John Tulloch

“ Aristotle, speaking generally, treated of every subject which came within the range of ancient thought, and if we regard matter, and not form or literary style, he treated of each of these subjects better than any one else. He also initiated many new branches of inquiry, dependent on observation and induction, and thus not only represented in himself the culmination of Greek speculative philosophy, but was also, as far as possible, the forerunner of modern science. ”

“ The Dialogues of Plato may serve to give us an idea of a society possessed with an insatiate appetite for discussion and controversy, and always delighted to take part in, or assist at, an intellectual game or fencing match between two opponents. And it is the object of the Topics of Aristotle to lay down the rules for the game of Dialectic, and to establish it as a highly salubrious and necessary intellectual art. Dialectic, properly speaking, is discussion with a view to probable truth, and so far is worthy of the attention of a philosopher. ”

“ None can deny the greatness of Augustine s soul his enthusiasm, his unceasing search after truth, his affectionateness, his ardour, his self-devotion. And even those who may doubt the soundness or value of some of his dogmatic conclusions, cannot hesitate to acknowledge the depth of his spiritual convictions, and the strength, solidity, and penetration with which he handled the most difficult questions, and wrought all the elements of his experience and of his profound Scriptural knowledge into a great system of Christian thought. ”

“ He had himself been brought out of darkness into " marvellous light," only by entering into the depths of his own soul, and finding, after many struggles, that there was no power but divine grace, as revealed in the life and death of the Son of God, which could bring rest to human weariness, or pardon and peace for human guilt. ”

“ No one who aspires to cultivation can dispense with a historical knowledge of the thought of Europe, and Aristotle is one of the great fountain-heads of that thought. Secondly, if cultivation consists, as has been said, in an acquaintance with all the best productions of the human mind, Aristotle's works, despite their want of style, certainly come among the number. Hegel advocated the study of these works as " the noblest problem of classical philology." ”

“ That in deduction the mind proceeds from some universal proposition, and how it proceeds these were the first things which Aristotle had to tell the world. The modern attempts to impugn these principles, and to show that the mind does not reason from universals, are a failure. They confuse inductive with deductive reasoning, and ignore both the case of a science like geometry, which is all deduction, and also the numerous cases where the mind, having unduly assumed a universal principle, rests in it afterwards and makes deductive applications of it. ”

“ Whether the dialogues which Cicero and his contemporaries read and admired were early works of Aristotle himself, or were forgeries, there is no means of knowing. But the fragments [14] of these works, which a search of all ancient literature has brought together, show us nothing worthy of Aristotle in his best days, nothing that contributes any light to his philosophy. And it is remarkable that all works of this kind seem to have been excluded from the edition of Andronicus. ”

“ AUGUSTINE (Aurelius Augustinus) , one of the four great fathers of the Latin Church, and admittedly the greatest of the four, more profound than Ambrose, his spiritual father, more original and systematic than Jerome, his contemporary and correspondent, and intellectually far more distinguished than Gregory the Great, the last of the series. The theological position and influence of Augustine may be said to be unrivalled. No single name has ever exercised such power over the Christian church, and no one mind ever made such an impression upon Christian thought. ”

“ In Aristotle deductive reasoning became conscious of itself. Unfortunately for his reputation, this merely preliminary part of his labours, in which the principles and rules of syllogistic inference were drawn out, occupied almost exclusively the minds of thinkers in the Middle Ages. The errors of modern Aristotelians were imputed to Aristotle, and hence arose the notion that Aristotle explained nature by means of the syllogism. Nothing could be further from the truth ”

“ He thus resists all approaches to that communism 2 which was carried to so great extravagance in the Republic of Plato. The form of government which, ideally speaking, he prefers, is a wise monarchy or aristocracy, some government, in short, in which neither wealth nor numbers shall be permitted to determine everything. In some points it must be confessed that he exhibits a narrow and conservative spirit, and a belief in the divine right of things as they are, which puts him at a disadvantage in comparison either with Plato or with modern views. ”

“ Like his great disciple in a later age Luther Augustine was prone to emphasise the side of truth which he had most realised in his own experience, and, in contradistinction to the Pelagian exaltation of human nature, to depreciate its capabilities beyond measure. ”

“ The universe, according to Aristotle, is a continuous chain ; at the one end is the purely potential matter without form or qualities ; at the other end is pure unconditioned actuality, the ever existent, or God. Reflection upon the relations of the potential and the actual shows the world to have been eternal, for the actual must always have preceded the potential ”

“ Thus, all the system of cause and effect, which makes up what is called "nature," has been and will be, according to Aristotle, of eternal duration, and is only slightly modified and altered by two incalculable elements 3 of causation, chance and the will of man. "Nature," or the system prevailing from the earth up wards through the planetary sphere, is full of reason; it does nothing in vain. 4 The formal cause, the form, or per fection, of each thing, is generally to be identified with the final cause, or end, at which nature aims. ”

“ The modern reader will look with less credulity upon an event which was probably quite natural in its occurrence, but he will hardly see any cause in it for lamentation. The character of Arius, if not originally tainted by self-seeking and restless ambition, appears to have gathered something of this taint in the course of his career, and the most impartial student of church history fails to see anything in it to admire beyond the pertinacity of his courage and his faithful devotion to his own opinions. ”

“ While discussing the syllogism itself, he says, 4 " This is the case in astronomy, which is based on the observation of astronomical phenomena, and it is the case with every branch of science or art. When the facts in each branch are brought together, it will be the province of the logician to set out the demonstrations in a manner clear and fit for use." It is true that Aristotle did nothing towards the logic of Induction, that is to say, towards elucidating the methods by which the mind legitimately arrives at general facts or laws of nature. ”

“ Thus the state is a prime necessity to man, and, indeed, the state is prior in idea to the individual, that is to say, the normal conception of man is of man in a state of civilisation, and this implies beforehand the conception of a state. On these grounds Aristotle went on from his Ethics to the composition of his Politics. ”

“ In modern times we have been long accustomed to think of this world as having had a beginning, and recent theories of " development " are attempts at a speculative history of nature gradually arriving at its pre sent condition. Such theories have nothing to correspond to them in the system of Aristotle, for in his view the pre sent fabric of the world has had an eternal existence, and nature is fixed, being only slightly varied by the element of chance. ”

“ We may hesitate to affirm, that, during 187 years, there were absolutely no copies of Aristotle's greatest works extant besides those hidden in the vault of Scepsis, for the Stoical ethics and logic both bear traces of a knowledge of Aristotle. But, at all events, for the time, the world had lost its interest in all that we most prize in Aristotle's thought. ”

“ The peculiarity of the Greek drama, in which a chorus remained constantly present and the curtain never fell, almost necessitated "the unities," but Aristotle only concerns him self with internal unity, which he says that tragedy must have in common with every other work of art, 14 and which consists in making every part bear an organic relation to the whole, so that no part could be altered or omitted without the whole suffering. ”

“ Upon no subject did Augustine bestow more of his intellectual strength, and in relation to no other have his views so deeply and permanently affected the course of Christian thought. Even those who most usually agree with his theological stand-point will hardly deny that, while he did much in these writings to vindicate divine truth and to expound the true relations of the divine and human, he also, here as elsewhere, was hurried into extreme expressions as to the absoluteness of divine grace and the extent of human corruption. ”

“ No other nation can compare with Germany in recent services towards a knowledge of Aristotle. France has contributed translations of the Physics, De Anima, Parva Xaturalia, Organon, Politics, and Ethics, by Barthelemy St Hilaire, an essay on the Metaphysics, by Ravaisson, and a few less important works. The translations are readable, but cannot be relied on for accuracy in any difficult point. In England the contributions to Aristotelian literature have borne no sort of proportion to the extent to which minds have been educationally imbued with certain of Aristotle's works. ”

“ There is something Eastern in this idea of a God absorbed in self -meditation ; and, on the other hand, we observe that Aristotle, while considering no trouble too great to obtain excellence in any little point of art, or science, or morals, or politics, still, in comparison with the great universe, makes human affairs of relatively little importance. But yet, within the sphere of nature, man is, according to _ him, the highest product indeed, the one end for which all the arrangements of nature are but means. 7 Nor does man himself fall wholly within the sphere of nature. ”

“ He admits, indeed, a process of development in human society, but in order to adapt this process to a fixed and eternal frame of things he announces 13 the curious opinion, that the human race has repeatedly brought to perfection all art, science, and philosophy, and has on each occasion been swept away by some wide spread catastrophe or convulsion of nature, leaving only a few individuals to repropagate the race, and to begin again the development of civilisation out of the merest rudiments. ”

“ The other hypothesis possible is, that a bias towards physical research and experiment and the collection of facts naturally led the Peripatetic school in the direction of nominalism, till at last some member of that school gave expression to this tendency by writing this little treatise called the Categories, derived, indeed, mainly from Aristotle s doctrines and teaching, but laying it down far more dogmatically than he woidd have done that the concrete individual is the unit of knowledge. ”

“ Having called Arius and his opponents before him, Alexander heard their respective arguments, and finally, after due examination, gave judgment against Arius. The result was a wide-spread commotion, extending not only through Africa, but other provinces of the Roman empire. Bishops joined issue with bishops; congregations were violently excited; and the greatest mystery of the Christian religion became a subject of irreverent controversy among women and children. Even the heathen joined in the profane uproar. Arius himself cannot be excused from stirring up this popular and unworthy clamour ”

“ AVe shall revert below to some of the points on which he controverts Plato, but the real contrast between them is in their attitude; the one is essentially a dialectician, though of the highest and noblest type, the other more and more tends to be a man of science. Following out his proper bent, Aristotle, in many of his works, strikes on a path in which Plato had not been his precursor. In these works he lays the foundation for the sciences of Natural Philosophy, Mechanics, Physiology, and Natural History. ”

“ He had found human nature in his own case too weak and sinful to find any good for itself. In God alone he had found good. This deep sense of human sinfulness coloured all his theology, and gave to it at once its depth its profound and sympathetic adaptation to all who feel the reality of sin and that tinge of darkness and exaggera tion which as surely have repelled others. When the expres sion Augustinianism is used, it points especially to those opinions of the great teacher which were evoked in the Pelagian controversy, to which he devoted the most mature and powerful period of his life. ”

“ Thus man, by his reason, lias a direct connection with the sphere of the eternal and the blessed. The question then arises whether the individual man can look forward to immortality. On this, regardless of Plato s elaborate pictures of a Hell, a Purgatory, and a Heaven, Aristotle says nothing. ”

“ He enjoys for ever that bliss which we can only at brief moments attain to ; His life is the thinking upon thought. In all this there is something incomplete, and the different points of view are not reconciled. ”

“ Aristotle's great knowledge of human nature, exhaustive classification, and clear methods of disentangling a question and dealing with what is essential in it, render many of his works an excellent curriculum for training young men, and fitting them for all the superior business of life. There is a certain dynamical impulse to be derived from Aristotle, independent of all his results and conclusions. The Aristotelian element in thought and knowledge may, perhaps, be summed up as " analytic insight ”

“ Motive is a fossilised confusion, as it should stand for the efficient cause (apxv taxijo-ecos) , whereas it really denotes the final cause of action. Faculty (in Universities) represents Aristotle's Svva/j.is = art. Energy is of purely Aristotelian origin, though not quite keeping its philosophic sonse. Actually is from the Latinised form of the same term. So, too, in category and predicament (e.g., " an unpleasant predicament ") we preserve both the Greek and Latin form of an Aristotelian term. ”

“ Much that the world has accepted from him, many a solid mass of wisdom and good sense, to be found in his writings, we have been obliged to pass over in silence. On most subjects Aristotle is no longer an authority, but yet, for many reasons his works are well worth study. ”

“ We begin with a genuine work of Aristotle himself, though even into this a spurious element has been introduced ; we go on to a paraphase, and then to the paraphrase of that paraphrase ; we end with a light essay written for the sake of one or two observations on character which the writer had made ; and yet all stands under the name of Aristotle. 7 This instance which we have before our eyes, and the proportion of the ungenuine to the genuine which it presents, may enable us to form a conception of the nature of those works, the 146 names of which make up the catalogue of Diogenes. ”

“ The matter of the Prior Analytics has become the common property of all modern books on logic. And scarcely anything 3 has had to be detracted from or added to what Aristotle wrote upon the syllogism. His was the proud distinction of having discovered and fully drawn out the laws under which the mind acts in deductive reasoning. ”

“ Thus, despite counter opinions in his own day, he maintains the institution of slavery as based on nature, and even lays it down 3 that it is justifiable to make war upon and reduce to slavery those races who were evidently intended by nature to be subject. In accordance with his physiological system, he treats woman 4 as stunted man, fixed by nature in a position of inferiority; and, therefore, he resists Plato's proposals for the emancipation and improved education of women. ”

“ Matter, rising from the merely potential, through the four elements into various substances, is the material cause ; and the efficient, or motive cause is supplied by the active powers of heat and cold. Nature, however, is impersonal, and to speak of it as pervaded by reason, has all the appearance of pantheism. But yet in the system of Aristotle there was a God who was not part of nature. Aristotle s utterances on this subject are obscure ”