Alexander Grant

“ The real aids for the advance and verification of science which exist in modern times— instruments, such as the telescope, the microscope, the barometer, the thermometer, the spectroscope, and countless others; the knowledge of many great laws of nature; and the practice of accurately observing and carefully recording,—were all wanting in the days of Aristotle. Therefore it is absurd to treat him as if he had been a modern man of science, with a vicious method. ”

“ On the whole, it is not for voluminousness that Aristotle is to be wondered at. The marvel begins when we come to contemplate the solid and compressed contents of his writings, their vast and various scope, and the amount of original thought given through them to the world. It would have been enough for any one man’s lasting reputation to have created the science of Logic, as Aristotle did ”

“ So far from chance having been the chief force in producing the framework of the Universe, Aristotle considers chance to be a mere exception, a mere irregularity, thwarting the reason and the wisdom which guides, and has ever guided, the operations of nature. ”

“ Aristotle, the strongest of the ancients and the oracle of the Middle Ages, must always hold a place of honour in the history of European thought. Writings which have interested and influenced mankind so deeply and through so many centuries can never fall into contempt, even though they may be devoid of the graces of style and though the matter in them may be either superseded or else absorbed into the treatises of other authors. Nor is it from mere curiosity—from a merely antiquarian or historical point of view—that the works of the Stagirite continue to be studied. ”

“ That Aristotle, the prince of philosophers and supreme master of the sphere of knowledge, should be called upon to train the mind of Alexander, the conqueror of the world, seems a combination so romantic, that it has come to be thought that it must have been the mere invention of some sophist or rhetorician. This, however, is an unnecessary scepticism, for antiquity is unanimous in accepting the tradition, and there are no circumstances that we know of which are inconsistent with it. ”

“ And virtue generally is a balance between too much and too little. It is produced by the introduction of the law of the mean into the passions, which in themselves are unlimited. But what is this “mean”—this juste milieu—and how is it ascertained? Aristotle tells us that it is not merely the mid-point between two external quantities, but it is the mid-point relatively to the moral agent. What is too much for one man—say, of danger, expense, indulgence, or self-valuation—may be by no means too much for another man. ”

“ The merit of Aristotle’s definition, as coming from an ancient Greek philosopher, consists in its avoiding the view which would have been natural in those times—namely, that life, the vital principle or the physical soul, was a separate entity, dwelling in the body, hospes comesque corporis, “the body’s guest and friend,” as the Emperor Hadrian called it in his dying verses. Aristotle said that life, or the soul, is not a chance guest, but a function; it is to the body as sight is to the eye; it is the perfect action of all the conditions of the bodily organisation. ”

“ And thus Chemistry is the black or Egyptian art, having taken its rise out of the searches made by the Alchemists to discover the philosopher’s stone. Aristotle had no notion whatever of the rich field of knowledge and power which lay in the analysis of substances. He had no idea of the composition of water or air. The crucible and the retort had never been worked in Athens; the most superficial guess-work, as to what we should call the chemical properties of bodies, contented the philosophers of the day. ”

“ When he speaks of “God,” he has in his mind that Supreme Being, Who, unmoved Himself, is the cause of motion to all things, being the object of reason and of desire—being, in short, the Good. Here the transition from a person to an abstract idea is obvious; but if God is the object of desire to the universe and to Nature, who or what is it that desires Him? Clearly, reason or divine instinct is placed by this theory within Nature itself. ”

“ The four last virtues in the table are qualities to adorn the external man in society, and as such seem more worthy of a place in Lord Chesterfield’s Letters than in a treatise of Moral Philosophy. To be mild without being spiritless; to be friendly without servility; to have a simple manner without either assumption or mock-humility; and to be witty without buffoonery,—these achievements constitute the minor excellences with which Aristotle concludes his list. ”

“ We are told by Proclus [5] that Aristotle “proclaimed loudly in his dialogues that he was unable to sympathise with the doctrine of Ideas, even though his opposition to it should be attributed to a factious spirit.” The import of that doctrine was to disparage the world of sensible objects. It represented that when we, by means of our senses, apprehend, or think that we apprehend, particular objects, we are like men sitting in a dimly-lighted subterraneous cavern, and staring at shadows on the wall; that the world of sense is a world of shadows, but that a true world exists,—a world of Ideas ”

“ Then came the second period of his life, when he had definitely broken with the school of Plato, and was away from all the schools of Athens, enjoying much leisure and positions of dignity. In this period it is probable that he not only prosecuted his researches and independent speculations in many branches of thought and science, but that he learned to know his own mission in the world, which was to stick to the matter of knowledge, abandoning all regard for the artistic adornment of truth. ”

“ As to Matter, Aristotle called it “timber,” or “the underlying,” to indicate that it is to existence as wood is to a table, and that it is something which is implied in all existence. Nothing can exist without Matter, which is one of the four causes of the existence of everything; but, on the other hand, it may be said that Matter itself has no existence. Things can only be realised by the mind, and so come into actual existence, if they be endowed with Form; pure Matter denuded of form cannot be perceived or known, and therefore cannot be actual. ”

“ What constitutes the chief good for an individual, or in other words, happiness? Aristotle is somewhat abstract and metaphysical in arguing upon this question. He says, happiness must be an end in itself, and not a means to anything else; it must lie within the proper sphere or function of man,—that function being a rational and moral life; it must be, not a merely dormant state, but a state of conscious vitality; and lastly, it must be in accordance with the law of excellence proper to the function of man. ”

“ Nature is both "matter or potentiality, and form or actuality; both the simple elements of a thing and its existence in perfection. It is also the transition from the one to the other. "Nature," says Aristotle, "spoken of as the creation of anything, is the path to nature." ”

“ Aristotle, unconscious how much nearer to the truth this guess was than his own, laughs at it as the production of men "who try to square facts to their own fancies, and who wish to have a share in the arrangement of the Universe." ”

“ The discovery of the structure of the syllogism—that is to say, of the forms in which men do, and must, reason about a great many things in life, was of course very useful for dialectical purposes, both for exposing fallacy in others and for keeping one’s self straight in controversy. But Aristotle, while in the course of writing his treatise on Dialectic, seems to have been impressed with the independent importance of the theory of the Syllogism, and of the necessity for a simple, unapplied Logic. ”

“ In laying down his famous doctrine that it is the characteristic of virtue to preserve “the mean,” Aristotle was not entirely original. In this, as in many other cases, he only fixed into scientific form a conception which had been previously floating in the mind of Greece. Hesiod, the Seven Sages, the unknown authors of ‘Maxims,’ the Gnomic poets, Pindar, and the Tragedians, had all preached the doctrine of moderation—a doctrine most congenial to the natural good taste of the Hellenic people, who instinctively despised excess in any form as unintellectual and barbarous. ”

“ It is a work which must excite our wonder if we consider the serried mass of observations which it contains, and the absolutely complete way in which it constructs a science and provides for it an appropriate nomenclature. Though countless generations of commentators and school-men have been busy with the ‘Analytics,’ and many modem philosophers have independently treated of Logic, none of them have been able to add a single point of any importance to Aristotle’s theory of deductive reasoning. The ‘Analytics’ are of course not light reading. ”

“ As long as the process of higher education in modern Europe consists so largely in imbuing the mind with the literature of classical antiquity, so long will a study of certain works of Aristotle remain as one of the last stages of that process. Those works—especially the 'Rhetoric,' 'Art of Poetry,' 'Ethics,' and 'Politics'— have a remarkable educational value. They form an introduction to philosophy; they invite comparison of ancient and modern ways of thinking; they offer rich stores of information as to human nature—so much the same in all ages ”

“ Among the permanent contributions to mental science which were made by Aristotle, none is more famous than his doctrine of the “Law of Association,” which he throws out while discussing Memory and Recollection in his ‘Physiological Tracts.’ He says, “Recollection is the recalling of knowledge. It implies the existence in the mind of certain starting-points, or clues, so that when you get hold of one you will be led to the rest. It depends on the law of association: we recollect when such and such a motion naturally follows such and such; we feel the latter motion, and that produces the former. ”