive,” is arrived at by the aid, the indispensable aid, of general propositions.’ To Aristotle the basis of knowledge was not ‘truths’ of any kind, but concepts; and in the last chapter of the _Posterior Analytics_ he has explained how these concepts are derived from sense-perceptions without the aid of any ‘propositions’ whatever.

We are here confronted with an important and much disputed question, Was Aristotle an empiricist? We hold most decidedly that he was, if by empiricist is meant, what alone should be meant—one who believes that the mind neither anticipates anything in the content, nor contributes anything to the form of experience; in other words, who believes knowledge to be the agreement of thought with things imposed by things on thought. We have already shown, when discussing Sir A. Grant’s view to the contrary, that Aristotle was in no sense a transcendental idealist. The other half of our position is proved by the chapter in the _Posterior Analytics_ already referred to, the language of which is _primâ facie_ so much in favour of our view that the burden of proof rests on those who give it another interpretation. Among these, the latest with whom we are acquainted is Zeller. The eminent German historian, after asserting in former editions of his work that Aristotle derived his first principles from the self-contemplation of the Nous, has now, probably in deference to the unanswerable arguments of Kampe, abandoned this position. He still, however, assumes the existence of a rather indefinable _à priori_ element in the Aristotelian noology, on the strength of the following considerations:—In the first place, according to Aristotle, even sense-perception is not a purely passive process, and therefore intellectual cognition can still less be so (p. 190). But the passages quoted only amount to this, that the passivity of a thing which is raised from possibility to actuality differs from the passivity implied in the destruction of its proper nature; and that the objects of abstract thought come from within, not from without, in the sense that they are presented by the imagination to the reason. The pure empiricist need not deny either position. He would freely admit that to lose one’s reason through drunkenness or disease is a quite different sort of operation from being impressed with a new truth; and he would also admit that we generalise not directly from outward experience, but from that highly-abridged and representative experience which memory supplies. Neither process, however, constitutes an anticipation of outward experience or an addition to it. It is from the materialist, not from the empiricist, that Aristotle differs. He believes that the forms under which matter appears are separable from every particular portion of matter, though not from all matter, in the external world; and he believes that a complete separation between them is effected in the single instance of self-conscious reason, which again, in cognising any particular thing is identified with that thing _minus_ its matter. Zeller’s next argument is that the cognition of ideas by the Nous is immediate, whereas the process of generalisation from experience described by Aristotle is extremely indirect. Here Zeller seems to misunderstand the word ἄμεσος. Aristotle never applies it to knowledge, but only to the objective relations of ideas with one another. Two terms constitute an ‘immediate’ premise when they are not connected by another term, quite irrespective of the steps by which we come to recognise their conjunction. So with the terms themselves. They are ‘immediate’ when they cannot be derived from any ulterior principle; when, in short, they are simple and uncaused. Finally, the objection that first principles, being the most certain and necessary of any, cannot be derived from sensible experience, which, dealing only with material objects, must inherit the uncertainty and contingency of matter,—is an objection, not to the empiricist interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy, but to empiricism itself; and it is not allowable to explain away the plain words of an ancient writer in order to reconcile them with assumptions which he nowhere admits. That universality and necessity involve an _à priori_ cognition or an intellectual intuition, is a modern theory unsupported by a single sentence in Aristotle.[287] We quite agree with Zeller when he goes on to say that in Aristotle’s psychology ‘certain thoughts and notions arise through the action of the object thought about on the thinking mind, just as perception arises through the action of the perceived object on the percipient’ (p. 195); but how this differs from the purest empiricism is more than we are able to understand.

It is remarkable that Aristotle, after repeatedly speaking of induction as an ascent from particulars to generals, when he comes to trace the process by which we arrive at the most general notions of any, does not admit the possibility of such a movement in one direction only. The universal and the individual are, according to him, combined in our most elementary sense-impressions, and the business of scientific experience is to separate them. Starting from a middle point, we work up to indivisible predicates on the one hand and down to indivisible subjects on the other, the final apprehension of both extremes being the office, not of science, but of Nous. This theory is equally true and acute. The perception of individual facts is just as difficult and just as slowly acquired as the conception of ultimate abstractions. Moreover, the two processes are carried on _pari passu_, each being only made possible by and through the other. No true notion can be framed without a firm grasp of the particulars from which it is abstracted; no individual object can be studied without analysing it into a group of common predicates, the idiosyncrasy of which—that is, their special combination—differentiates it from every other object. What, however, we wish to remark is the illustration incidentally afforded by this striking aperçu of Aristotle’s analytical method, which is also the essentially Greek method of thought. We saw that, for our philosopher, syllogism was not the subsumption of a particular case under a general law, but the interpolation of a mean between two extremes; we now see that his induction is not the finding of a law for the particular phenomenon, but its analysis into two elements—one universal and the other individual—a solution of the mean into the extremes. And the distinctive originality of his whole system was to fix two such extremes for the universe—a self-thinking thought in absolute self-identity at one end of the scale, and an absolutely indeterminate matter at the other; by combining which in various proportions he then re-constructed the whole intermediate phenomenal reality. In studying each particular class of facts, he follows the same method. The genus is marked by some characteristic attribute which one species—the prerogative species, so to speak—exhibits in its greatest purity, while the others form a graduated scale by variously combining this attribute with its opposite or privation. Hence his theory, since revived by Goethe, that the colours are so many different mixtures of light and darkness.

It has, until lately, been customary to speak as if all that Aristotle knew about induction was contained in a few scattered passages where it is mentioned under that name in the _Analytics_. This, no doubt, is true, if by induction we mean simple generalisation. But if we understand by it the philosophy of experimental evidence—the analysis of those means by which, in the absence of direct observation, we decide between two conflicting hypotheses—then the _Topics_ must be pronounced as good a discussion on the subject as was compatible with his general theory of knowledge. For he supposes that there are large classes of phenomena, including, among other things, the whole range of human life, which, not being bound by any fixed order, lie outside the scope of scientific demonstration, although capable of being determined with various degrees of probability; and here also what he has in view is not the discovery of laws, but the construction of definitions. These being a matter of opinion, could always be attacked as well as maintained. Thus the constant conflict and balancing of opposite forces, which we have learned to associate with the sublunary sphere, has its logical representative no less than the kindred ideas of uncertainty and vicissitude. And, in connexion with this side of applied logic, Aristotle has also to consider the requirements of those who took part in the public debates on disputed questions, then very common among educated Athenians, and frequently turning on verbal definitions. Hence, while we find many varieties of reasoning suggested, such as Reasoning by Analogy, Disjunctive Reasoning, Hypothetical Reasoning (though without a generalised expression for all its varieties), and, what is most remarkable, three out of Mill’s four Experimental Methods,[288] we do not find that any interesting or useful application is made of them. Even considered as a handbook for debaters, the _Topics_ is not successful. With the practical incompetence of a mere naturalist, Aristotle has supplied heads for arguments in such profusion and such utter carelessness of their relative importance that no memory could sustain the burden, except in the probably rare instances when a lifetime was devoted to their study.

VIII.

We have now concluded our survey of the first great mental antithesis, that between reason on the one hand, and sense and opinion on the other. The next antithesis, that between reason and passion, will occupy us a much shorter time. With it we pass from theory to practice, from metaphysics and logic to moral philosophy. But, as we saw in the preceding chapter, Aristotle is not a practical genius; for him the supreme interest of life is still the acquisition of knowledge. Theorising activity corresponds to the celestial world, in which there can be neither opposition nor excess; while passion corresponds to the sublunary sphere, where order is only preserved by the balancing of antithetical forces; and the moderating influence of reason, to the control exercised by the higher over the lower system.

The passions themselves, and the means by which they can be either excited or controlled, are described in Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ with wonderful knowledge of human nature in the abstract, but with almost no reference to the art for whose purposes the information is ostensibly systematised; while in the _Ethics_ they are studied, so to speak, statically, in their condition of permanent equilibration or disequilibration; the virtues and vices being represented as so many different aspects of those conditions. It is obvious that such an extremely artificial parallelism could not be carried out without a considerable strain and distortion of the facts involved. The only virtue that can, with truth, be described as a form of moderation is temperance; and even in temperance this is accidental rather than essential. Elsewhere Aristotle deduces the extremes from the mean rather than the mean from the extremes; and sometimes one of the extremes is invented for the occasion. To fit justice, confessedly the most important virtue, into such a scheme, was obviously impracticable without reinterpreting the idea of moderation. Instead of an equilibrium between opposing impulses in the same person, we have equality in the treatment of different persons; which again resolves itself into giving them their own, without any definite determination of what their own may be.[289] It cannot even be said that Aristotle represented either the best ethical thought of his own age, or an indispensable stage in the evolution of all thought. The extreme insufficiency of his ethical theory is due to the fancied necessity of squaring it with the requirements of his cosmological system. For no sooner does he place himself at the popular point of view than he deduces the particular virtues from regard to the welfare of others, and treats them all as so many different forms of justice.[290]

Aristotle has sometimes been represented as an advocate of free-will against necessity. But the question had not really been opened in his time. He rejected fatalism; but it had not occurred to him that internal motives might exercise a constraining power over action. Nor has his freedom anything to do with the self-assertion of mind, its extrication from the chain of physical antecedents. It is simply the element of arbitrariness and uncertainty supposed to characterise the region of change and opposition, as distinguished from the higher region of undeviating regularity.

It is only in this higher region that perfect virtue can be realised. The maintenance of a settled balance between rival solicitations, or between the excess and defect of those impulses which lead us to seek pleasure and avoid pain, is good indeed, but neither the only nor the chief good. The law of moderation does not extend to that supremely happy life which is related to our emotional existence as the aether to the terrestrial elements, as soul to body, as reason to sense, as science to opinion. Here it is the steady subordination of means to ends which imitates the insphering of the heavenly orbs, the hierarchy of psychic faculties, and the chain of syllogistic arguments. Of theoretic activity we cannot have too much, and all other activities, whether public or private, should be regarded as so much machinery for ensuring its peaceful prosecution. Wisdom and temperance had been absolutely identified by Socrates; they are as absolutely held apart by Aristotle. And what we have had occasion to observe in the other departments of thought is verified here once more. The method of analysis and opposition, apparently so prudent, proved, in the end, unfruitful. Notwithstanding his paradoxes, Socrates was substantially right. The moral regeneration of the world was destined to be brought about, not by Dorian discipline, but by free Athenian thought, working on practical conceptions—by the discovery of new moral truth, or rather by the dialectic development of old truth. And, conversely, the highest development of theoretic activity was not attained by isolating it in egoistic self-contemplation from the world of human needs, but by consecrating it to their service, informing it with their vitality, and subjecting it, in common with them, to that law of moderation from which no energy, however godlike, is exempt.

The final antithesis of conscious life is that between the individual and the state. In this sense, Aristotle’s _Politics_ is the completion of his _Ethics_. It is only in a well-ordered community that moral habits can be acquired; and it is only in such a community that the best or intellectual life can be attained, although, properly speaking, it is not a social life. Nevertheless, the _Politics_, like every other portion of Aristotle’s system, reproduces within itself the elements of an independent whole. To understand its internal organisation, we must begin by disregarding Aristotle’s abortive classification (chiefly adapted from Plato) of constitutions into three legitimate—Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Republic; and three illegitimate—Democracy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny. Aristotle distinguishes them by saying that the legitimate forms are governed with a view to the general good; the illegitimate with a view to the interests of particular classes or persons. But, in point of fact, as Zeller shows,[291] he cannot keep up this distinction; and we shall better understand his true idea by substituting for it another—that between the intellectual and the material state. The object of the one is to secure the highest culture for a ruling caste, who are to abstain from industrial occupations, and to be supported by the labour of a dependent population. Such a government may be either monarchical or aristocratic; but it must necessarily be in the hands of a few. The object of the other is to maintain a stable equilibrium between the opposing interests of rich and poor—two classes practically distinguished as the few and the many. This end is best attained where supreme power belongs to the middle class. The deviations are represented by oligarchy and tyranny on the one side, and by extreme democracy on the other. Where such constitutions exist, the best mode of preserving them is to moderate their characteristic excess by borrowing certain institutions from the opposite form of government, or by modifying their own institutions in a conciliatory sense.

In the last chapter we dealt at length with the theories of art, and especially of tragic poetry, propounded in Aristotle’s _Poetics_. For the sake of formal completeness, it may be mentioned here that those theories are adapted to the general scheme of his systematic philosophy. The plot or plan of a work answers to the formal or rational element in Nature, and this is why Aristotle so immensely over-estimates its importance. And, just as in his moral philosophy, the ethical element, represented by character-drawing, is strictly subordinated to it. The centre of equilibrium is, however, not supplied by virtue, but by exact imitation of Nature, so that the characters must not deviate very far from mediocrity in the direction either of heroism or of wickedness.

IX.

Notwithstanding the radical error of Aristotle’s philosophy—the false abstraction and isolation of the intellectual from the material sphere in Nature and in human life—it may furnish a useful corrective to the much falser philosophy insinuated, if not inculcated, by some moralists of our own age and country. Taken altogether, the teaching of these writers seems to be that the industry which addresses itself to the satisfaction of our material wants is much more meritorious than the artistic work which gives us direct aesthetic enjoyment, or the literary work which stimulates and gratifies our intellectual cravings; while within the artistic sphere fidelity of portraiture is preferred to the creation of ideal beauty; and within the intellectual sphere, mere observation of facts is set above the theorising power by which facts are unified and explained. Some of the school to whom we allude are great enemies of materialism; but teaching like theirs is materialism of the worst description. Consistently carried out, it would first reduce Europe to the level of China, and then reduce the whole human race to the level of bees or beavers. They forget that when we were all comfortably clothed, housed, and fed, our true lives would have only just begun. The choice would then remain between some new refinement of animal appetite and the theorising activity which, according to Aristotle, is the absolute end, every other activity being only a means for its attainment. There is not, indeed, such a fundamental distinction as he supposed, for activities of every order are connected by a continual reciprocity of services; but this only amounts to saying that the highest knowledge is a means to every other end no less than an end in itself. Aristotle is also fully justified in urging the necessity of leisure as a condition of intellectual progress. We may add that it is a leisure which is amply earned, for without it industrial production could not be maintained at its present height. Nor should the same standard of perfection be imposed on spiritual as on material labour. The latter could not be carried on at all unless success, and not failure, were the rule. It is otherwise in the ideal sphere. There the proportions are necessarily reversed. We must be content if out of a thousand guesses and trials one should contribute something to the immortal heritage of truth. Yet we may hope that this will not always be so, that the great discoveries and creations wrought out through the waste of innumerable lives are not only the expiation of all error and suffering in the past, but are also the pledge of a future when such sacrifices shall no longer be required.

The two elements of error and achievement are so intimately blended and mutually conditioned in the philosophy which we have been reviewing, that to decide on their respective importance is impossible without first deciding on a still larger question—the value of systematic thought as such, and apart from its actual content. For Aristotle was perhaps the greatest master of systematisation that ever lived. The framework and language of science are still, to a great extent, what he made them; and it remains to be seen whether they will ever be completely remodelled. Yet even this gift has not been an unmixed benefit, for it was long used in the service of false doctrines, and it still induces critics to read into the Aristotelian forms truths which they do not really contain. Let us conclude by observing that of all the ancients, or even of all thinkers before the eighteenth century, there is none to whom the methods and results of modern science could so easily be explained. While finding that they reversed his own most cherished convictions on every point, he would still be prepared by his logical studies to appreciate the evidence on which they rest, and by his ardent love of truth to accept them without reserve. Most of all would he welcome our astronomy and our biology with wonder and delight, while viewing the development of modern machinery with much more qualified admiration, and the progress of democracy perhaps with suspicious fear. He who thought that the mind and body of an artisan were alike debased by the exercise of some simple handicraft under the pure bright sky of Greece, what would he have said to the effect wrought on human beings by the noisome, grinding, sunless, soulless drudgery of our factories and mines! How profoundly unfitted would he have deemed its victims to influence those political issues with which the interests of science are every day becoming more vitally connected! Yet slowly, perhaps, and unwillingly, he might be brought to perceive that our industry has been the indispensable basis of our knowledge, as supplying both the material means and the moral ends of its cultivation. He might also learn that there is an even closer relationship between the two: that while the supporters of privilege are leagued for the maintenance of superstition, the workers, and those who advocate their claims to political equality, are leagued for its restraint and overthrow. And if he still shrank back from the heat and smoke and turmoil amid which the genius of our age stands, like another Heracleitus, in feverish excitement, by the steam-furnace whence its powers of revolutionary transmutation are derived, we too might reapply the words of the old Ephesian prophet, bidding him enter boldly, for here also there are gods.

FOOTNOTES:

[222] _Phys._, II., viii., p. 198, b, 24.

[223] The late Father Secchi, for example.

[224] _Phys._, II., iv., p. 196, a, 28; _De Coel._, II., xii.

[225] _Phys._, II., viii., p. 199, b, 14.

[226] _Metaph._, I., iii., _sub in._; _Anal. Post._, II., xi., _sub in._ Bekker. (cap. x., in the Tauchnitz ed.); _Phys._ II., iii.; _De Gen. An._, I., i. _sub in._

[227] _Metaph._, VIII., iv., p. 1044, b, 1; _De Gen. An._, I., i., p, 715, a, 6; _ib._ II., i., 732, a, 4; _Phys._, II., vii., p. 198, a, 24 ff.

[228] _Phys._, II., iii., p. 195, a, 32 ff.; _Metaph._, IX., viii., p. 1049, b, 24.

[229] That is, according to the traditional view, which, however, will have to be considerably modified if we accept the conclusions embodied in Teichmüller’s _Literarische Fehden_.

[230] _Parmen._, 130, A ff.; _Tim._, 28, A.

[231] As we may infer from a passage in the _Rhetoric_ (II., ii., p. 1379, a, 35), where partisans of the Idea are said to be exasperated by any slight thrown on their favourite doctrine.

[232] Repeated in the _Metaphysics_, I., ix., p. 993, a, 1.

[233] This may seem inconsistent with our former assertion, that Hegel holds in German philosophy a place analogous to that held by Aristotle in Greek philosophy. Such analogies, however, are always more or less incomplete; and, so far as he attributes a self-moving power to ideas, Hegel is a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. Similarly, as an evolutionist, Mr. Herbert Spencer stands much nearer to early Greek thought than to Aristotle, whom, in other respects, he so much resembles.

[234] Zeller, _Ph. d. Gr._, II., b, 297 f.

[235] _Metaph._ IV., iii. and viii.

[236] _Ibid._ VI., ii., p. 1026, b, 21.

[237] _Metaph._, VI., iv., p. 1027, b, 29.

[238] _Ibid._, VI., iv.

[239] _Ibid._, VI., ii., _sub in._; VII., i., _sub in._; _Topic._, I., ix.

[240] These are τί, ποιόν, ποσόν, ποῦ, ποτέ, and πῶς. Τί is associated with πρός in the question πρὸς τί, which has no simple English equivalent. Apparently it was suggested to Aristotle by ποσόν, how much? in connexion with which it means, in relation to what standard? If we were told that a thing was double, we should ask, double what? Again, the Greeks had a simply compound question, τί παθών, meaning, what was the matter with him? or, what made him do it? From this Aristotle extracted πάσχειν, a wider notion than our passion, meaning whatever is done or happens to anything; which again would suggest ποιεῖν, what it does. Finally, πῶς, taken alone, is too vague a question for any answer, but must be taken in its simplest compounds πῶς διακείμενον and πῶς ἔχον, which give the two rarely-occurring categories ἔχειν and κεῖσθαι, for which it is on one occasion substituted (_Soph. El._, xxii., p. 178, b, 39). Διὰ τί does not figure among the categories, because it is reserved for the special analysis of οὐσία.

[241] As Grote has shown in his chapter on the Categories.

[242] _Eth. Nic._, I., iv., p. 1096, a, 24, where six are enumerated.

[243] _Metaph._, VII. _passim_.

[244] _Metaph._, VII., vi., p. 1031, b, 18 ff.

[245] Zeller, _Phil. d. Gr._, II., b, 309.

[246] For the general theory of Actuality and Possibility, see _Metaph._, VIII.

[247] Grant’s _Aristotle_, p. 176.

[248] _Metaph._, XII., viii., p. 1074, a, 36.

[249] Grant’s _Aristotle_, p. 176.

[250] ‘The rational attitude of a thinking mind towards the supernatural, whether in natural or revealed religion, is that of scepticism, as distinguished from belief on the one hand and atheism on the other.’—Mill’s _Essays on Religion_, p. 242.

[251] Grant’s _Aristotle_, p. 177.

[252] τὸ δ’ [252] τὸ δ’ εἶνα οὐκ οὐσία οὐδενί· οὐ γὰρ γένος τὸ ὄν.—_An. Post._, II., vii., p. 92, b, 13.

[253] _Metaph._, XIII., x.

[254] ‘Non pensar oltre lei [la terra] essere un corpo senza alma e vita et anche feccia tra le sustanze corporali.’ Giordano Bruno, _Cena de le Ceneri_, p. 130 (_Opere_, ed. Wagner). ‘Non dovete stimar ... che il corpo terreno sia vile e più degli altri ignobile.’—_De l’Infinito Universo e Mondi_, p. 54 (_ib._).

[255] This conjecture of Empedocles deserves more attention than it has as yet received. It illustrates once more the superior insight of the early thinkers as compared with Aristotle.

[256] _De Coelo_, II., 1.

[257] Lewes, quoted by Zeller, p. 524.

[258] So Trendelenburg, Brandis, Kampe, and apparently also Zeller. Grote speaks of it rather vaguely as an intelligence pervading the celestial sphere. Schwegler vacillates between the theological and the psychological explanation.

[259] The last chapter of the _Posterior Analytics_ sets forth a much more developed and definite theory of the process by which general ideas are formed. We think that it was composed at a considerably later date than the rest of the work, and probably after the treatise on the Soul, to which we should almost suspect an allusion in the word πάλαι (p. 100, a, 14), did philology permit. The reference can hardly be to the first part of the chapter (as is generally supposed); nor has the subject under discussion been touched on in any other part of the _Analytics_.

[260] Grote and Kampe think that Aristotle assigns a portion of aether as an extended, if not precisely a material, substratum to the rational soul; but the arguments of Zeller (p. 569) seem decisive against this view.

[261] _De Gen. An._, II., iii., p. 736, b, 15.

[262] _Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle_, p. 45.

[263] The word θεῖον, at any rate, does not mean ‘almost God,’ for Aristotle applies it to the intelligence of bees, and also to the heavenly bodies (_De Gen. An._, III., x., p. 761, a, 5; _De Coelo_, II., xii., p. 292, b, 32).

[264] Principal Caird.

[265] _Outlines_, Preface, p. viii.

[266] _Metaph._, VII., xiii., p. 1039, a, 4.

[267] _De An._, III., ii., p. 426, a, 20; 425, b, 25 ff. What Aristotle means by saying that the εἶναι of object and sensation is not the same, appears from a passage in his tract on Memory (p. 450, b, 20), where he employs the illustration of a portrait and its original, which are the same, although their εἶναι is different.

[268] _Metaph._, IV., v., _sub fin._

[269] _De An._, III., iv., _sub fin._

[270] _De An._, II., ii., p. 414, a, 20.

[271] _De An._, III., i., p. 425, a, 13.

[272] See Zeller pp. 602-606, where the whole subject is thoroughly discussed.

[273] _Anal. Pr._, I., i., _sub in._; ii., _sub in._; _Top._, I., viii., Bekker (in the Tauchnitz ed., vi.).

[274] _Anal. Pr._, I., xxiii., 41, a, 11 (in the Tauchnitz ed., xxii., 8).

[275] This point is well brought out in F. A. Lange’s _Logische Untersuchungen_.

[276] _Anal. Pr._, I., xxxi.; _Anal. Post._, II., v.

[277] _Metaph._, IV., iii., _sub in._

[278] _Anal. Post._, I., x.

[279] ‘Die Wissenschaft soll die Erscheinungen aus ihren Gründen erklären, welche näher in den allgemeinen Ursachen und Gesetzen zu suchen sind’ (Zeller, p. 203). ‘Induction is the method of proceeding from particular instances to general laws’ (Wallace, p. 13). ‘It seems to have been his [Aristotle’s] idea that after gathering facts up to a certain point, a flash of intuition would supervene, telling us “This is a law”’ (Grant, p. 68). _Apropos_ of the discussion whence this last passage is extracted, we may observe that Sir A. Grant is quite mistaken in saying that Aristotle ‘omits to provide for verification.’ Aristotle is, on the contrary, most anxious to show that his theories agree with all the known facts. See in particular his memorable declaration (_De Gen. An._, III., x., p. 760, b, 27), that facts are more to be trusted than reasonings.

The emphasis laid by Aristotle on concepts as distinguished from laws is noticed by J. H. v. Kirchmann, in his German translation of the _Metaphysics_, p. 13.

[280] _De An._, III., vi., _sub in._, taken together with _Anal. Post._, I., vi.

[281] _Anal. Post._, I., xxxiv.; II., ii.

[282] _Anal. Post._, II., xii., p. 95, a, 36.

[283] Wallace’s _Outlines_, p. 14.

[284] _Ibid._, Preface, pp. viii.-ix.

[285] As if Mill wrote exclusively for Oxford tutors, and as if other philosophers had not constantly elucidated their arguments by concrete examples. One does not see why the village matron should be more deserving of contempt than Aristotle’s Thebans and Phocians.

[286] That is, knowledge which has never been actualised.

[287] It is a mistake to translate νόησις, as the Germans do, by Anschauung. The Nous does not intuite ideas, but is converted into and consists of them.

[288] For Analogy, see _Top._, II., x., _sub in._; Disjunction, II., vi., _sub in._; Hypothetical Reasoning, II., x., p. 115, a, 15; Method of Differences, II., xi., _sub in._; Method of Residues, VI., xi., _sub in._; Concomitant Variations, II., x., p. 114, b, 37; V., viii., _sub in._; VI., vii., _sub in._ The Method of Agreement occurs _An. Prior._, II., xxvii., _sub fin._; and _An. Post._, II., xiii., p. 97, b, 7.

[289] It may possibly be urged that the fifth book of the _Nicomachean Ethics_ is of doubtful authenticity. Still the dilemma remains that Aristotle either omitted the most important of all moral questions from his ethics, or that he treated it in a miserably inadequate manner.

[290] _Eth. Nic._, V., iii.; _Rhet._, I., vi., p. 1362, b, 28; ix., p. 1366, b, 4.

[291] P. 753.

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

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Transcriber’s note:

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Other variations in hyphenation spelling, accents and punctuation remain unchanged.

Footnotes are placed at the end of each chapter.

Footnote 143: Zeller, 678-8. This appears erroneous.