Division III.—Aristotle

Section I. Aristotle the Beginner of a New Epoch

1. When we call Plato the ideal philosopher, we forget that the Greek people, his fellow-citizens especially, were pursuing ideals the whole time he and his master lived. Socrates was born in 468 B.C. and Plato died in 347 B.C. Pericles entered public life a year before Socrates was born, and Philip of Macedon took Olynthus the year Plato died. If one expression must stand for these 120 years, it is this: sculptors, painters, poets, politicians, cities and mobs were all occupied with some ideal of beauty, wisdom, freedom or self-government. They were striving to realise it, dreaming of it, or playing with it to bewilder others. The philosopher belonged to mankind, but he belonged just as remarkably to his own time. He interpreted, ordered and justified its cravings, and showed that they had a true foundation and must have an ultimate satisfaction.

2. A different stage of history clearly begins when Philip appears. His name signals that the age of individual energy had passed. In that age, weighty events took place in insignificant localities, and the pettiest party contests developed the most lasting and universal principles. His name marks the arrival of an age of concentrated organising power, of successful assaults on freedom, of grand conceptions and wide conquests, of what has well been called material sublimity. This age needed its own philosophical expounder and representative. One was provided, who was destined to influence later times more than his own.

3. In 367 a young man arrived in Athens who had been born at Stagira in Chalcidice. His father was a physician at the court of Amyntas II., king of Macedonia. The youth had been brought to that court and had met Philip, the king’s son, who was a few years younger. But at seventeen no court attraction could keep him from the city where Plato lived and where all wisdom was to be found. Perhaps he was almost ashamed of a country that Athenians still affected to think semi-barbarous.

4. No scrupulous Athenian could have found anything barbarous in the young Aristotle. A defect in his pronunciation was only a lisp. He differed from the ordinary student in taking more care of his person: he set off his short, slender figure with somewhat fastidious dress, and, it is reported, with rings and a fashionable haircut. Small quick eyes and a sarcastic curl of the lips were noted as his characteristics, perhaps the only important ones, until Plato returned from his Sicilian journey, during which he seems to have been absent. Plato found the most promising pupil his school had ever had, and surnamed him “the reader.” He found it necessary to check this pupil’s philosophical devotion rather than excite it.

5. Even so, Speusippus, not Aristotle, succeeded Plato in the Academy. Aristotle left Athens just when Philip’s triumphs were becoming terrible to the liberties of Greece. Five years later he was at Philip’s court, educating his son Alexander. His influence on Alexander’s mind must have been prodigious, and Alexander’s whole later history depended on the years between his fourteenth and seventeenth. He came to his master a raw, untamed youth, with impulses no one could understand or govern. He left as a Greek prince who united the vigour and accomplishments of the republican period with his father’s schemes and capacities, a desire to conquer the world, and an intellect able to achieve it. We need not ask whether Aristotle inspired or favoured Alexander’s particular projects. Even if he discouraged them, the direction of mind that made them conceivable and achievable came from the teacher. Without this culture, Alexander might have aspired to no more than victory in one of those Olympic contests from which a not very remote ancestor had been excluded.

6. Alexander gave his master the one reward he really prized. He enabled him to make his history of animals a book of instruction and wonder for all later generations, Cuvier and Owen among them. Every nation Alexander conquered enriched Aristotle with new and more valuable facts. Aristotle stored up and meditated on these treasures in Athens, where all his great works were written. There he gathered a circle of devoted pupils who heard both his more popular and his more systematic teaching. There he commented on his predecessors, corresponded with Alexander, and endured the misunderstandings of Alexander and his court. He suffered domestic sorrows, which he felt as a man and which give us a personal interest in him. Finally he underwent the popular charge of impiety, which had banished Anaxagoras and killed Socrates. Summoned before the Areopagus on this charge, 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. A student who passes from Plato to Aristotle is struck first by the complete absence of the dramatic form and feeling he has grown used to. The living people he conversed with are gone. Protagoras, Prodicus, and Hippias no longer lounge on their couches among admiring pupils. There are no walks along the city wall, no readings beside the Ilissus, no lively symposia leading to high talk about love, no Critias recalling the tales of ancient and glorious republics that he heard in his youth before he became a tyrant. Above all there is no Socrates at the centre of these groups, standing out in his own character and showing that the subtlest of dialecticians may be the most humorous and humane of men. Everyone will feel some sorrow at losing so many beautiful pictures. But most readers will think the precision and philosophical dignity of the treatise ample compensation for the richness of the dialogue. They like to hear solemn questions treated solemnly and opinions discussed calmly, without personalities. Above all they like a profound and considerate judge who is willing to pronounce a positive decision on the evidence. They count this a great advantage, and they find it, and more, in Aristotle.

2. Still, I think the person who can do justice to the master’s method will be the best judge of the disciple. We will understand neither well if we settle for a vague notion that one was a consummate artist and the other a profound practical philosopher. I have already argued that Plato used the dialogue not for artistic purposes but because his idea of science required it. In the same way, to claim for Aristotle his true and noble position, we must not suppose that his claim to be practical or profound rests on lacking Plato’s qualities or abandoning Plato’s method. We call those studies most practical that are tied to real, living, passing questions. Yet it was the actual opposition of the Sophists that drove Socrates and Plato to seek principles not yet recognised, lest they lose those they had. Aristotle could examine sophistical arguments calmly, because it was the hour in the school for that subject. In Plato’s day it was a matter of life and death whether we have anything permanent to rest on, for men in every Greek town were abusing Heraclitus’s name to support a doctrine of perpetual flux. Aristotle could label the question physical or metaphysical and balance it patiently against an opposing theory. The Parmenideans forced Plato to investigate the nature and conditions of science, because they threatened it with hopeless stillness. Aristotle feels no such alarm; he has only to compose a system of analytics. Socrates, whose body was about to pass through death, was led to consider the nature and lasting properties of the soul. Aristotle opens his treatise on the soul by asking whether it is to be considered in relation to any particular person or in the abstract, and whether we should speak of it physically or dialectically. Without deciding which course is best, I think it would violate ordinary usage to call the latter the more practical.

3. Nor is depth quite the quality to attribute to Aristotle when we contrast him with his predecessor. Plato’s situation and task made him always seek principles. The simplest everyday facts puzzled him, and nothing that interested human beings was beneath his notice, but what he kept asking about was the meaning of these things, the truth implied in them. The commonest word and the commonest act were unintelligible to him except by a light from another region than the one we habitually live in. There is no trace of this feeling in Aristotle. His ambition, and perhaps his appointed function, was to collect every possible fact and arrange and classify it. No one is less tempted to suspect a deep meaning in facts, or to grope after one. Likewise his highest aim with words is to press and settle them into a definition. The thought that words have a life, connected with the life in us, and might help interpret its marvels, never entered his mind, or at least never stayed there. This disposition may bring comfort and advantage, but people careful with language would not call it “profound.”

4. Another prejudice must be removed if we are to understand their relative positions. It is often fancied, and Aristotle seems not anxious to correct the impression, that Plato’s disciple forsook him as Plato had forsaken his master, and that the later philosophy is in some respects a return to the simple faith of Socrates. If what I have said is right, this notion is not merely wide of the truth but the opposite of it. Plato’s personality was exactly the quality of mind and writing that he inherited from Socrates. He seldom drifted into abstractions, and he kept the strong feeling that “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.” He owed this to Socrates. His own work was to connect this personal struggle with the orderly development of principles. It was just with the Socrates in Plato that Aristotle could not sympathise. I can easily imagine that he had a general respect for Socrates’s good sense, that he recognised him as the useful and victorious opponent of what was mischievous and unphilosophical, and that he sincerely believed Socrates did not hold certain offensive opinions of his disciple. But I cannot believe that he in the least admired the Socratic method, or that all his wisdom could teach him where that method must lead anyone who habitually followed it.

5. These remarks may seem for a moment to disparage this wonderful man, but on reflection they relieve his character of some unjust charges, set his real merits in a clearer light, and explain the kind of influence he has had and always will have. Some over-watchful, sensitive critics find in his works passages showing personal jealousy and dislike of Plato. They say he does not comment on Plato in a manly, philosophical spirit, but usually with affected phrases of reluctance, which betray hidden ill-will more than strong abuse would. Perhaps these passages would have seemed far less meaningful if the gossiping anecdote-mongers of later Greece had not illustrated them with stories of quarrels between master and pupil. These stories plainly come from vulgar invention or a trivial, treacherous memory, yet once heard they influence us unawares and keep us from looking fairly at the evidence that gives them their only plausibility. Apart from the stories, the quotations prove only that Aristotle felt irritation and displeasure on perceiving something in Plato’s words that his large intellect and immense information could not grasp. Imagine being haunted by this thought: “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.” That could well vex even an honest and great mind. It would be not only a personal humiliation but a jar against his strongest conviction, that nothing ought to be incapable of definition and that whatever defies it can scarcely be of great worth. So admirers and flatterers, equally unable to understand either man, may have stirred up petty quarrels between them. But we do not need that supposition to account for the sneers and taunts, if such they are, that now and then displease us in Aristotle.

6. Given all this, it is not hard to show what was peculiar to the Stagirite’s philosophy: how it grew out of Plato’s, how far they contradict each other, and how far one fills a space the other left empty. We have seen how Plato came to his high estimate of dialectics. He watched his master hold a safe moral position against the Sophists’ attacks. To assert realities against appearances and counterfeits was his single aim, and keeping it steadily in view he almost unconsciously worked out a method entirely different from earlier philosophers’. Reflecting on Socrates’s end, he saw the full practical meaning of what Xenophanes and others had asserted in terms, that Being is the object of all our inquiries. He saw also that the end must be joined to the method, since until the method was practised, Being had been a word, a notion, a negation, not an object really to be beheld and striven after. Hence it was vital to bring the method forward and present it to his pupils substantively, not merely as leading to certain results but as the safe and universal means of reaching any results. I have mentioned a class of dialogues with this purpose. These, or something answering to them (perhaps nearer ordinary exposition, though I can scarcely believe Plato ever abandoned the dialogue as his vehicle), must have been the peculiar study of the Academy, especially of the more advanced disciples.¹ So a feeling about dialectics will have grown up among these pupils that Plato would have wished to discourage, yet which his own works kept fostering. They saw it used as a key to the secrets of social, moral, and physical life, and saw their master take pains that they should examine the wards of the key. It was natural that they should think a fuller and more systematic development of this all-important science desirable, even necessary. They would see confusion and irregularity in their teacher’s proceedings. Had he not strangely mixed inquiries into the grounds of morality with statements about the nature of science? Surely it would be more orderly to keep these questions distinct, each under its own head. And were there not signs of narrowness in Plato that a more accurate habit of distinction would have cured? His dislike of some usual abuses of rhetoric had led him to undervalue the whole art, though it could, like any other, be reduced to strict laws and be contemplated apart from its accidental results. The same might be said of his doctrine of poetry, and still more of his ill-concealed indifference to physical speculation. If all these subjects were looked at directly as distinct branches of human culture, how much knowledge might be gained in each, and how much clearer we might become about the capacities and limits of the human intellect!

7. Such thoughts may have been at work in many who frequented Plato’s school. In few did they bear fruit, and in most of those few it was the unripe or blighted fruit of feeble theories that professed to universalise Plato’s system and really showed their authors knew nothing of Plato or of themselves. But one was able to make the others’ thoughts intelligible. To him Platonism will have seemed a necessary preparation for a complete, circular philosophy. Its unsystematic character, imaginative flights, and neglect of certain provinces of thought will have looked like signs of rudeness and infancy. He will have conceived the thought of assigning each study its true place, with the one Plato had proved so important in the first place, shown in full proportion and determining the character and treatment of the rest. So dialectics was in a sense the centre of both philosophies. Nor did Aristotle consciously change what the word meant in his predecessor’s discourses. He only wanted to give the study more distinctness and prominence, and to exhibit its processes and operations apart from any particular applications and results. But in doing this the character of the pursuit inevitably changed. Plato’s feeling was: certain objects are presented to my mind, whether sensible objects like trees or objects for the understanding like names, but objects still, things thrown in my way; I must know what they mean and find out their truth, and for this I must have dialectics. For Aristotle the object has vanished from before his eyes and mind, and he devotes his whole energy to contemplating dialectics in itself. What follows? The sense of needing dialectics as an escape from the impositions that block our view of things as they are grows weaker and at last disappears. Plato spent his life asserting against Protagoras and his school that the mind is not its own standard, that the aspects under which objects appear to us are not our knowledge of them, and that we can know them as they are in themselves. This principle gave his dialectics all its meaning, and his disciple no longer feels it with any force. On the contrary, Aristotle proposes to investigate precisely the aspects under which we see and judge things. He wants to know 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, as Plato’s opponents did. But he differed from them in that their intention was knavish and his entirely honest. They set up the doctrine that things are only as they seem to us in order to unsettle all faith and make each individual’s judgment a lawful standard. He sought to convince men that all is not unstable and fluctuating, by showing a fixed rule to which human judgments must conform. That rule limits individual taste and caprice, and tests and orders the appearances that the Sophist pretended were infinite.

8. So the definition of dialectics in Plato and Aristotle may be almost the same, while the whole scope and object of the science is different. Either could say that dialectics is the science that discovers the difference between false and true. But in Plato the false is the semblance an object presents to the sensualised mind, and the true is the object’s very substance and meaning. In Aristotle the false is a wrong affirmation about whatever the mind takes cognizance of, and the true is a right affirmation about the same. So Plato’s dialectic treats of how we gain a clear and vital perception of things, and Aristotle’s of how we discourse about them. To Plato, words are the means by which we ascend to realities that have no sensible exponents. To Aristotle they are formulas in which we set out our notions and judgments. One wants to find what hidden meaning a word indexes; the other wants to keep the word from crossing boundaries he has fixed for it. Hence 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 had set themselves against it. When Aristotle had matured his dialectics, it seemed so perfect and satisfactory that he could not dream of anything outside its circle that could not be brought under its rules. He felt he had found all the forms in which any proposition can be set down in words. What more there could be, what opening for another region wholly outside the government of these forms, he had no conception. If there were such a region it must be a vague, uninhabited world, and to suppose it peopled with other, most real and distinct forms was the extravagance of philosophical delirium. So when he speaks of the doctrine of substantial ideas, ideas that are the grounds of all our forms of thought and so cannot be subject to them, he is driven to a strange and, for so consummate a logician, most disagreeable necessity: he begs the whole question. He argues that since these ideas ought to come under some ascertained condition of logic, and by hypothesis come under none, they must be fictitious.

9. As we go on I shall note how this primary difference affected the two philosophers’ views on every question they took up. For now I mention it to show that methods with entirely different objects need not interfere with each other. The Platonic doctrine is not absurd because Aristotle could find no place for it in his system. And Aristotle’s labours are not useless or ill-directed because they do not supply, as he fancied they did, any satisfaction for the inquiries Plato had awakened.

Section III. The Logical Treatises of Aristotle

1. Any orderly examination of Aristotle must, I think, begin with his treatises on logic. They are not the most interesting of his works, but without some grasp of their nature and purpose we can hardly understand the character, value and necessary limits of his opinions on ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry. I shall shortly quote an eminent writer on physical science to show that a fair estimate of Aristotle’s work in that field depends on knowing how much weight he gave to the forms of logic. The long-debated question closer to this sketch is what exactly he meant by Metaphysics, or which of his thoughts his disciples referred to by that name. I think it can be settled only by first examining his dialectics.

2. In the Berlin edition of Aristotle the Categories come first. Doubts about its genuineness seem to have been removed by modern inquiry. A work that exactly fills a gap in an author’s acknowledged writings, so that together they form a complete system, would often be suspect. Against that, roundness is Aristotle’s great characteristic. It is easier to imagine a perfect series of his logical writings reaching us than a pupil able to fill a gap he left. It is also less hard to credit one man with such mastery of the subject when we remember that the original conception of the study was Zeno’s, not his. I have already explained how naturally that conception arose in a mind that had taken in the principle of Xenophanes and Parmenides: that the mind has laws of its own and is independent of what the senses report. What more we owe to Zeno beyond this discovery and its use in refuting sensible conclusions, we do not know. Some Sophists, though they turned the art to the worst ends, may have refined and improved it. In the school of Euclides the principles of logic, not only its practice, must have been studied and clarified. Given these materials, it is not incredible that a man trained in Plato’s school to great subtlety and precision, and possessing unparalleled breadth and diligence, produced a design and edifice that later ages have scarcely been able to alter or improve. He did not raise the science from its foundations. “He found it brick and left it marble” may be said of him as truly as of almost any architect.

3. The work on the Categories seems a fitting vestibule to this building. On entering it we feel that its purpose is altogether different from what Plato taught us to think all-important, and yet that it is a true purpose. There is a way of penetrating the nature and essence of things, whether they present an outward image to my senses or, just as really, speak only to my mind. Aristotle does not concern himself with that way. But our minds certainly form notions about both kinds of things, and these notions may themselves be subject to rules. They may be defined and classified, and there may be a general set of conceptions to which all particular ones refer. Aristotle affirms this. He says all our notions can be reduced to ten: Substance, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Time, Place, Position, Possession, Action, Passion. A Platonist will ask what these words themselves signify. How do I know what Substance is better than I know what a man or a horse is? Or Quantity better than I know what three cubits long is? These questions had to be asked, as we shall see, and were asked to good effect when the Aristotelian province of thought tried to bring all other provinces within it. But for any purpose other than destroying that pretension they are beside the point. When I study an actual man or horse, the substance is doubtless the unknown x I am looking for, and to assume I know it is to stop investigation. But I understand the name substance as well as the name man or horse. And who says that, because there is a science of things, there is no science of names, no laws of dependence and affinity among them? Conformity or nonconformity to such laws is exactly what we mean by coherent or incoherent discourse. We must either call our deep desire for arrangement and classification a mere disease, or believe it arises from the limits and conditions to which our minds are subject, and is another name for the wish to understand them.

4. The rules of grammar, the terminology of every art and science, the very attempt to be intelligible, all presuppose these limits. Men keep inventing divisions and schemes of thought, and keep narrowing and stifling great principles and laws by them. There is no safety from this except a clear and steady perception of certain necessary boundaries, imposed not by our fellow-men but by the nature of our own understandings. Let the reader consider the Categories carefully. Does it not clear his mind, and in no ordinary degree, about his own modes of speech? Does it not make him feel more than before that his words, winged as they are, cannot take a chance flight but must follow an appointed, preordained path? Is there not, then, a witness in himself that Aristotle has a distinct and reasonable end which it is greatly in our interest to know?

5. From these general forms under which all our notions fall, Aristotle goes on, in his treatise On Interpretation, to inquire into the mode of our affirmations and denials. There he develops the nature and limits of propositions, the meaning of contraries and contradictories, and the force of affirmation and denial in impossible, contingent and necessary matter. I have no excuse for dwelling on works of merely formal character. I mention them to press on the reader Archbishop Whately’s important remark that the two books of the Prior Analytics develop the syllogistic principle and process. Aristotle is not the mere inventor of an art but the masterly expounder of the facts on which the art rests, and without which it would have no meaning. He does not teach us how to make propositions, but what propositions are and necessarily must be, given 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 we would violate the laws of our body by trying to walk on our heads instead of our feet.

6. But Aristotle saw that this analysis of our mental operations was not enough. He had told us how we discourse, not how we know. Are these forms of logic themselves knowledge? Is syllogistic demonstration the same as science? Or is only one kind of it science? Or are its results science? Or are there premises assumed in it which also do, or may, belong to science? What are they, and how do we get at them? These are the questions that occupy him in the Posterior Analytics. I shall try to seize a few points in the inquiry that will best let the reader judge Aristotle’s mind and see how he stands related both to his great master and to the expounder of the inductive philosophy.

7. The treatise opens: “All teaching and all intellectual learning come from previously existing knowledge. This is plain from looking at every case. The mathematical sciences are acquired this way, and so is each of the other arts. So it is also with arguments, both by syllogism and by induction: both teach through what is already known, the one taking its premises as from those who understand, the other showing the universal through the clearness of the particular. Rhetoricians persuade in the same way, either through examples, which is induction, or through enthymemes, which is syllogism.” Two important words in the first clause, teaching and learning, were, I imagine, carefully distinguished in the school Aristotle came from. I am confident that learning, being the method of acquisition, would there have taken precedence of teaching, which points to the communication of knowledge. That here the order is changed, and teaching put first as if it contained learning, is very significant and explains much that follows. Plato had a profound reverence for mathematics: “Let no man undisciplined in geometry enter the halls of philosophy.” I cannot account for this unless he saw in the mathematical process something akin to his own method. That resemblance does not lie in what we call mathematical demonstration, the machinery of axioms, definitions, hypotheses and propositions, which, valuable as it is, has scarcely a Socratic element in it. What remains? Plato, I think, would answer: exactly the essence of mathematics, the learning. Demonstration is only the teaching, a necessary and inseparable accident of the science, which implies something else and means nothing without it. Learning is the process by which, in a particular triangle, I arrive at one of the laws belonging to it as a triangle, that its three angles equal two right angles. Teaching is the formal verbal statement of that law and its confirmation by deductions from admitted premises. In this sense mathematics would be to Plato not the science but the best preparation for it, because it recognises permanent forms and principles in visible objects that we are able to enter into and discover. Aristotle, as I have often hinted, perceives only the forms and laws of our mind. So what was the subordinate part of mathematics for his master became the whole for him. He looks at mathematics only in reference to demonstrations; its mark is that it deals with necessary matter. Ask why necessary, and the only answer is that it starts ultimately from self-evident propositions. So the proposition, a mode of our own mind, becomes the ultimate ground of all things; or if you want a Hercules’ pillar beyond it, you have the Categories. Penned within these limits, it is hard to grasp what science means. Aristotle feels the difficulty and, with his usual honesty, does not evade it. He admits it may puzzle us to say whether science is only what we get after a series of satisfactory syllogisms, or whether the premises assumed in them must have the same character. All he can say is that we must deal fairly with facts, and that what we are bound to assume as known we do in some sort actually know. Ultimate knowledge, then, the most perfect truth the philosopher can reach, as well as his starting point, is still a proposition. All knowledge seems to fall under two forms: knowing that it is so, and knowing why it is so. Neither can include the knowledge Plato aims at, knowledge correlative with Being, which is not about things or persons but of them.

8. If these forms of our mind are the ground of our knowledge, we cannot reach them at once. What are the steps? Here comes in Aristotle’s doctrine about sensible objects. Our perception of them is not strictly knowledge, for that word, whether used of premises or conclusions, always refers to the universal. Our sense apprehensions refer only to particulars, to individuals. From these, which are most evident to us, we reach the more general by induction. How entirely this differs from what Bacon called induction, the reader will see the more he studies Aristotle. He will find first that the sensible phenomenon is taken for granted as a safe starting point. Aristotle believed as strongly as we do that phenomena are not principles. But to suspect phenomena, to suppose they need sifting and probing to learn what fact they denote, is no part of his system. The sensible impression satisfied him, not to rest in, but as a true beginning; the whole difference between those who acquiesce in it and the most consummate philosopher lay in the use the latter made of his power of generalising and syllogising. In this way Aristotle became the parent of all the modern schools of sensible philosophy. Yet those schools have drawn their best and most convincing arguments from the errors into which Aristotle and the Aristotelians were led by their own hypothesis. The first book of Locke is 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 see that the mind demands universal forms somehow. Because they would not acknowledge them as the grounds of our mind, they were forced to seek them in the mind, and so to conceive them as propositions. Hence the fancy of an innate notion that whatever is, is, or that the whole is greater than its part. Mr. Locke confuted that fancy amid shouts of triumph from his admirers, while in fact he was conspiring with Aristotle to disparage the principle that delivers us from such fallacies. But I am anticipating a later page.

9. These later analytics deal entirely with demonstrative reasoning. The Topics, a much longer work, deal wholly with probable reasoning. Here Aristotle seems to me far more at home. I have suggested that he never possessed, and could not possess, the idea of Science; it lay outside his province, and when he tried to grapple with it he brought it within forms that robbed it of its essence. But no one did so much to give scientific form to subjects that are by nature not scientific, or to give our thoughts precision about the wavering matters of opinion and ordinary conduct. Looking at the Topics, we confess, with some reluctance, that no method of persuasion or discourse is so loose that it cannot be analysed and shown to involve inevitable limits. We have some justification for discontent with these resolute reductions of all thought and argument to a system. We feel the vital power is not there. What really brings men to agree with a falsehood or a truth, the energy and conviction of the speaker, is left out of account. And the habit of contemplating arguments without regard to the truth they are meant to establish, or their moral influence, is somewhat hardening and deadening. But I think the work of a thorough master like Aristotle will on the whole do good. He so well understands himself and what he can do that we are not misled, as by inferior writers, into fancying nothing is wanted but what he tells us. His exquisite dissections teach what more blundering dissectors might not: that there is something which cannot be dissected. To understand Aristotle rightly, the Topics should be read with the three books on Rhetoric. I cannot speak of that work now, because so much of Aristotle’s moral and political wisdom is presumed in it, but it is closely connected with the work on probable arguments. The Topics are to it what the six books of Euclid are to a treatise on practical mechanics. It may seem strange to speak of a geometry for a rhetorician, and I have shown how alien geometry was to Aristotle’s habits of mind. Yet we cannot help seeing that, as far as a person with the faculty of persuasion can be taught that his is not a mere craft but has maxims and laws governing it, he will become at least less mischievous, and may become a sincere, true-minded man. From another point of view the Topics give the roundness and completeness to Aristotle’s logical system which, as I said, he evidently desired and so remarkably achieved.