Division III.—Aristotle

Section I. Aristotle the Beginner of a New Epoch

1. The age of Plato an age of ideals. When we speak of Plato as the ideal philosopher, we sometimes forget that the people of Greece, his own fellow-citizens especially, were pursuing ideals during the whole time in which he and his master flourished. Socrates was born in 468 B.C. Plato died 347 B.C. Pericles had begun to take part in public affairs one year before the birth of Socrates; Olynthus was taken by Philip of Macedon the very year in which Plato died. If one could find an expression for this period of 120 years, it would surely be this, that sculptors, painters, poets, politicians, cities, mobs, were all occupied with some ideal of beauty, wisdom, freedom, self-government, were striving to realise it, or setting it before themselves in some dream, or playing with it to bewilder their fellow-men. The philosopher, if he belonged to mankind, belonged as remarkably to his own time; he interpreted, methodised, justified its cravings, showed that they had a true foundation, and must have an ultimate satisfaction.

2. The Macedonian period. It is quite clear that we enter upon a different stage of the history when Philip appears in it. His name is a sign that the age of individual energy, when pregnant events were transacted in insignificant localities, when the lowest party contests were developing the most permanent and universal principles, had passed away. His name is a signal that an age has come of concentrated organising power, of successful assaults upon freedom, of grand conceptions, of extensive conquests, of what has well been called material sublimity. This age needed its own philosophical expounder and representative. One was provided for it, who was destined to exercise a mightier influence upon after times than upon his own.

3. Aristotle: his early years. In the year 367 a young man arrived in Athens who was born at Stagira in Chalcidice. His father was a physician at the court of Amyntas II., king of Macedonia. This youth had already been brought to that court, and had met there Philip, the son of the king, who was a few years younger than himself. But when he was seventeen years of age, no court attractions could keep him from the city in which Plato dwelt, and in which all wisdom was to be found. Perhaps he was almost ashamed of a country which Athenians still affected to consider semi-barbarous.

4. An Athenian student. The most scrupulous Athenian could have detected nothing barbarous in the young Aristotle, for a certain defect which was observable in his pronunciation¹ was owing to a lisp. Some difference might be seen between him and an ordinary student, in that he was more attentive to his person, setting off, it would appear, his short and slender figure with the advantages of a somewhat fastidious costume.² Small quick eyes, and a sarcastic curl about his lips, were noted as characteristics of him, perhaps the only important characteristics, till Plato, who appears to have been absent on his Sicilian journey, returned and found the most promising pupil who had ever appeared in his school, one whom he surnamed “the reader,” and whose philosophical devotion he found it necessary to check rather than excite.

5. The tutor of Alexander. Nevertheless Speusippus, not Aristotle, succeeded Plato in the Academy. Aristotle left Athens just at the time, as we have mentioned already, when the triumphs of Philip were becoming terrible to the liberties of Greece. Five years after he was at the court of Philip educating his son Alexander. It is evident that the influence of Aristotle upon Alexander’s mind must have been prodigious; that all his subsequent history depended upon the period which elapsed between his fourteenth and his seventeenth year. He came into the hands of his master a raw untamed youth, with impulses which no man could understand or govern. He left him a Greek prince, uniting the vigour and accomplishments of the republican period, with the schemes and capacities of his father, with a desire to conquer the world, and with an intellect that was able to effect what he desired. It is not necessary to inquire whether the particular projects of Alexander were inspired or favoured by Aristotle. Even if they were discouraged, it would not be less true that the direction of mind which made the conception or the achievement of them possible, was received from the teacher by one who, without this culture, might have aspired no higher than to be a victor in one of those Olympic contests from which a not very remote ancestor had been excluded.

6. His later life. Alexander bestowed upon his master the only reward for these precious gifts which he really prized: he enabled him to make his history of animals a book which should be one of instruction and wonder to all after generations—not least to that of Cuvier and Owen. Every nation which he conquered enriched Aristotle with some new and more valuable facts. It was in Athens that Aristotle husbanded and meditated upon these treasures. There all his great works were written. There he gathered about him a circle of devoted pupils, who listened to his more popular and his more systematic instruction; there he commented upon his predecessors, corresponded with Alexander, endured the misunderstandings of him and his court, suffered domestic sorrows, which he felt as a man, and which give us a personal interest in him; finally underwent the popular charge of impiety, which had caused the banishment of Anaxagoras and the death of Socrates. On this charge Aristotle was summoned before the Areopagus; he declined to appear, and was condemned to death. He retired to Chalcis, and died there in 322 B.C.

Section II. Relation of Aristotle to Plato

1. The Dialogue and the Treatise. A student passing from the works of Plato to those of Aristotle is struck first of all with the entire absence of that dramatic form and that dramatic feeling with which he has become familiar. The living human beings with whom he has conversed have passed away. Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias, are no longer lounging upon their couches amidst groups of admiring pupils; we have no walks along the wall of the city, no readings besides the Ilissus, no lively symposia giving occasion to high discourses about love, no Critias recalling the stories he had heard in the days of his youth, before he became a tyrant, of ancient and glorious republics; above all, no Socrates forming a centre to these various groups, while yet he stands out clear and distinct in his individual character, showing that the most subtle of dialecticians may be the most thoroughly humorous and humane of men. Some little sorrow for the loss of so many clear and beautiful pictures will be felt perhaps by every one. But by far the greater portion of readers will believe that they have an ample compensation in the precision and philosophical dignity of the treatise for the richness and variety of the dialogue. To hear solemn questions treated solemnly; to hear opinions calmly discussed without the interruption of personalities; above all, to have a profound and considerate judge, able, and not unwilling, to pronounce a positive decision upon the evidence before him; this they think a great advantage, and this, and far more than this, they find in Aristotle.

2. Was Aristotle more practical than his master? Still we are of opinion that a person who is able to render justice to the method of the master, will, on the whole, be the most likely to appreciate the disciple; at all events we shall not understand either well if we content ourselves with a vague notion that one was a consummate artist, the other a profound practical philosopher. That Plato did not adopt his dialogue form for any artistical purpose, but simply because it was necessary for the development of his idea of science, we have contended already. And we feel it equally necessary, in order that we may claim for Aristotle the true and very noble position which of right belongs to him, not to let it be supposed that his pretensions to be either practical or profound rest upon his want of those qualities, and his abandonment of that method, by which Plato is distinguished. In common parlance we are wont to consider those most practical whose studies are most connected with real, living, passing questions. Now it was the actual opposition of Sophists, which drove Socrates and Plato to seek for principles not yet recognised, lest they should lose those which they had. Aristotle had the advantage of being able calmly to examine sophistical arguments, because it was the hour in the school for that particular subject to be lectured upon. It was a question of life and death in Plato’s day, whether we have something permanent to rest on or not; for men in every town of Greece were abusing the name of Heraclitus in support of the doctrine of a perpetual flux. Aristotle could label this question physical or metaphysical, and patiently balance it against some opposite theory. The Parmenideans forced Plato to investigate the nature and conditions of science, for they threatened it with a hopeless stationariness. Aristotle is under no such alarm; he has merely to make out a system of analytics. It was because the body of Socrates was about to pass through death, that he was led to consider the meaning, and nature, and enduring properties of the soul. Aristotle begins his treatise on the same subject, with inquiring whether it is to be considered in reference to any particular person at all or abstractedly, and whether we are to speak of it physically or dialectically. Without determining which of the two courses we have indicated is the best, we think it must be a violence upon ordinary usage to say that the latter is the more practical.

3. or more profound? Neither is the quality of depth precisely that one which we conceive ought to be predicated of Aristotle, when it is our object to contrast him with his predecessor. It was the necessary consequence of Plato’s situation, and of the task which had been committed to him, that he was always seeking for principles. The most simple every-day facts puzzled him; nothing that human beings were interested in was beneath his attention: but then it was the meaning of these things, the truth implied in them, which he was continually inquiring after. He found the commonest word that men speak, the commonest act that men do, unintelligible, except by the light which comes from another region than that in which they are habitually dwelling. Of this feeling there are no traces in Aristotle. To collect all possible facts, to arrange and classify them, was his ambition, and perhaps his appointed function: no one is less tempted to suspect any deep meaning in facts, or to grope after it. In like manner, to get words pressed and settled into a definition is his highest aim: the thought that there is a life in words, that they are connected with the life in us, and may lead at all to the interpretation of its marvels, never was admitted into his mind, or at least never tarried there. In this disposition there may be a comfort and an advantage; but it certainly is not that upon which persons who are careful in the use of language would bestow the epithet “profound.”

4. How far Aristotle reverenced Socrates. Another prejudice in reference to these great men it is necessary to remove, or we shall not understand their relative positions. It is often fancied—and Aristotle seems not altogether anxious to do away the impression—that Plato’s disciple forsook him when he forsook his master; that the later philosophy is in some important respects a return to the simple faith of Socrates. If what we have just said be correct, this notion must be not only wide of the truth, but in direct contradiction to it. The personality of Plato was precisely that quality of his mind and of his writings which he had inherited from Socrates. That he so seldom deviated into abstractions,—that he preserved so strongly the feeling, “we are actual men, wrestling against evil tendencies within, and evil powers without, capable of being educated, and of educating each other into a longing after, and perception of, the perfect Goodness and Truth:” this he owed to Socrates. His own especial work was to connect this personal struggle with the orderly development of principles. It was precisely then with the Socrates in Plato that Aristotle was incapable of feeling sympathy. That he had a general reverence for his good sense, that he recognised him as the useful and victorious opposer of what was mischievous and unphilosophical, and that he sincerely believed him not to have held certain offensive opinions of his disciple: this we can easily imagine. But that he the least admired the Socratic method, or that all his wisdom could avail to teach him into what conclusions that method must necessarily lead one who habitually followed it, we cannot believe.

5. Feelings of Aristotle towards Plato. Though these remarks seem for a moment derogatory to the fame of this wonderful man, they will be found upon reflection to relieve his character from some unjust imputations, to set his actual merits in a clearer light, and to explain the kind of influence which he has exerted, and must always exert, over mankind. There are passages in his works which, in the opinion of over-watchful and sensitive critics, indicate a personal jealousy and dislike of Plato. They remark that he does not introduce his comments upon him in a manly, philosophical spirit, but generally with some of those affected phrases of reluctance which display often more than the strongest vituperation the ill-will that is lurking within. Possibly far less meaning would have been seen in these passages, if the gossiping anecdote-mongers of later Greece had not illustrated them by stories of dissensions between the master and the pupil, which, though obviously derived from a very vulgar invention, or a memory generally treacherous, because always trivial, still unconsciously influence our minds when we have once heard them, and prevent us from fairly looking at the evidence which gives them their only plausibility. Separated from these stories, the quotations we think prove no more than that Aristotle felt a certain irritation and displeasure when he perceived there was something in the words of Plato which his large intellect and immense information did not enable him to comprehend. To be continually haunted with a consciousness of this kind, “In all definable qualities I am equal, nay superior to my predecessor; I have reduced subjects into far greater order, I analyse far more perfectly, I have a far greater store of facts at my command; and yet there is in him something quite undefinable, which seems to make an incredible difference between us:” this may, no doubt, have been very vexatious even to an honest and great mind. For it was not merely the personal humiliation of such a reflection which would be grievous to him, it would jar against his strongest conviction that nothing ought to be incapable of definition, and that whatsoever does defy it can scarcely be of any great worth. While, then, it is no doubt possible that petty quarrels may have been stirred up between two such men by admirers and flatterers, who were equally incapable of understanding either, we have no need of that supposition to account for the sneers and taunts (if such they must be called) which now and then displease us in Aristotle.

6. The Dialectics of Plato: why different to him and to his disciples. In conformity with these remarks, it will not be difficult to show wherein the peculiarity of the Stagirite philosophy consisted; how it grew out of the Platonic, how far they are contradictory, how far one occupies a space which the other had left void. We have seen by what steps Plato was led into his high estimate of dialectics. He watched his master maintaining a safe moral position against the attacks of the sophists. To assert realities against appearances and counterfeits was his single aim. Keeping this aim steadily before him, he almost unconsciously wrought out a method entirely different from that of previous philosophers. As Plato reflected upon the end which Socrates had proposed to himself, he perceived the full practical meaning of that truth which in terms had been asserted by Xenophanes and others,—that Being is the object of all our inquiries. He saw at the same time how necessary it was to connect the end with the method; for till that method had been practised, Being had been a word, a notion, a negation,—not an object to be really beheld and striven after. Hence the immense importance of bringing that method forward; of presenting it substantively, as it were, to his pupils; not allowing them merely to contemplate it as leading to certain results, but as the safe and universal means of arriving at any results. We have alluded to a class of dialogues having this purpose; and these, or something answering to them (approaching, it is possible, the nature of ordinary exposition, though we can scarcely believe that Plato ever abandoned the dialogue as his vehicle of instruction), must have been the peculiar study of the Academy, as such, and expressly of the more advanced disciples.³ Hence there will have grown up among these pupils a feeling respecting dialectics which Plato would have been anxious to discourage, and yet which his own works continually tended to foster. Seeing it used as a key to unlock the secrets of social life, of moral life, of physical life, and seeing likewise the pains which their master took that they should examine the wards of the key, it was most natural that they should think a much fuller and more systematic development of this all-important science was desirable, and even necessary. It would occur to them that there was something like confusion and irregularity in the proceedings of their great teacher. Had he not strangely mixed together inquiries respecting the grounds of morality with statements respecting the nature of science? Surely it would have been much better, much more orderly, that these questions should have been kept distinct, and referred to particular heads. And were there not also some indications of narrowness in Plato, which a more accurate habit of distinction would have delivered him from? Ambition of greater arrangement and system. Had not his aversion to some of the usual abuses of rhetoric led him to undervalue the whole art, when it was undoubtedly capable, like every other, of being reduced to strict laws, and must deserve to be contemplated without any reference to its accidental results? The same might be said of his doctrine respecting poetry; the same, still more strongly, of his ill-concealed indifference to physical speculations. If all these subjects could be directly looked at in themselves as distinct branches of human culture, how much increase of knowledge might be expected in each, how much increase of clearness respecting the capacities and limitations of the human intellect!

7. Aristotle satisfies this desire. Such thoughts, we suppose, may have been at work in the minds of many who frequented the school of Plato. In few they will have borne any fruit, in most of these few the unripe or blighted fruit of some feeble theories, professing to universalise the system of Plato, really proving that their authors knew nothing either of Plato or of themselves. But there was one who was able to make the thoughts of the rest intelligible. To him Platonism will have appeared a needful preparation for a complete and circular philosophy. Its unsystematic character, its imaginative flights, its disregard of certain provinces of thought, will have seemed to him indications of rudeness and infancy. And he will have conceived the thought of assigning to each study its true position, that one which Plato declared and proved to be so important, occupying the first place, being exhibited in its full proportions, and determining the character and treatment of the rest. Dialectics, then, was in some sense the centre of both philosophies. Nor would it be correct to say that Aristotle consciously altered the signification which the word dialectics had borne in the discourses of his predecessor. He only wished to give the study more distinctness and prominence, to exhibit the processes and operations of which it treated apart from any particular applications and results. But in fulfilling this desire, the character of the pursuit became inevitably changed. The feeling of Plato was, There are certain objects presented to my mind; they may be sensible objects, as trees; they may be objects for the understanding merely, as names; but objects they are still—things thrown in my way; and I must know what they mean, I must find out the truth of them. For this end I must have dialectics. The object has vanished from before the eyes and mind of Aristotle; he has begun to devote the whole energy of his mind to the contemplation of dialectics in themselves. What is the consequence? The sense of requiring them as the means of escape from the impositions which intercept our views of things as they are, becomes more and more weakened, till at last it disappears altogether. In doing which he necessarily abandons the Platonical principle. That principle which it had been the business of Plato’s life to assert against Protagoras and his school, that the mind is not its own standard, that the aspects under which objects present themselves to us do not constitute our knowledge of them, but that we may arrive at an acquaintance with them as they are in themselves; this principle, which had given his dialectics all their meaning, is no longer felt with any potency by his disciple. On the contrary, it is precisely the aspects under which we see and judge of things that he proposes to investigate. He wants to know what are the rules and conditions under which the mind, by its own constitution, considers and discourses. He makes the mind a centre, referring everything to itself, just as those did with whom Plato contended. But he differed from them in this, that their intention was knavish, his most honest. They set up the doctrine that all things are merely as they seem to us, for the purpose of unsettling all faith, and proving the judgment of each individual to be a lawful standard. He sought to convince men that all is not unstable and fluctuating, by showing them that there is a fixed rule to which human judgments must conform, which limits the exercises of individual taste and caprice, which tests and reduces to order those appearances which the Sophist pretended were infinite.

8. The dialectics of realities and affirmations. From this statement it will be easily apparent that the definition of dialectics in Plato and Aristotle may be almost the same, and yet that the whole scope and object of the science indicated by this common definition will be different. One as much as the other could say, Dialectics is that science which discovers the difference between the false and the true. But the false in Plato is the semblance which any object presents to the sensualised mind; the true, the very substance and meaning of that object. The false in Aristotle is a wrong affirmation concerning any matter whereof the mind takes cognizance; the true, a right affirmation concerning the same matter. Hence the dialectic of the one treats of the way whereby we obtain to a clear and vital perception of things; the dialectic of the other treats of the way in which we discourse of things. Words to the one are the means whereby we ascend to an apprehension of realities of which there are no sensible exponents. Words to the other are the formulas wherein we set forth our notions and judgments. The one desires to ascertain of what hidden meaning the word is an index; the other desires to prevent the word from transgressing certain boundaries which he has fixed for it. Hence it happened that the sense and leading maxim of Plato’s philosophy became not only more distasteful, but positively more unintelligible to his wisest disciple, than to many who had never studied in the Academy, or who had set themselves in direct opposition to it. When Aristotle had matured his system of dialectics, there was something in it so perfect and satisfactory, that he could not even dream of anything lying out of its circle, and incapable of being brought under its rules. He felt that he had discovered all the forms under which it is possible to set down any proposition in words, and what there could be besides this, what opening there could be for another region entirely out of the government of these forms, he had no conception. At any rate, if there were such a one, it must be a vague, uninhabited world. To suppose it peopled with other, and those most real and distinct forms, was the extravagance of philosophical delirium. Accordingly, when he speaks of the doctrine of substantial ideas—of ideas, that is to say, which are the grounds of all our forms of thought, and consequently cannot be subject to them—he is reduced to the strange, and for so consummate a logician, most disagreeable necessity of begging the whole question, of arguing that, since these ideas ought to be included under some of the ascertained conditions of logic, and by the hypothesis are not included under any, they must be fictitious.

9. The worth of both philosophies. As we proceed we shall have occasion to notice how this primary difference affected the views of these philosophers upon all questions which came under their notice. At present we speak of it in order to show that the methods having a perfectly distinct object, do not of necessity interfere with each other; that the Platonic doctrine is not absurd, because Aristotle could find no place for it in his system; that the labours of Aristotle are not useless or ill-directed, because they do not supply, as he fancied they did, any satisfaction to the inquiries which Plato had awakened.

Section III. The Logical Treatises of Aristotle

1. The Aristotelian logic the key to his philosophy. Every orderly examination of Aristotle must then, we conceive, take its start from his treatises on logic. That these are not the most interesting of the works which he has bequeathed to the world we may easily admit; but, unless something is understood of their nature and purpose, it is scarcely possible to understand the character, the value, and the necessary limitation of his opinions on ethics, on politics, on rhetoric, on poetry. We shall presently quote the opinion of an eminent writer on physical science, to prove that a just estimate of Aristotle’s labours in that department depends upon our knowledge of the importance which he attached to the forms of logic. And the settlement of the long-debated question which falls more within the province of this sketch, what precise meaning he attached to the word Metaphysics, or what portion of his thoughts his disciples referred to under that name, can, we think, be hoped for only from a previous examination of his dialectics.

2. Completeness of these treatises. In the Berlin edition of Aristotle, the Categories occupy the first place. Some doubt has been entertained respecting the genuineness of this treatise, which modern inquiries appear to have removed. It would in many cases afford a reasonable ground of suspicion against a work, that it exactly filled up a gap in a set of acknowledged works by the same author, so that with it they form a complete system of instruction upon the subject which they treat. But it is a set-off against this consideration, that roundness is the great characteristic of Aristotle; and that it is less hard to imagine how a perfect series of his logical writings can have come down to us, than to believe any pupil capable of supplying a void which he had left in it. The difficulty, too, of supposing one man to possess the full mastery of this subject indicated by the successive works which he has left, is diminished when we remember that the original conception of the study was not his but Zeno’s. How naturally that conception arose in a mind which had once entered into the great principle of Xenophanes and Parmenides, that the mind has laws of its own, and is independent of the appearances and determinations of the senses, we have explained already. What more than this discovery, and the application of it in confuting sensible conclusions, may be owing to Zeno, we do not know. It is not impossible that some of the Sophists, while they turned the art to the worst purposes, may have done something for the refinement and improvement of it. In the school of Euclides, not only the practice, but the principles of logic must have been studied and elucidated. With these materials to work upon, it seems nowise incredible that one trained in the school of Plato to the greatest subtlety and precision of thought, and possessing in himself a comprehension and a diligence quite unparalleled, should have been able to produce a design and an edifice which after ages have found it scarcely possible to alter or amend. He had not to raise a science from its foundations; but lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit, may, perhaps, be said of him with as strict truth as of almost any architect that the world has seen.

3. The Categories: object of the work. Now the work on the Categories seems to be a fitting vestibule to this building. On entering it, we feel at once that the purpose to which it is consecrated is altogether different from that which Plato has been teaching us to regard as all-important, and we feel that it is a true purpose still. There is a way of penetrating into the nature and essence of things, whether those which present an outward image to my senses, or those, equally real, which merely utter themselves to my mind. With this way Aristotle does not concern himself. But it is equally certain that our mind forms notions and conceptions about the things belonging to both these kinds which it contemplates, and it may be that these conceptions themselves are subject to certain rules. They may be defined and classified; there may be a general set of conceptions to which all particular conceptions will refer themselves. This Aristotle affirms to be the case. Under the ten notions of Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Time, Place, Position, Possession, Action, Passion, he says you may reduce all your notions. Now a Platonist is very likely to ask, “But what do these words Substance, Quantity, &c. themselves signify?” “How do I know what Substance is, better than I know what a man or a horse is?” “Quantity, better than I know what three cubits long is?” And these are questions which, as we shall find hereafter, had need to be asked, and were asked with effect and advantage when the Aristotelian province of thought had endeavoured to bring all other provinces within it. But for any further purpose than for destroying this pretension they are impertinent. When I study an actual man, or an actual horse, the substance is doubtless the x or unknown quantity which I am inquiring after; to assume that I know it, is to stop all investigation. But I understand the name substance, as well as I understand the name man or horse. And who told you that, because there is a science of things, there is not a science of names? that there are not laws of dependence and affinity among them? and that conformity or nonconformity to these laws is not exactly what we mean by coherent or incoherent discourse? There is no alternative between the assertion, that the desire so deeply implanted in us of arrangement and classification, is a mere disease, or the belief that it arises from the sense of certain limitations and conditions to which our minds themselves are subject, and is another name for the wish to understand what they are.

4. Such a work necessary. The rules of grammar, the terminology of every art and science, the very attempt to be intelligible, presume these. And there is no safety from the efforts of men to invent divisions and schemes of thought, no safety for the great principles and laws, which these dividers and schemers are continually narrowing and stifling, but in the clear and steady perception of certain necessary boundaries not imposed upon us by our fellow-men, but by the nature of our own understandings. Let, then, the reader carefully consider this work on the Categories. Let him ask himself whether it has not the effect of clearing his mind, and that in no ordinary degree, respecting his own modes of speech; whether it does not lead him to feel, more than he did before, that his words, winged though they be, can take no chance flight, but must move along an appointed preordained path; and, therefore, whether there be not a witness in himself that Aristotle has a distinct and reasonable end of his own, which it is very much for our interest to be acquainted with.

5. Logic based on facts. From the investigation of these general forms under which we reduce all the notions that enter our minds, he proceeds in his treatise Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας, to inquire respecting the mode of our affirmations and denials. In this treatise he developes the nature and limitations of propositions, the meaning of contraries and contradictories, the force of affirmations and denials, in impossible, contingent, and necessary matter. We have no excuse for dwelling on works of a merely formal character, but we mention them for the purpose of pressing the important remark of Archbishop Whateley on our readers, that the two books of Ἀναλυτικὰ Πρότερα develope the syllogistic principle and process. Aristotle is not the mere inventor of an art, but the masterly expounder of the facts upon which that art rests, and but for which it would have no meaning. He does not teach us how to make propositions, but what propositions are, and necessarily must be, according to the conditions of the human intellect.

He does not tell us how to make syllogisms, but how we do syllogise, when we do not violate the laws of our mind as much as we should violate the laws of our body, if we tried to walk upon our heads instead of upon our feet.

6. The later analytics. But Aristotle perceived that this analysis of our mental operations was not sufficient. He had told us how we discourse, but he had not told us how we know. Are these forms of logic themselves knowledge? Is the syllogistic demonstration the same thing with science? Or, is one kind of it science? Or, are the results of it science? Or, are there certain premises assumed in it which also do or may belong to science? What are these? how do we get at them? Such are the important inquiries which occupy Aristotle in his Ἀναλυτικὰ Ὕστερα. We shall endeavour to seize a few of those points in the investigation which will best enable the reader to estimate the character of Aristotle’s mind, and to see how he stands related as well to his great master, as to the expounder of the inductive philosophy.

7. The treatise opens thus:—Πᾶσα διδασκαλία καὶ πᾶσα μάθησις διανοητικὴ ἐκ προϋπαρχούσης γίνεται γνώσεως· φανερὸν δὲ τοῦτο θεωροῦσιν ἐπὶ πασῶν· αἵ τε γὰρ μαθηματικαὶ τῶν ἐπιστημῶν διὰ τούτου τοῦ τρόπου παραγίνονται καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἑκάστη τεχνῶν· ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ περὶ τοὺς λόγους οἵ τε διὰ συλλογισμῶν καὶ οἱ δι᾿ ἐπαγωγῆς· ἀμφότεροι γὰρ διὰ προγινωσκομένων ποιοῦνται τὴν διδασκαλίαν, οἱ μὲν λαμβάνοντες ὡς παρὰ ξυνιέντων, οἱ δὲ δεικνύντες τὸ καθόλου διὰ τοῦ δῆλον εἶναι τὸ καθ᾿ ἕκαστον· ὡς δ᾿ αὔτως καὶ οἱ Ῥητορικοὶ συμπείθουσιν· ἢ γὰρ διὰ παραδειγμάτων ὅ ἐστι ἐπαγωγὴ ἢ δι᾿ ἐνθυμημάτων ὅπερ ἐστὶ συλλογισμός. There are two very important words in the opening clause of this sentence which we imagine were carefully distinguished in the school from which Aristotle came, διδασκαλία and μάθησις. We feel confident, also, that the last being, by the force of its name, the method of learning and acquisition, would have uniformly taken precedence of the other, which points to the communication of knowledge. That the order is here changed, that διδασκαλία is put foremost as if it included the other within itself, is a very significant circumstance, which is an explanation of much that follows. How Plato and Aristotle differed in their views of mathematics. Plato, it is well known, had a profound reverence for mathematics. He was wont to say, “Let no man undisciplined in geometry enter the halls of philosophy.” Now we cannot account for this admiration unless we suppose him to have perceived in the mathematical process something akin to his own method. But this resemblance certainly does not lie in that which we are wont to call the mathematical demonstration, it does not lie in the machinery of axioms, definitions, hypotheses, propositions. This machinery, valuable as it is, has scarcely a Socratic element in it. What remains? Plato, we conceive, would have answered, Exactly that which is the essence of mathematics, exactly the μάθησις. For this demonstration is but the διδασκαλία, a necessary and inseparable accident of the science, but implying the presence of something else and unmeaning without it. The μάθησις is the process whereby in any particular triangle I arrive at this as one of the laws which belong to it as a triangle, that its three angles are equal to two right angles; the διδασκαλία is the formal verbal enunciation of that law, and the confirmation of it by certain deductions from previously admitted premises. In this sense mathematics would seem to him not indeed the science, but the best preparation for it, because it recognises certain permanent forms and principles existing in visible objects, which we are capable of entering into and discovering. Now Aristotle, as we have often hinted, perceives only the forms and laws of our mind. That, consequently, which was the subordinate and accessory part of mathematics in the judgment of his master, became in his judgment the whole. He looks upon mathematics simply in reference to the demonstrations; the characteristic of mathematics is that it deals with necessary matter. If you ask why necessary, the only answer you can get is, that it starts ultimately from some self-evident propositions. So that, after all, the proposition, a mode of our own mind, becomes the ultimate ground of all things. Or if you will find out a Hercules’ pillar beyond these, you have the Categories. Pent within these limits, it becomes difficult to grasp the meaning of science. Aristotle feels the difficulty, and with his usual honesty does not evade it. Is knowledge the result of syllogism? He acknowledges that it may puzzle us to tell whether science is only that which we obtain after a series of satisfactory syllogisms, or whether the premises assumed in those syllogisms must not of themselves be entitled to the same character. And he can only say, that we must deal fairly with facts, and that what we are bound to assume as known, we do actually in some sort know. Ultimate knowledge, then, as well as primary knowledge, the most perfect truth which the philosopher can attain, as well as the point from which he starts, is still a proposition. All knowledge seems to be included under the two forms,—knowledge that it is so; knowledge why it is so. Neither of these can, of course, include the knowledge at which Plato is aiming, knowledge which is correlative with Being—a knowledge not about things, or persons, but of them.

8. Sensible perception: is it knowledge? But if these forms of our mind are the ground of our knowledge, we cannot at once arrive at them. What are the steps? Here comes in the Aristotelian doctrine about sensible objects. Our perception of these is not strictly to be called knowledge; that word, whether used about premises or conclusions, the data of a syllogism or its results, has still reference to what is universal. Our sensible apprehensions refer only to particulars, to individuals. But from these, which are the most evident to us, we come to the more general by a process of induction. What this induction is, and how entirely it differs from that process which bears the same name in the writings of Bacon, the reader will perceive the more he studies the different writings of Aristotle. He will find, first, that the sensible phenomenon is taken for granted as a safe starting-point. That phenomena are not principles, Aristotle believed as strongly as we could. But to suspect phenomena, to suppose that they need sifting and probing in order that we may know what the fact is which they denote, this is no part of his system. The sensible impression was to him satisfactory, not indeed to rest in, but as a true beginning; all the difference between those who acquiesce in it and the most consummate philosopher, lay in the use which the latter made of his power of generalising and syllogising. The Aristotelian induction. It is in this way that Aristotle has become the parent of all the modern schools of sensible philosophy, which schools have, nevertheless, drawn their very best and most convincing arguments from the errors into which Aristotle and the Aristotelians were led by the adoption of their own hypothesis. The first book of Locke may be justly said to be an elaborate and satisfactory exposure of the notions into which the Stagirite school is driven, by its determination to recognise no foundation of truth but sense and experience. They were too learned and thoughtful not to perceive that universal forms are in some way or other demanded by the mind; and because they would not acknowledge them as the grounds of our mind, they were forced to seek for them in the mind, and thus to conceive them in the shape of propositions. Hence the fancy of an innate notion that whatever is, is; that the whole is greater than its part, &c.; a fancy which Mr. Locke has confuted amidst such shouts of triumph from his admirers, while he was, in fact, conspiring with Aristotle to disparage the principle which delivers us from such fallacies. But we are anticipating a future page of our sketch.

9. The Topics. These later analytics deal, it will be seen, entirely with demonstrative reasoning. The Topics, a much longer work, refer wholly to probable reasoning. On this subject Aristotle, it seems to us, is much more at home than on the other. We have intimated our suspicion that he never did possess or could possess the idea of Science. It lay altogether out of his province; when he tried to grapple with it he necessarily brought it within conditions and forms which robbed it of its very essence. But no one ever did so much as he to give a scientific form and semblance to those subjects which are by their nature not scientific. No one ever did so much to give our thoughts precision and clearness respecting all the wavering and fluctuating matters that fall within the domain of opinion and of ordinary conduct. When we look at the Topics, we are brought to confess (not without a certain reluctance) that there is no method of persuasion or human discourse so loose and random but that it may be subjected to analysis, and shown to involve certain inevitable limitations. Undoubtedly there is some justification for our discontent with these resolute reductions of all our thoughts and arguments to a system; we feel that the vital power is not there; Probable reasoning reduced to rules. that what really brings men into consent with either a falsehood or a truth, the energy and conviction of him who utters it is taken no account of, and that the habit of contemplating arguments without reference either to the truth of that which they are meant to establish, or to the moral influence which they exert, is somewhat hardening and deadening to the mind. But we shall find that the work of a thorough master in this line, like Aristotle, will, on the whole, produce a good effect. He so entirely understands himself and what he is able to do, that we cannot commit the mistake which inferior writers often draw us into, of fancying that nothing is wanted but what he tells us. His exquisite dissections teach us what more blundering dissectors might not; that there is something which cannot be dissected. To understand Aristotle rightly, the Topics should be read together with the three books on Rhetoric. We cannot speak of that work now, because so much of the moral and political wisdom of Aristotle is presumed in it. Nevertheless it is closely connected with this work on probable arguments. The Topics are to it what the six books of Euclid are to a treatise on practical mechanics. Now, though it may seem strange to talk of a geometry expressly for a rhetorician, and though we have already shown in what sense geometry was very alien from the habits of Aristotle’s mind, yet we cannot help seeing that just so far as a person who has the faculty of persuasion can be taught that his is not a mere craft, but has maxims and laws to govern it, he will become at any rate less mischievous, and may become a sincere, true-minded man. In another point of view the Topics give that roundness and completeness to the logical system of Aristotle which we said that he evidently desired, and had in so remarkable a manner realised.