Aristotelianism

“ Then Aristotle, following out the method of his teachers, attempts to exhaust experience, and directs his inquiries into the outward world of sense and observation, but all with the view of discovering from phenomena the unconditional truth, in which he too believes. But everything in this world is fleeting and transitory, and therefore it is not easy to arrive at truth. A cold doubt creeps into the experimental mind of Aristotle, with all his learning and his logic. ”

“ The reality of this element of personality and the force for culture which resides in it are clearly illustrated by a comparison of the works of Plato with those of Aristotle. Aristotle was for many centuries the first name in philosophy, and is still one of the greatest; but Aristotle, although a student of the principles of the art of literature and a critic of deep philosophical insight, was primarily a thinker, not an artist. One goes to him for discipline, for thought, for training in a very high sense; one does not go to him for form, beauty, or personality. ”

“ You will all go thus far with me, that—now taking the Greek words—the school of literature teaches you to have νοῦς, or conception of things, instead of ἄνοια,—no conception of things; that the school of art teaches you τεχνὴ of things, instead of ἀτεχνία; and the school of science ἐπιστήμη, instead of ἄγνοια or ‘ignorantia.‘ But, you recollect, Aristotle names two other faculties with these three,—φρόνησις, namely, and σοφία. He has altogether five, τεχνὴ, ἐπιστήμη, φρόνησις, σοφία, νοῦς; that is to say, in simplest English,—art, science, sense, wisdom, and wit. ”

“ And it often seems as if the Possible Being of this Aristotelian doctrine would have to be expressed in terms of validity rather than in terms of the mere realistic entities themselves. It is true that the architect can build, the sleeper wake. These truths are valid. They are, for Aristotle, valid about independently real beings; and his doctrine is that there is also an independent or realistic type of Being corresponding to their validity; but this sort of Being, this ens in potentia, tends on the whole to assume the essentially ideal form of our present conception of what it is to be. ”

“ He was the author of the first scientific cultivation of each science, and there was hardly any quality distinguishing a philosopher as such, which he did not possess in an eminent degree. Of all the philosophical systems of antiquity, that of Aristotle was the best adapted to the physical wants of mankind. His works consisted of treatises on natural, moral, and political philosophy, history, rhetoric, criticism,—indeed, there was scarcely a branch of knowledge which his vast and comprehensive genius did not embrace. His greatest claim to our admiration is as a logician. ”

“ As if in emulation of Aristotle's simplicity of character, his absorbing intellectualism— impressive certainly, heroic enough, in its way—they have served science, science in vacuo, as if nothing beside, faith, imagination, love, the bodily sense, could detach them from it for an hour. ”

“ Nearer to our present form of the ontological predicate comes, however, Aristotle’s conception of Possible Being, a conception which plays a great part in the whole Aristotelian theory of Nature. The ens in potentia of the Aristotelian system occupies a place in a realistic doctrine. Aristotle insists that possibilities are in one sense real beings. Is not an architect a house-builder even when he is not building houses? Is not the sleeper potentially awake? Is not every natural process the realization of possibility? ”

“ Aristotle here inquires what the particular faculty or force may be which individualises, makes one, that is, of objects; and, thereby, gives to the sentient being the consciousness of identity. It cannot be a sense, as the senses are derived from the elements, and the elements are akin to matter, while that, whatever it be, which combines the faculties and powers of the body must, of all, be the most influential; and it may be inferred rather than gathered from what is said, that it cannot be either the Vital Principle or the mind. ”

“ Midway between the natural and the supernatural worlds Aristotle placed man, whom he regarded as bound to the world of nature by his body and the lower elements of his mind, but connected with God through his reason, for he held that the human mind possessed attributes of the divine intelligence. Aristotle’s psychology was based on his belief that there was a purpose in all nature, and on his view that in the individual were always united form and material. ”

“ On one side of his thought Aristotle represents a reaction against idealism and a return to the position of common-sense dualism, but on another, and this the deeper side, he represents the attempt to restore the theory in a more satisfactory form. ”

“ Now, Aristotle’s theory of the origin of society, like his philosophy of ethics, rests ultimately on the principle of final causes, not in the theological meaning of an aim or tendency imposed from without, but in the scientific sense of function corresponding to organ. ‘Nature maketh no thing in vain’ is the text of Aristotle in this as in other inquiries. Man being the only animal possessed of the power of rational speech is, he asserts, by nature intended to be social, more so than the bee or any other gregarious animal. ”

“ Therefore man is the highest creature, the most perfect organism in the natural order.
But the human mind, as Aristotle pointed out, has two activities: it concerns itself with knowing and with reasoning; it is passive, receptive, in that it receives ideas from without, and creative in that it can reflect on its own ideas and so create new ideas which are in no sense dependent on material objects—are, as we say, abstract ideas. To this creative part of man’s soul, to his reason alone, did Aristotle grant eternal existence and immortality. ”

“ We turn now to Aristotle's psychology. We must give a brief sketch of it in order to establish the fact that the Aristotelian and the monophysite science of the soul labour under the same defect. It is a radical defect, namely, the almost complete absence of the conception of personality. The principle of Aristotle's psychology, like that of his metaphysic, is the concept of form and matter. The soul of man comes under the general ontological law. All existence is divisible into grades, the lower grade being the matter whose form is constituted by the next highest grade. ”

“ The 'Realisation' of Aristotle is the 'Reminiscence' of Plato.
This conception Aristotle extended to Thought, to the various forms of life, to education, to morals, to politics.
Thought is an entelechy, an organic whole, in which every process conditions and is conditioned by every other. If we begin with sensation, the sensation, blank as regards predication, has relations to that which is infinitely real,—the object, the real thing before us,—which relations science will never exhaust. ”

“ Particular, we should note Aristotle’s final perplexities and contradictions, arising from his failure to harmonize or to transcend, by means of a new and self-consistent conception, the two currents, the Platonic and the specifically Aristotelian, which make up his thought. For, with him as with Plato, all Knowledge has to do with Reality: hence Reality alone, in the highest, primary sense of the word, can form the highest, primary object of Knowledge; Knowledge will be busy, primarily, with the Essence, the Substance of things. ”

“ It used to be the fashion to make little of the medieval scholars for the high estimation in which they held Aristotle. Occasionally even yet one hears narrowly educated men, I am sorry to say much more frequently scientific specialists than others, talk deprecatingly of this ardent devotion to Aristotle. No one who knows anything about Aristotle ever indulges in such an exhibition of ignorance of the realities of the history of philosophy and science. To know Aristotle well is to think of him as probably possessed of the greatest human mind that ever existed. ”

“ The terms comprehend, in fact, all the metamorphic conditions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and have a range of application wide enough to include life under all degrees and forms. This was the first great idea in their adoption, and although Aristotle made them to signify an analogous transition in moral or mental faculties, (as when he speaks of a boy as a general, in potentiality,) yet their real purport is to distinguish those two universal conditions of living and sentient beings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Aristotelian view of Nature as an energetic process failed to impress itself upon his successors. Greek Philosophy soon after Aristotle's death decayed or was deprived of its early vigour, and the doctrine which survived the wreck was essentially derived, however imperfectly, from the Platonic theory. ”

“ The determination to keep God a reality and the world a reality and yet relate the two became the controlling motive of their thinking.
Aristotle in theory and application of theory has always a feeling for fact. The individual thing and the world of individual things are, for him, never negligible. Realised matter, life, the human spirit, human nature, are actualities and have their value as such. They are not all on the same level of being; they do not occupy the same rank; and it is the philosopher's business to determine their respective positions in the scale of being and value. ”

“ Aristotle's philosophy is a marvel—for his time: but his theory of the Universe is no more tenable than his Natural Science. The luxuriant growths of later Greek philosophy are interesting only to the curious investigators of the pathology of the human intellect. The vast [Pg 188] development of scholastic philosophy in the middle ages showed only how far unlimited ingenuity and subtlety may lead in the wrong direction, if it starts with mistaken principles. ”

“ But when Aristotle defines God as pure Thought, the supreme Idea or Form, with no admixture of matter, it might seem that he had contradicted himself. It will be remembered, however, that in his system matter and form do not stand quite on an equality—matter is somewhat subordinate to form. He regarded matter as the point of departure for something higher—the clay being antecedent and lower than the pot, the bronze than the statue—for the higher product always results from the operation of the formal cause on the material. ”

“ Subsidiary to his theory of knowledge, Aristotle discourses at some length, both in his treatise ‘On the Soul’ and in his ‘Physiological Tracts,’ on the Five Senses. He affirms that the sentient soul of man is able to discriminate between the properties of things, “because it is itself a mean or middle term between the two sensible extremes of which it takes cognisance,—hot and cold, hard and soft, wet and dry, white and black, acute and grave, bitter and sweet, light and darkness, &c. ”

“ Aristotle had thought that human reason alone persisted, and that the emotional and nutritive soul was destroyed with the body, but he left no personality to this pure intelligence, deprived of all sensibility. ”

“ But the doctrine of course has its obscurities. Where, in the independently real world, which Aristotle all the while assumes, are the mere possibilities when they are not yet realized? If one fairly faces this question, one finds that the possibilities appear to be in some sense ideal. They suggest even to Aristotle his theory of Nature as desiring or willing the yet unfulfilled possibilities, — a theory to which he nowhere gives a perfectly rounded expression. ”

“ Are not these, and the innumerable words like to these, which you remember as I read them, strange words, if Aristotle’s statement respecting wisdom be true; that it never contemplates anything that can make men happy, “ἡ μέν γὰρ σοφία οὐδέν θεωρει ἐξ ὦν ἔσται εὐδαίμων ἄνθρωπος”?
When we next meet, therefore, I purpose to examine what it is which wisdom, by preference, contemplates; what choice she makes among the thoughts and sciences open to her, and to what purpose she employs whatever science she may possess. ”

“ The name and fame of Aristotle, never quite forgotten even in the darkest age, [80] and now known and extolled among Moorish scholars, formed indeed the ground of that immense reputation which Arabian philosophy enjoyed in Europe. The Latin schools had long been familiar with the logical writings of Aristotle, but the modern spirit, soon to show [47] itself as it were precociously in Bacon and Albertus Magnus, was already awake, and under its influence men had begun to demand more than the mere training of the mind in abstract reasoning. ”

“ Thus in our day, that little which Aristotle can bring, is peculiar for its inventive reasoning, its suggestiveness, its metaphysics, and is useful for other pedants, who work with the same "Sursum corda," who institute new dialectics and modes of forming the reason (judgment?) which are as much viler than those of Aristotle, as may be the philosophy of Aristotle is incomparably viler than that of the ancients. ”