Thomas Case

“ Platonism is the doctrine that the individuals we call things only become, but a thing is always one universal form beyond many individuals, e.g. one good beyond seeming goods; and that without supernatural forms, which are models of individuals, there is nothing, no being, no knowing, no good. Aristotelianism is the contrary doctrine: a thing is always a separate individual, a substance (οὐσία) , natural such as earth or supernatural such as God; and without these individual substances, which have attributes and universals belonging to them, there is nothing, to be, to know, to be good. ”

“ For intellect is what mainly makes a man what he is, and is divine and immortal.
To turn from Ethics to Politics, the good of the individual on a small scale becomes on a large scale the good of the citizen and the state, whose end should be no far-off form of good, and no mere guarantee of rights, but the happiness of virtuous action, the life according to virtue, which is the general good of the citizen. Hence, the citizen of the best state is he who has the power and the purpose to be governed and govern for the sake of the life according to virtue. ”

“ We cannot write a history of the varied origin of logic, beyond putting the rudimentary logic of the proposition in the De Interpretatione before the less rudimentary theory of categories as significant names capable of becoming predicates in the Categories, and before the maturer analysis of the syllogism in the Analytics. But at any rate the process was gradual; and Aristotle was advanced in metaphysics, mathematics, physics, dialectics, rhetoric and poetics, before he became the founder of logic. ”

“ The world, according to Aristotle, consists of substances, each of which is a separate individual, this man, this horse, this animal, this plant, this earth, this water, this air, this fire; in the heavens that moon, that sun, those stars; above all, God. On the other hand, a universal species or genus of substances is a predicate which, as well as everything else in all the other categories, always belongs to some individual substance or other as subject, and has no separate being. ”

“ So can we men, not, as Plato thought, by having in our souls universal principles innate but forgotten, but by acquiring universal principles from sense, which is the origin of knowledge, arrive at judgments which are true, and true because they agree with the things which we know by sense, by inference and by science. Such is Aristotle’s psychological and logical realism, contained in the De Anima and logical treatises. ”

“ As the rational is either deliberative or scientific, either practical or speculative intellect, there are two virtues of the intellect—prudence of the deliberative or practical, and wisdom of the scientific or speculative, intellect. The right reason by which moral virtue is determined is prudence, which is determined in its turn by wisdom. Pleasure is a psychical state, and is not a generation in the body supplying a defect and establishing a natural condition, but an activity of a natural condition of the soul. ”

“ The only logical conclusion is that the Categories, being nearer to Plato on the nature of attributes, and still nearer on the relation of universals to substances, is earlier than the Metaphysics. There are difficulties no doubt in drawing this conclusion; because the Metaphysics, though it denies that universals can be substances, and does not allow species and genera to be called “secondary substances,” nevertheless falls itself into calling a universal essence (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) a substance—and that too in the very book where it is proved that no universal can be a substance. ”

“ Aristotle had no sympathy with the unwritten dogmas of Plato. But with the written dialogues of Plato he always continued to agree almost as much as he disagreed. Like Plato, he believed in real universals, real essences, real causes; he believed in the unity of the universal, and in the immateriality of essences; he believed in the good, and that there is a good of the universe; he believed that God is a living being, eternal and best, who is a supernatural cause of the motions and changes of the natural world, and that essences and matter are also necessary causes ”

“ Thus even God is a substance, a separate individual, whose differentiating essence is to be a living being, eternal and very good; He is however the only substance whose essence is entirely without matter and unconjoined with matter; and therefore He is a substance, not because He has or is a substratum beneath attributes, but wholly because He is a separate individual, different both from nature and men, yet the final good of the whole universe. ”

“ In an ascending scale, a plant is an organism with a nutritive soul; an animal is a higher organism with a nutritive, sensitive, orectic and locomotive soul; a man is the highest organism with a nutritive, sensitive, orectic, locomotive and rational soul. What differentiates man from other natural and organic substances, and approximates him to a supernatural substance, God, is reason (λόγος) , or intellect (νοῦς) . Now, though only one of the powers of the soul, intellect alone of these powers has no bodily organ; it alone is immortal: it alone is divine. ”

“ Are the things which surround me in what I call the environment,—the men, the animals, the plants, the ground, the stones, the water, the air, the moon, the sun, the stars and God—are they shadows, unsubstantial things, as formerly Platonism made all things to be except the supernatural world of forms, gods and souls? ”

“ Intelligence is not active intellect propagating universal essence in passive intellect, but only logical inference starting from sense, and both requiring nervous body and conscious soul. It is not always a true apprehension of essence, but often, especially in physical matter, such as sound or heat or light, takes superficial effects to be the essence of the thing. Aristotle did not altogether solve the question, What is, and scarcely solved at all the question, How do we know the external world? ”

“ For even nature does nothing in vain, but aims at final causes, which she uniformly realizes, except so far as matter by its spontaneity (ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτομάτου) causes accidental effects; and the ends of nature are no form of good, nor even the good of man, but the essences of natural substances themselves, and, above them all, the good God Himself. Such is Aristotle’s natural realism, pervading his metaphysical and physical writings. ”

“ It remains to answer the final question:—What is the Aristotelian philosophy, which its author gradually formed with so much labour? Here we have only room for its spirit, which we shall try to give as if he were himself speaking to us, as head of the Peripatetic school at Athens, and holding no longer the early views of his dialogues, or the immature views of such treatises as the Categories, but only his mature views, such as he expresses in the Metaphysics. Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician, a philosopher of things, who uses the objective method of proceeding from being to thinking. ”

“ Aristotle at once maintains the primacy of metaphysics and vindicates the independence of the special sciences. He is at the same time the only Greek philosopher who clearly discriminated discovery and disputation, science and dialectic, the knowledge of a definite subject from its appropriate principles and the discussion of anything whatever from opinions and authority. On one side he places science and philosophy, on the other dialectic and sophistry. ”

“ Hence, moreover, a natural substance or body as an efficient cause or force causes an effect on another, not by propagating one eternal essence of a species into the matter of the other, but so far as we really understand force, by their reciprocally preventing one another from occupying the same place at the same moment on account of the mutual resistance of any two bodies. The essence of a natural substance, e.g. wood, is not immateriate, but is the whole body as what it is. ”

“ Ethics then is a kind of Politics. But in Ethics a man’s individual good is his own happiness; and his happiness is no mere state, but an activity of soul according to virtue in a mature life, requiring as conditions moderate bodily and external goods of fortune; his virtue is (1) moral virtue, which is acquired by habituation, and is a purposive habit of performing actions in the mean determined by right reason or prudence; requiring him, not to exclude, but to moderate his desires; and (2) intellectual virtue, which is either prudence of practical, or wisdom of speculative intellect ”

“ Happiness in this world consists proximately in virtue as a harmony between the three parts, rational, spirited and appetitive, of our souls, and ultimately in living according to the form of the good; but there is a far higher happiness, when the immortal soul, divesting itself of body and passions and senses, rises from earth to heaven and contemplates pure forms by pure reason. Such in brief is the Platonism of the written dialogues ”

“ Must we then, on account of misfortunes, look with Solon at the end, and call no man happy till he is dead? Or is this altogether absurd for us who say that happiness is an activity? Virtuous activities determine happiness, and a virtuous man is happy in this life, in spite of misfortunes unless they be too great; while after death he will not feel the misfortunes of the living so much as to change his happiness. Still, for perfect happiness a man should prefer the speculative life of divine intellect, and immortalize (ἀθανατίζειν) as far as possible. ”

“ According to him, science at its widest selects a special subject, e.g. number in arithmetic, magnitude in geometry, stars in astronomy, a man’s good in ethics; concentrates itself on the causes and appropriate principles of its subject, especially the definition of the subject and its species by their essences or formal causes; and after an inductive intelligence of those principles proceeds by a deductive demonstration from definitions to consequences: philosophy is simply a desire of this definite knowledge of causes and effects. Beyond philosophy, not beyond science, there is art ”

“ Meanwhile, however, the truth about the Eudemian Ethics in general is that it was an earlier rudimentary sketch written by Aristotle, when he was still struggling, without quite succeeding, to get over Plato’s view that there is one philosophical knowledge of universal good, by which not only the dialectician and mathematician must explain the being and becoming of the world, but also the individual and the statesman guide the life of man. ”

“ Substances are so similar that the individuals of a species are even the same in essence or substance, e.g. Callias and Socrates differ in matter but are the same in essence, as rational animals. The universal (τὸ καθόλου) is real only as one predicate belonging to many individual substances: it is therefore not a substance. There are then no separate universal forms, as Plato supposed. There are attributes and universals, real as belonging to individual substances, whose being is their being. ”

“ Hence, as science and dialectic are different, so scientific induction and syllogism must be distinguished from dialectical induction and syllogism. Dialectic is useful, for exercise, for conversation and for philosophical sciences, where by being critical it has a road to principles. But it is by a different process of sense, memory, experience, induction, intelligence, syllogism, that science becomes knowledge of real causes, of real effects, and especially of real essences from which follow real consequences, not beyond, but belonging to real substances. ”

“ Above all forms stands the form of the good, which is the cause of all other forms being, and through them of all individuals becoming. The creator, or the divine intellect, with a view to the form of the good, and taking all forms as models, creates in a receptacle (ὑποδοχή, Plato, Timaeus, 49 a) individual impressions which are called things but really change and become without attaining the permanence of being. ”

“ Above all natural substances, the objects of natural science, there stands a supernatural substance, the object of metaphysics as theology. Nature’s boundary is the outer sphere of the fixed stars, which is eternally moved day after day in a uniform circle round the earth. ”

“ Philosophic differences are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world. ”

“ At this point, Plato and Aristotle have become very far apart: to the master beauty appears to be an independent thing, and really separate, to the pupil at his best only something beautiful, an attribute which is only mentally separable from an individual substance. The first difference then between the Categories and the Metaphysics is in the nature of an attribute; and the theory of inherence in the Categories is nearer to Plato and more rudimentary than the theory of predication in the Metaphysics. ”

“ Sense receives from the external world an essence, e.g. of white, which is really universal as well as individual, but apprehends it only as individual, e.g. this white substance: intellect thereupon discovers the universal essence but only in the individuals of sense. ”

“ On the whole then, in his early dialectical and didactic writings, of which mere fragments remain, Aristotle had already diverged from Plato, and first of all in metaphysics. During his master’s life, in the second period of his own life, he protested against the Platonic hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the one as the good, and tended to separate metaphysics from dialectic by beginning to pass from dialogues to didactic works. ”

“ This indifference to goods of body and estate is quite Platonic, but is very different from Aristotle’s later ethical doctrine that such goods, though not the essence, are nevertheless necessary conditions of happiness. Finally, in the spirit of Plato’s Phaedo and the dialogue Eudemus, the Protrepticus holds that the soul is bound to the sentient members of the body as prisoners in Etruria are bound face to face with corpses; whereas the later view of the De Anima is that the soul is the vital principle of the body and the body the necessary organ of the soul. ”

“ The reason is that Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician half for and half against Plato, occupied himself with metaphysics all his philosophical life, made the science of things the universal basis of all sciences without destroying their independence, and so gradually brought round philosophy from universal forms to individual substances. ”