A Woman Of The Inner Sea Thomas Keneally

download

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-woman-of-the-inner-sea-thomas-
keneally-58961058

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

A Woman Of The Inner Sea Thomas Keneally

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-woman-of-the-inner-sea-thomas-
keneally-8677352

Awakening Your Inner Shaman A Womans Journey Of Selfdiscovery Through

The Medicine Wheel Marcela Lobos

https://ebookbell.com/product/awakening-your-inner-shaman-a-womans-
journey-of-selfdiscovery-through-the-medicine-wheel-marcela-
lobos-46359924

The Path Of Elemental Witchcraft A Wyrd Womans Book Of Shadows

Salicrow

https://ebookbell.com/product/the-path-of-elemental-witchcraft-a-wyrd-
womans-book-of-shadows-salicrow-46287614

Finding Your Inner Warrior A Guide For The Hesitant Woman In The Wake
Of Metoo Nora Fahlberg

https://ebookbell.com/product/finding-your-inner-warrior-a-guide-for-
the-hesitant-woman-in-the-wake-of-metoo-nora-fahlberg-48903966
A Week In The Life Of A Grecoroman Woman Holly Beers

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-week-in-the-life-of-a-grecoroman-
woman-holly-beers-59458038

A Hemisphere Of Women The Founding And Development Of The

Interamerican Commission 19151939 E Sue Wamsley

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-hemisphere-of-women-the-founding-and-
development-of-the-interamerican-commission-19151939-e-sue-
wamsley-37530880

A Woman Of The Century Frances Minerva Nunnery 18981997 Her Story In

Her Own Memorable Voice As Told To Cecil Dawkins 1st Edition Cecil
Dawkins

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-woman-of-the-century-frances-minerva-
nunnery-18981997-her-story-in-her-own-memorable-voice-as-told-to-
cecil-dawkins-1st-edition-cecil-dawkins-5149606

A Woman Of The Iron People Eleanor Arnason

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-woman-of-the-iron-people-eleanor-
arnason-36024762

A Woman Of No Importance The Untold Story Of The American Spy Who

Helped Win World War Ii Sonia Purnell

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-woman-of-no-importance-the-untold-
story-of-the-american-spy-who-helped-win-world-war-ii-sonia-
purnell-43600590
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
discoveries, the central position of the heart in the vascular system,
and the possession of a backbone by all red-blooded animals;219 the
resemblance of animal intelligence to a rudimentary human
intelligence, especially as manifested in children;220 and, finally, he
attempts to trace a continuous series of gradations connecting the
inorganic with the organic world, plants with animals, and the lower
animals with man.221
The last mentioned principle gives one more illustration of the
distinction between Aristotle’s system and that of the evolutionist,
properly so called. The continuity recognised by the former only
obtains among a number of coexisting types; it is a purely logical or
ideal arrangement, facilitating the acquisition and retention of
knowledge, but adding nothing to its real content. The continuity of
the latter implies a causal connexion between successive types
evolved from each other by the action of mechanical forces.
Moreover, our modern theory, while accounting for whatever is true
in Aristotle’s conception, serves, at the same time, to correct its
exaggeration. The totality of existing species only imperfectly fill up
the interval between the highest human life and the inorganic matter
from which we assume it to be derived, because they are collaterally,
and not lineally, related. Probably no one of them corresponds to
any less developed stage of another, although some have preserved,
with more constancy than others, the features of a common parent.
In diverging from a single stock (if we accept the monogenetic
hypothesis,) they have become separated by considerable spaces,
which the innumerable multitude of extinct species alone could fill
up.
Our preliminary survey of the subject is now completed. So far, we
have been engaged in studying the mind of Aristotle rather than his
system of philosophy. In the next chapter we shall attempt to give a
more complete account of that system in its internal organisation not
less than in its relations to modern science and modern thought.
 CHAPTER VII.
THE SYSTEMATIC PHILOSOPHY OF
ARISTOTLE.

I.
We have considered the Aristotelian philosophy in relation to the
great concrete interests of life, morals, politics, literature, and
science. We have now to ask what it has to tell us about the deepest
and gravest problems of any, the first principles of Being and
Knowing, God and the soul, spirit and matter, metaphysics,
psychology, and logic. We saw that very high claims were advanced
on behalf of Aristotle in respect to his treatment of these topics; and
had we begun with them, we should only have been following the
usual example of his expositors. We have, however, preferred
keeping them to the last, that our readers might acquire some
familiarity with the Aristotelian method, by seeing it applied to
subjects where the results were immediately intelligible, and could
be tested by an appeal to the experience of twenty-two centuries.
We know that there are some who will demur to this proceeding,
who will say that Aristotle the metaphysician stands on quite
different ground from Aristotle the man of science, because in the
one capacity he had, and in the other capacity he had not, sufficient
facts to warrant an authoritative conclusion. They will say, with Prof.
St. George Mivart, that in accumulating natural knowledge men’s
minds have become deadened to spiritual truth; or with Mr. Edwin
Wallace, that the questions opened by Aristotle have not yet been
closed, and that we may with advantage begin our study of them
under his guidance. We, on the other hand, will endeavour to show
that there is a unity of composition running through the Stagirite’s
entire labours, that they everywhere manifest the same excellences
and defects, which are those of an anatomising, critical, descriptive,
classificatory genius; that his most important conclusions, however
great their historical interest, are without any positive or even
educational value for us, being almost entirely based on false
physical assumptions; that his ontology and psychology are not what
his admirers suppose them to be; and that his logic, though meriting
our gratitude, is far too confused and incomplete to throw any light
on the questions raised by modern thinkers.
Here, as elsewhere, we shall employ the genetic method of
investigation. Aristotle’s writings do not, indeed, present that gradual
development of ideas which makes the Platonic Dialogues so
interesting. Still they exhibit traces of such a development, and the
most important among them seems to have been compiled from
notes taken by the philosopher before his conclusions were definitely
reasoned out, or worked up into a consistent whole. It is this
fragmentary collection which, from having been placed by some
unknown editor after the Physics, has received a name still
associated with every kind of speculation that cannot be tested by a
direct or indirect appeal to the evidence of external sense.
Whether there exist any realities beyond what are revealed to us
by this evidence, and what sensible evidence itself may be worth,
were problems already actively canvassed in Aristotle’s time. His
Metaphysics at once takes us into the thick of the debate. The first
question of that age was, What are the causes and principles of
things? On one side stood the materialists—the old Ionian physicists
and their living representatives. They said that all things came from
water or air or fire, or from a mixture of the four elements, or from
the interaction of opposites, such as wet and dry, hot and cold.
Aristotle, following in the track of his master, Plato, blames them for
ignoring the incorporeal substances, by which he does not mean
what would now be understood—feelings or states of consciousness,
or even the spiritual substratum of consciousness—but rather the
general qualities or assemblages of qualities which remain constant
amid the fluctuations of sensible phenomena; considered, let us
observe, not as subjective thoughts, but as objective realities.
Another deficiency in the older physical theories is that they either
ignore the efficient cause of motion altogether (like Thales), or
assign causes not adequate to the purpose (like Empedocles); or
when they hit on the true cause do not make the right use of it (like
Anaxagoras). Lastly, they have omitted to study the final cause of a
thing—the good for which it exists.
The teleology of Aristotle requires a word of explanation, which
may appropriately find its place in the present connexion. In
speaking of a purpose in Nature, he does not mean that natural
productions subserve an end lying outside themselves; as if, to use
Goethe’s illustration, the bark of cork-trees was intended to be made
into stoppers for ginger-beer bottles; but that in every perfect thing
the parts are interdependent, and exist for the sake of the whole to
which they belong. Nor does he, like so many theologians, both
ancient and modern, argue from the evidence of design in Nature to
the operation of a designing intelligence outside her. Not believing in
any creation at all apart from works of art, he could not believe in a
creative intelligence other than that of man. He does, indeed,
constantly speak of Nature as if she were a personal providence,
continually exerting herself for the good of her creatures. But, on
looking a little closer, we find that the agency in question is
completely unconscious, and may be identified with the constitution
of each particular thing, or rather of the type to which it belongs. We
have said that Aristotle’s intellect was essentially descriptive, and we
have here another illustration of its characteristic quality. The
teleology which he parades with so much pomp adds nothing to our
knowledge of causes, implies nothing that a positivist need not
readily accept. It is a mere study of functions, an analysis of statical
relations. Of course, if there were really any philosophers who said
that the connexion between teeth and mastication was entirely
accidental, the Aristotelian doctrine was a useful protest against
such an absurdity; but when we have established a fixed connexion
between organ and function, we are bound to explain the
association in some more satisfactory manner than by reaffirming it
in general terms, which is all that Aristotle ever does. Again,
whatever may be the relative justification of teleology as a study of
functions in the living body, we have no grounds for interpreting the
phenomena of inorganic nature on an analogous principle. Some
Greek philosophers were acute enough to perceive the distinction.
While admitting that plants and animals showed traces of design,
they held that the heavenly bodies arose spontaneously from the
movements of a vortex or some such cause;222 just as certain
religious savants of our own day reject the Darwinian theory while
accepting the nebular hypothesis.223 But to Aristotle the unbroken
regularity of the celestial movements, which to us is the best proof
of their purely mechanical nature, was, on the contrary, a proof that
they were produced and directed by an absolutely reasonable
purpose; much more so indeed than terrestrial organisms, marked
as these are by occasional deviations and imperfections; and he
concludes that each of those movements must be directed towards
the attainment of some correspondingly consummate end;224 while,
again, in dealing with those precursors of Mr. Darwin, if such they
can be called, who argued that the utility of an organ does not
disprove its spontaneous origin, since only the creatures which, by a
happy accident, came to possess it would survive—he answers that
the constant reproduction of such organs is enough to vindicate
them from being the work of chance;225 thus displaying his inability
to distinguish between the two ideas of uniform causation and
design.
As a result of the foregoing criticism, Aristotle distinguishes four
different causes or principles by which all things are determined to
be what they are—Matter, Form, Agent, and Purpose.226 If, for
example, we take a saw, the matter is steel; the form, a toothed
blade; the agent or cause of its assuming that shape, a smith; the
purpose, to divide wood or stone. When we have enumerated these
four principles, we have told everything that can be known about a
saw. But Aristotle could not keep the last three separate; he
gradually extended the definition of form until it absorbed, or
became identified with, agent and purpose.227 It was what we
should call the idea of function that facilitated the transition. If the
very essence or nature of a saw implies use, activity, movement,
how can we define it without telling its purpose? The toothed blade
is only intelligible as a cutting, dividing instrument. Again, how came
the saw into being? What shaped the steel into that particular form?
We have said that it was the smith. But surely that is too vague. The
smith is a man, and may be able to exercise other trades as well.
Suppose him to be a musician, did he make the saw in that
capacity? No; and here comes in a distinction which plays an
immense part in Aristotle’s metaphysics, whence it has passed into
our every-day speech. He does not make the saw quâ musician but
quâ smith. He can, however, in the exercise of his trade as smith
make many other tools—knives, axes, and so forth. Nevertheless,
had he only learned to make saws it would be enough. Therefore, he
does not make the saw quâ axe-maker, he makes it quâ saw-maker.
Nor, again, does he make it with his whole mind and body, but only
with just those thoughts and movements required to give the steel
that particular shape. Now, what are these thoughts but the idea of
a saw present in his mind and passing through his eyes and hands,
till it fixes itself on the steel? The immaterial form of a saw creates
the real saw which we use. Let us apply the preceding analogies to a
natural object; for example, a man. What is the Form, the definition
of a man? Not a being possessing a certain outward shape, for then
a marble statue would be a man, which it is not; nor yet a certain
assemblage of organs, for then a corpse would be a man, which,
according to Aristotle, criticising Democritus, it is not; but a living,
feeling, and reasoning being, the end of whose existence is to fulfil
all the functions involved in this definition. So, also, the creative
cause of a man is another man, who directly impresses the human
form on the material supplied by the female organism. In the same
way, every definite individual aggregate becomes what it is through
the agency of another individual representing the same type in its
perfect manifestation.228
 The substantial forms of Aristotle, combining as they do the notion
of a definition with that of a moving cause and a fulfilled purpose,
are evidently derived from the Platonic Ideas; a reflection which at
once leads us to consider the relation in which he stands to the
spiritualism of Plato and to the mathematical idealism of the Neo-
Pythagoreans. He agrees with them in thinking that general
conceptions are the sole object of knowledge—the sole enduring
reality in a world of change. He differs from them in maintaining that
such conceptions have no existence apart from the particulars in
which they reside. It has been questioned whether Aristotle ever
really understood his master’s teaching on the subject. Among
recent critics, M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire asserts, with considerable
vehemence, that he did not. It is certain that in some respects
Aristotle is not just to the Platonic theory, that he exaggerates its
absurdities, ignores its developments, and occasionally brings
charges against it which might be retorted with at least equal effect
against his own philosophy. But on the most important point of all,
whether Plato did or did not ascribe a separate existence to his
Ideas, we could hardly believe a disciple of twenty years’ standing229
to be mistaken, even if the master had not left on record a decisive
testimony to the affirmative side in his Parmenides, and one scarcely
less decisive in his Timaeus.230 And so far as the controversy
reduces itself to this particular issue, Aristotle is entirely right. His
most powerful arguments are not, indeed, original, having been
anticipated by Plato himself; but as they were left unanswered he
had a perfect right to repeat them, and his dialectical skill was great
enough to make him independent of their support. The extreme
minuteness of his criticism is wearisome to us, who can hardly
conceive how another opinion could ever have been held. Yet such
was the fascination exercised by Plato’s idealism, that not only was it
upheld with considerable acrimony by his immediate followers,231
but under one form or another it has been revived over and over
again, in the long period which has elapsed since its first
promulgation, and on every one of these occasions the arguments of
Aristotle have been raised up again to meet it, each time with
triumphant success. Ockham’s razor, Entia non sunt sine necessitate
multiplicanda, is borrowed from the Metaphysics; Locke’s principal
objection to innate ideas closely resembles the sarcastic observation
in the last chapter of the Posterior Analytics, that, according to
Plato’s theory, we must have some very wonderful knowledge of
which we are not conscious.232 And the weapons with which
Trendelenburg and others have waged war on Hegel are avowedly
drawn from the Aristotelian arsenal.233
In his criticism on the ideal theory, Aristotle argues that it is
unproved; that the consequences to which it leads would be rejected
by the idealists themselves; that it involves a needless addition to
the sum of existence; that it neither explains the origin of things nor
helps us to understand them, while taking away from them their
substantial reality; that the Ideas are merely sensible objects
hypostasised, like the anthropomorphic divinities of primitive men;
that, to speak of them as patterns, in whose likeness the world was
created, is a mere idle metaphor; that, even assuming the existence
of such patterns, each individual must be made in the likeness, not
of one, but of many ideas—a human being, for instance, must be
modelled after the ideal biped and the ideal animal, as well as after
the ideal man; while many of the ideas themselves, although all are
supposed to exist absolutely, must be dependent on other and
simpler types; finally, that, assuming an idea for every abstract
relation, there must be ideas to represent the relation between every
sensible object and its prototype, others for the new relations thus
introduced, and so on to infinity.
Aristotle’s objections to the Neo-Pythagorean theory of ideal
numbers need not delay us here. They are partly a repetition of
those brought against the Platonic doctrine in its original form, partly
derived from the impossibility of identifying qualitative with
quantitative differences.234
Such arguments manifestly tell not only against Platonism, but
against every kind of transcendental realism, from the natural
theology of Paley to the dogmatic agnosticism of Mr. Herbert
Spencer. A modern Aristotle might say that the hypothesis of a
creative first cause, personal or otherwise, logically involves the
assumption of as many original specific energies as there are
qualities to be accounted for, and thus gives us the unnecessary
trouble of counting everything twice over; that every difficulty and
contradiction from which the transcendental assumption is intended
to free us, must, on analysis, reappear in the assumption itself—for
example, the God who is to deliver us from evil must be himself
conceived as the creator of evil; that the infinite and absolute can
neither cause, nor be apprehended by, the finite and relative; that to
separate from Nature all the forces required for its perpetuation, and
relegate them to a sphere apart, is a false antithesis and a sterile
abstraction; lastly, that causation, whether efficient or final, once
begun, cannot stop; that if this world is not self-existing, nothing is;
that the mutual adaptation of thoughts in a designing intelligence
requires to be accounted for just like any other adaptation; that if
the relative involves the absolute, so also does the relation between
the two involve another absolute, and so on to infinity.

These are difficulties which will continue to perplex us until every

shred of the old metaphysics has been thrown off. To that task
Aristotle was not equal. He was profoundly influenced by the very
theory against which he contended; and, at the risk of being
paradoxical, we may even say that it assumed a greater importance
in his system than had ever been attributed to it by Plato himself. To
prove this, we must resume the thread of our exposition, and follow
the Stagirite still further in his analysis of the fundamental reality
with which the highest philosophy is concerned.

II.
Ever since the age of Parmenides and Heracleitus, Greek thought
had been haunted by a pervading dualism which each system had in
turn attempted to reconcile, with no better result than its
reproduction under altered names. And speculation had latterly
become still further perplexed by the question whether the
antithetical couples supposed to divide all Nature between them
could or could not be reduced to so many aspects of a single
opposition. In the last chapter but one we showed that there were
four such competing pairs—Being and Not-Being, the One and the
Many, the Same and the Other, Rest and Motion. Plato employed his
very subtlest dialectic in tracing out their connexions, readjusting
their relationships, and diminishing the total number of terms which
they involved. In what was probably his last great speculative effort,
the Timaeus, he seems to have selected Sameness and Difference as
the couple best adapted to bear the heaviest strain of thought.
There is some reason for believing that in his spoken lectures he
followed the Pythagorean system more closely, giving the preference
to the One and the Many; or he may have employed the two
expressions indifferently. The former would sooner commend itself
to a dialectician, the latter to a mathematician. Aristotle was both,
but he was before all things a naturalist. As such, the antithesis of
Being and Not-Being, to which Plato attached little or no value,
suited him best. Accordingly, he proceeds to work it out with a
clearness before unknown in Greek philosophy. The first and surest
of all principles, he declares, is, that a thing cannot both be and not
be, in the same sense of the words, and furthermore that it must
either be or not be. Subsequent logicians prefixed to these axioms
another, declaring that whatever is is. The three together are known
as the laws of Identity, Contradiction, and Excluded Middle. By all,
except Hegelians, they are recognised as the highest laws of
thought; and even Hegel was indebted to them, through Fichte, for
the ground-plan of his entire system.235
The whole meaning and value of such excessively abstract
propositions must lie in their application to the problems which they
are employed to solve. Aristotle made at once too much and too
little of his. Too much—for he employed them to refute doctrines not
really involving any logical inconsistency—the theory of Heracleitus,
that everything is in motion; the theory of Anaxagoras, that
everything was originally confused together; the theory of
Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things. Too little—for he
admitted a sphere of possibilities where logical definition did not
apply, and where subjects simultaneously possessed the capacity of
taking on one or other of two contradictory attributes.
Nor is this all. After sharply distinguishing what is from what is
not, and refusing to admit any intermediary between them, Aristotle
proceeds to discover such an intermediary in the shape of what he
calls Accidental Predication.236 An accident is an attribute not
necessarily or usually inhering in its subject—in other words, a co-
existence not dependent on causation. Aristotle could never
distinguish between the two notions of cause and kind, nor yet
between interferences with the action of some particular cause and
exceptions to the law of causation in general; and so he could not
frame an intelligible theory of chance. Some propositions, he tells us,
are necessarily true, others are only generally true; and it is the
exceptions to the latter which constitute accident; as, for instance,
when a cold day happens to come in the middle of summer. So also
a man is necessarily an animal, but only exceptionally white. Such
distinctions are not uninteresting, for they prove with what
difficulties the idea of invariable sequence had to contend before
even the highest intellects could grasp it. There was a constant
liability to confound the order of succession with the order of co-
existence, the order of our sensations with the order of objective
existence, and the subjection of human actions to any fixed order,
with the impossibility of deliberation and choice. The earlier Greek
thinkers had proclaimed that all things existed by necessity; but with
their purely geometrical or historical point of view, they entirely
ignored the more complex questions raised by theories about
classification, logical attribution, and moral responsibility. And the
modifications introduced by Epicurus, into the old physics, show us
how unanswerable Aristotle’s reasonings seemed to some of his
ablest successors.
 Absolute being is next distinguished from truth, which, we are
told, has no objective existence237—a remarkable declaration, which
throws much light on other parts of the Aristotelian system, and to
which we shall subsequently return.238
After explaining at considerable length what Being is not, Aristotle
now proceeds to ascertain what it is. He tells us that just as all
number quâ number must be either odd or even, so all Being quâ
Being must have certain universal attributes. These he sets himself
to discover. When Descartes long afterwards entered on a somewhat
similar inquiry, he fell back on the facts of his own individual
consciousness. Aristotle, on the contrary, appeals to the common
consciousness of mankind as embodied in ordinary language. In how
many senses do we say that a thing is? The first answer is contained
in his famous Ten Categories.239 These are not what some have
supposed them to be, summa genera of existence, but summa
genera of predication. In other words, they are not a classification of
things, but of the information which it is possible to receive about a
single thing, more especially about the richest and most concrete
thing known to us—a human being. If we want to find out all about
a thing we ask, What is it? Of what sort? How large? To what does it
belong? Where and when can we find it? What does it do? What
happens to it? And if the object of our investigations be a living
thing, we may add, What are its habits and dispositions? The
question has been raised, how Aristotle came to think of these ten
particular categories, and a wonderful amount of rubbish has been
written on the subject, while apparently no scholar could see what
was staring him in the face all the time, that Aristotle got them by
collecting all the simple forms of interrogation supplied by the Greek
language,240 and writing out their most general expressions.
Having obtained his categories, Aristotle proceeds to mark off the
first from the other nine. The subject or substance named in answer
to the question, What is it? can exist without having any quality,
size, and so forth predicated of it; but they cannot exist without it.
Logically, they cannot be defined without telling what they are; really
they cannot be conceived without something not themselves in
which they inhere. They are like the tail of a kite, giving greater
conspicuousness and buoyancy to the body, but entirely dependent
on it for support. What our philosopher fails to perceive is, that the
dependence is reciprocal, that substance can no more be conceived
without attributes than attributes without substance; or rather that
substance, like all other categories, can be resolved into Relation.241
Meanwhile, he had a logical machine ready to hand, which could
be used with terrible effect against the Platonic Ideas. Any of these
—and there were a great number—that could be brought under one
of the last nine categories were at once deprived of all claim to
independent existence. Take Equality, for instance. It cannot be
discovered outside quantity, and quantity is always predicated of a
substance. And the same is true of number, to the utter destruction
of the Neo-Pythagorean theory which gave it a separate existence.
Moreover, the categories served not only to generalise and combine,
but also to specificate and divide. The idea of motion occurs in three
of them; in quantity, where it means increase or diminution; in
quality, where it means alteration, as from hot to cold, or vice versâ;
and in place, implying transport from one point to another. The Idea
of Good, which stands at the very summit of Plato’s system, may be
traced through all ten categories.242 Thus, the supposed unity and
simplicity of such conceptions was shown to be an illusion. Platonism
was, in truth, so inconsistent with the notions embodied in common
language, that it could not but be condemned by a logic based on
those notions.
Aristotle next takes the Idea of Substance and subjects it to a
fresh analysis.243 Of all things none seem to possess so evident an
existence as the bodies about us—plants and animals, the four
elements, and the stars. But each of these has already been shown
to consist of Form and Matter. A statue, for instance, is a lump of
bronze shaped into the figure of a man. Of these two constituents,
Matter seems at first sight to possess the greater reality. The same
line of thought which led Aristotle to place substance before the
other categories now threatens to drive him back into materialism.
This he dreaded, not on sentimental or religious grounds, but
because he conceived it to be the negation of knowledge. He first
shows that Matter cannot be the real substance to which individuals
owe their determinate existence, since it is merely the unknown
residuum left behind when every predicate, common to them with
others, has been stripped off. Substance, then, must be either Form
alone or Form combined with Matter. Form, in its completest sense,
is equivalent to the essential definition of a thing—the collection of
attributes together constituting its essence or conception. To know
the definition is to know the thing defined. The way to define is to
begin with the most general notion, and proceed by adding one
specific difference after another, until we reach the most particular
and concrete expression. The union of this last with a certain portion
of Matter gives us the individual Socrates or Callias. There are no
real entities (as the Platonists pretend) corresponding to the
successive stages of generalisation, biped, animal, and so forth, any
more than there are self-existing quantities, qualities, and relations.
Thus the problem has been driven into narrower and narrower
limits, until at last we are left with the infimæ species and the
individuals contained under them. It remains to discover in what
relation these stand to one another. The answer is unsatisfactory.
We are told that there is no definition of individuals, and also that
the definition is identical with the individual.244 Such, indeed, is the
conclusion necessarily resulting from Aristotle’s repeated declarations
that all knowledge is of definitions, that all knowledge is of
something really existing, and that nothing really exists but
individual things. Nevertheless, against these we have to set equally
strong declarations to the effect that knowledge is of something
general, not of the perishing individuals which may pass out of
existence at any moment. The truth is, that we are here, as Zeller
has shown,245 in presence of an insoluble contradiction, and we
must try to explain, not how Aristotle reconciled it with itself, for that
was impossible, but how he reconciled himself to it.
 His analysis of individuality was the first step in this direction. We
have seen that he treats definition as a process of gradual
specification, beginning with the most general notions, and working
down by successive differentiations to the most particular. Now, the
completed conception is itself the integration of all these differences,
the bond of union holding them together. Turning to an antithetical
order of ideas, to the material substance of which bodies are
composed, and its various transformations, we find him working out
the same vein of thought. According to the Aristotelian chemistry, an
ultimate indeterminate unknowable something clothes itself with one
or other of the opposing attributes, dry and moist, hot and cold; and
when two of these are combined, manifests itself to our senses as
one of the four elements. The elements combine in a particular
manner to form homogeneous animal tissues, and these again are
united into heterogeneous organs, which together constitute the
living body. Here, then, we have two analogous series of
specifications—one conceptual and leading down from the abstract
to the concrete, the other physical, and leading up from the vague,
the simple, and the homogeneous, to the definite, the complex, and
the heterogeneous. Aristotle embraces both processes under a single
comprehensive generalisation. He describes each of them as the
continuous conversion of a possibility into an actuality. For the sake
of greater clearness, let us take the liberty of substituting modern
scientific terms for his cumbrous and obsolete classifications. We
shall then say that the general notion, living thing, contains under it
the two less general notions—plant and animal. If we only know of
any given object that it has life, there is implied the possibility of its
being either the one or the other, but not both together. On
determining it to be (say) an animal, we actualise one of the
possibilities. But the actualisation is only relative, and immediately
becomes the possibility of being either a vertebrate or an
invertebrate animal. The actuality vertebrate becomes the possibility
of viviparous or oviparous, and so on through successive
differentiations until we come (say) to a man. Now let us begin at
the material end. Here are a mass of molecules, which, in their
actual state are only carbon, nitrogen, and so forth. But they are
potential starch, gluten, water, or any other article of food that might
be named; for under favourable conditions they will combine to form
it. Once actualised as such, they are possible blood-cells; these are
possible tissues; these, again, possible organs, and lastly we come
to the consensus of vital functions, which is a man. What the raw
material is to the finished product, that are the parts to the entire
organism, the elements to the compound, the genus to the species,
and such in its very widest sense is potency to realisation, δύναμις to
ἐντελέχεια, throughout the universe of growth and decay.246
It will be observed that, so far, this famous theory does not add
one single jot to our knowledge. Under the guise of an explanation,
it is a description of the very facts needing to be explained. We did
not want an Aristotle to tell us that before a thing exists it must be
possible. We want to know how it is possible, what are the real
conditions of its existence, and why they combine at a particular
moment to produce it. The Atomists showed in what direction the
solution should be sought, and all subsequent progress has been
due to a development of their method. Future ages will perhaps
consider our own continued distinction between force and motion as
a survival of the Peripatetic philosophy. Just as sensible aggregates
of matter arise not out of potential matter, but out of matter in an
extremely fine state of diffusion, so also sensible motion will be
universally traced back, not to potential motion, which is all that
force means, but to molecular or ethereal vibrations, like those
known to constitute heat and light.
We have said, in comparing him with his predecessors, that the
Stagirite unrolled Greek thought from a solid into a continuous
surface. We have now to add that he gave his surface the false
appearance of a solid by the use of shadows, and of aërial
perspective. In other words, he made the indication of his own
ignorance and confusion do duty for depth and distance. For to say
that a thing is developed out of its possibility, merely means that it is
developed out of something, the nature of which we do not know.
And to speak about such possibilities as imperfect existences, or
matter, or whatever else Aristotle may be pleased to call them, is
simply constructing the universe, not out of our ideas, but out of our
absolute want of ideas.
We have seen how, for the antithesis between Form and Matter,
was substituted the wider antithesis between Actuality and
Possibility. Even in this latter the opposition is more apparent than
real. A permanent possibility is only intelligible through the idea of
its realisation, and sooner or later is certain to be realised. Aristotle
still further bridges over the interval between them by a new
conception—that of motion. Motion, he tells us, is the process of
realisation, the transformation of power into act. Nearly the whole of
his Physics is occupied with an enquiry into its nature and origin. As
first conceived, it is equivalent to what we call change rather than to
mechanical movement. The table of categories supplies an
exhaustive enumeration of its varieties. These are, as we have
already mentioned, alteration of quality or transformation, increase
or decrease of quantity, equivalent to growth and decay, and
transport from place to place. Sometimes a fourth variety is added,
derived from the first category, substance. He calls it generation and
destruction, the coming into existence or passing out of it again. A
careful analysis shows that motion in space is the primordial change
on which all others depend for their accomplishment. To account for
it is the most vitally important problem in philosophy.

III.
Before entering on the chain of reasoning which led Aristotle to
postulate the existence of a personal First Cause, we must explain
the difference between his scientific standpoint, and that which is
now accepted by all educated minds. To him the eternity not only of
Matter, but also of what he called Form,—that is to say, the
collection of attributes giving definiteness to natural aggregates,
more especially those known as organic species—was an axiomatic
certainty. Every type, capable of self-propagation, that could exist at
all, had existed, and would continue to exist for ever. For this, no
explanation beyond the generative power of Nature was required.
But when he had to account for the machinery by which the
perpetual alternation of birth and death below, and the changeless
revolutions of the celestial spheres above the moon were preserved,
difficulties arose. He had reduced every other change to transport
through space; and with regard to this his conceptions were entirely
mistaken. He believed that moving matter tended to stop unless it
was sustained by some external force; and whatever their
advantages over him in other respects, we cannot say that the
Atomists were in a position to correct him here: for their theory, that
every particle of matter gravitated downward through infinite space,
was quite incompatible with the latest astronomical discoveries.
Aristotle triumphantly showed that the tendency of heavy bodies
was not to move indefinitely downwards in parallel lines, but to
move in converging lines to the centre of the earth, which he, in
common with most Greek astronomers, supposed to be also the
centre of the universe; and seeing light bodies move up, he credited
them with an equal and opposite tendency to the circumference of
the universe, which, like Parmenides and Plato, he believed to be of
finite extent. Thus each kind of matter has its appropriate place,
motion to which ends in rest, while motion away from it, being
constrained, cannot last. Accordingly, the constant periodicity of
terrestrial phenomena necessitates as constant a transformation of
dry and wet, and of hot and cold bodies into one another. This is
explained with perfect accuracy by the diurnal and annual
revolutions of the sun. Here, however, we are introduced to a new
kind of motion, which, instead of being rectilinear and finite, is
circular and eternal. To account for it, Aristotle assumes a fifth
element entirely different in character from the four terrestrial
elements. Unlike them, it is absolutely simple, and has a
correspondingly simple mode of motion, which, as our philosopher
erroneously supposes, can be no other than circular rotation.
Out of this eternal unchanging divine substance, which he calls
aether, are formed the heavenly bodies and the transparent spheres
containing them. But there is something beyond it of an even higher
and purer nature. Aristotle proves, with great subtlety, from his
fundamental assumptions, that the movement of an extended
substance cannot be self-caused. He also proves that motion must
be absolutely continuous and without a beginning. We have,
therefore, no choice but to accept the existence of an unextended,
immaterial, eternal, and infinite Power on which the whole cosmos
depends.
So much only is established in the Physics. Further particulars are
given in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics. There we learn that, all
movement being from possibility to actuality, the source of
movement must be a completely realised actuality—pure form
without any admixture of matter. But the highest form known to us
in the ascending scale of organic life is the human soul, and the
highest function of soul is reason. Reason then must be that which
moves without being moved itself, drawing all things upwards and
onwards by the love which its perfection inspires. The eternal,
infinite, absolute actuality existing beyond the outermost starry
sphere is God. Aristotle describes God as the thought which thinks
itself and finds in the simple act of self-consciousness an everlasting
happiness, wonderful if it always equals the best moments of our
mortal life, more wonderful still if it surpasses them. There is only
one supreme God, for plurality is due to an admixture of matter, and
He is pure form. The rule of many is not good, as Homer says. Let
there be one Lord.
Such are the closing words of what was possibly Aristotle’s last
work, the clear confession of his monotheistic creed. A monotheistic
creed, we have said, but one so unlike all other religions, that its
nature has been continually misunderstood. While some have found
in it a theology like that of the Jews or of Plato or of modern Europe,
others have resolved it into a vague pantheism. Among the latter we
are surprised to find Sir A. Grant, a writer to whom the Aristotelian
texts must be perfectly familiar both in spirit and in letter. Yet
nothing can possibly be more clear and emphatic than the
declarations they contain. Pantheism identifies God with the world;
Aristotle separates them as pure form from form more or less
alloyed with matter. Pantheism denies personality to God; Aristotle
gives him unity, spirituality, self-consciousness, and happiness. If
these qualities do not collectively involve personality, we should like
to know what does. Need we remind the accomplished editor of the
Nicomachean Ethics how great a place is given in that work to
human self-consciousness, to waking active thought as distinguished
from mere slumbering faculties or unrealised possibilities of action?
And what Aristotle regarded as essential to human perfection, he
would regard as still more essential to divine perfection. Finally, the
God of pantheism is a general idea; the God of Aristotle is an
individual. Sir A. Grant says that he (or it) is the idea of Good.247 We
doubt very much whether there is a single passage in the
Metaphysics to sanction such an expression. Did it occur, however,
that would be no warrant for approximating the Aristotelian to the
Platonic theology, in presence of such a distinct declaration as that
the First Mover is both conceptually and numerically one,248 coming
after repeated repudiations of the Platonic attempt to isolate ideas
from the particulars in which they are immersed. Then Sir A. Grant
goes on to speak of the desire felt by Nature for God as being itself
God,249 and therefore involving a belief in pantheism. Such a notion
is not generally called pantheism, but hylozoism, the attribution of
life to matter. We have no desire, however, to quarrel about words.
The philosopher who believes in the existence of a vague
consciousness, a spiritual effort towards something higher diffused
through nature, may, if you will, be called a pantheist, but not unless
this be the only divinity he recognises. The term is altogether
misleading when applied to one who also proclaims the existence of
something in his opinion far higher, better and more real—a living
God, who transcends Nature, and is independent of her, although
she is not independent of him.
We must also observe that the parallel drawn by Sir A. Grant
between the theology of Aristotle and that of John Stuart Mill is
singularly unfortunate. It is in the first place incorrect to say that Mill
represented God as benevolent but not omnipotent. He only
suggested the idea as less inconsistent with facts than other forms
of theism.250 In the next place, Aristotle’s God was almost exactly
the reverse of this. He possesses infinite power, but no benevolence
at all. He has nothing to do with the internal arrangements of the
world, either as creator or as providence. He is, in fact, an egoist of
the most transcendent kind, who does nothing but think about
himself and his own perfections. Nothing could be more
characteristic of the unpractical Aristotelian philosophy; nothing
more repugnant to the eager English reformer, the pupil of Bentham
and of Plato. And, thirdly, Sir A. Grant takes what is not the God of
Aristotle’s system at all, but a mere abstraction, the immanent
reason of Nature, the Form which can never quite conquer Matter,
and places it on the same line with a God who, however
hypothetical, is nothing if not a person distinct from the world;
while, as if to bewilder the unfortunate ‘English reader’ still further,
he adds, in the very next sentence, that ‘the great defect in
Aristotle’s conception of God is’ the denial ‘that God can be a moral
Being.’251
The words last quoted, which in a Christian sense are true
enough, lead us over to the contrasting view of Aristotle’s theology,
to the false theory of it held by critics like Prof. St. George Mivart.
The Stagirite agrees with Catholic theism in accepting a personal
God, and he agrees with the First Article of the English Church,
though not with the Pentateuch, in saying that God is without parts
or passions; but there his agreement ceases. Excluding such a thing
as divine interference with nature, his theology of course excludes
the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles, and grace. Nor is
this a mere omission; it is a necessity of the system. If there can be
no existence without time, no time without motion, no motion
without unrealised desire, no desire without an ideal, no ideal but
eternally self-thinking thought—then it logically follows that God, in
the sense of such a thought, must not interest himself in the affairs
of men. Again, Aristotelianism equally excludes the arguments by
which modern theologians have sought to prove the existence of
God. Here also the system is true to its contemporaneous, statical,
superficial character. The First Mover is not separated from us by a
chain of causes extending through past ages, but by an intervening
breadth of space and the wheels within wheels of a cosmic machine.
Aristotle had no difficulty in conceiving what some have since
declared to be inconceivable, a series of antecedents without any
beginning in time; it was rather the beginning of such a series that
he could not make intelligible to himself. Nor, as we have seen, did
he think that the adaptation in living organisms of each part to every
other required an external explanation. Far less did it occur to him
that the production of impressions on our senses was due to the
agency of a supernatural power. It is absolutely certain that he
would have rejected the Cartesian argument, according to which a
perfect being must exist if it be only conceivable—existence being
necessarily involved in the idea of perfection.252 Finally, not
recognising such a faculty as conscience, he would not have
admitted it to be the voice of God speaking in the soul.
On the other hand, Aristotle’s own theistic arguments cannot
stand for a moment in the face of modern science. We know by the
law of inertia that it is not the continuance, but the arrest or the
beginning of motion which requires to be accounted for. We know by
the Copernican system that there is no solid sidereal sphere
governing the revolutions of all Nature. And we know by the
Newtonian physics that gravitation is not dependent on fixed points
in space for its operation. The Philosophy of the Philosopher Aristotle
is as inconsistent with the demonstrations of modern astronomy as it
is with the faith of mediaeval Catholicism.
It remains to be seen whether the system which we are examining
is consistent with itself. It is not. The Prime Mover, being
unextended, cannot be located outside the sidereal sphere; nor can
he be brought into immediate contact with it more than with any
other part of the cosmos. If the aether has a motion proper to itself,
then no spiritual agency is required to keep it in perpetual rotation.
If the crystalline spheres fit accurately together, as they must, to
avoid leaving a vacuum anywhere, there can be no friction, no
production of heat, and consequently no effect produced on the
sublunary sphere. Finally, no rotatory or other movement can, taken
alone, have any conceivable connexion with the realisation of a
possibility, in the sense of progress from a lower to a higher state of
being. It is merely the perpetual exchange of one indifferent position
for another.
We have now to consider what were the speculative motives that
led Aristotle to overlook these contradictions, and to find rest in a
theory even less satisfactory than the earlier systems which he is
always attacking with relentless animosity. The first motive, we
believe, was the train of reasoning, already laid before the reader, by
which universal essences, the objects of knowledge, gradually came
to be identified with particular objects, the sole existing realities. For
the arguments against such an identification, as put forward by our
philosopher himself, still remained unanswered. The individuals
comprising a species were still too transient for certainty and too
numerous for comprehension. But when for the antithesis between
Form and Matter was substituted the antithesis between Actuality
and Possibility, two modes of evasion presented themselves. The
first was to distinguish between actual knowledge and potential
knowledge. The former corresponded to existing particulars, the
latter to general ideas.253 This, however, besides breaking up the
unity of knowledge, was inconsistent with the whole tenor of
Aristotle’s previous teaching. What can be more actual than
demonstration, and how can there be any demonstration of transient
particulars? The other mode of reconciliation was perhaps suggested
by the need of an external cause to raise Possibility into Actuality.
Such a cause might be conceived with all the advantages and
without the drawbacks of a Platonic Idea. It would be at once the
moving agent and the model of perfection; it could reconcile the
general and the particular by the simple fact of being eternal in time,
comprehensive in space, and unique in kind. Aristotle found such a
cause, or rather a whole series of such causes, in the celestial
spheres. In his system, these bear just the same relation to
terrestrial phenomena that Plato’s Ideas bear to the world of sense.
They are, in fact, the Ideas made sensible and superficial, placed
alongside of, instead of beneath or behind, the transient particulars
which they irradiate and sustain.
The analogy may be carried even farther. If Plato regarded the
things of sense as not merely a veil, but an imperfect imitation of
the only true realities; so also did Aristotle represent the sublunary
elements as copying the disposition and activities of the ethereal
spheres. They too have their concentric arrangements—first fire,
then air, then water, and lastly earth in the centre; while their
perpetual transformation into one another presents an image in time
of the spatial rotation which those sublime beings perform. And
although we think that Sir A. Grant is quite mistaken in identifying
Aristotle’s Supreme Mind with the Idea of Good, there can be no
doubt of its having been suggested by that Idea. It is, in fact, the
translation of Plato’s abstraction into concrete reality, and the
completion of a process which Plato had himself begun. From
another point of view we may say that both master and disciple
were working, each in his own way, at the solution of a problem
which entirely dominates Greek philosophy from Empedocles on—
the reconciliation of Parmenides and Heracleitus, Being and
Becoming, the eternal and the changeful, the one and the many.
Aristotle adopts the superficial, external method of placing the two
principles side by side in space; and for a long time the world
accepted his solution for the same reason that had commended it to
his own acceptance, its apparent agreement with popular tradition
and with the facts of experience. It must be confessed, however,
that here also he was following the lines laid down by Plato. The
Timaeus and the Laws are marked by a similar tendency to
substitute astronomy for dialectics, to study the celestial movements
with religious veneration, to rebuild on a scientific basis that ancient
star-worship which, even among the Greeks, enjoyed a much higher
authority and prestige than the humanised mythology of the poets.
But for Christianity this star-worship would probably have become
the official faith of the Roman world. As it is, Dante’s great poem
presents us with a singular compromise between the two creeds.
The crystalline spheres are retained, only they have become the
abode of glorified spirits instead of being the embodiment of eternal
gods. We often hear it said that the Copernican system was rejected
as offensive to human pride, because it removed the earth from the
centre of the universe. This is a profound mistake. Its offence was to
degrade the heavenly bodies by assimilating them to the earth.254
Among several planets, all revolving round the sun, there could not
be any marked qualitative difference. In the theological sense there
was no longer any heaven; and with the disappearance of the solid
sidereal sphere there was no longer any necessity for a Prime Mover.
There is, perhaps, no passage in Aristotle’s writings—there is
certainly none in his scientific writings—more eloquent than that
which describes the glory of his imaginary heavens. The following
translation may give some faint idea of its solemnity and splendour:
—

We believe, then, that the whole heaven is one and

everlasting, without beginning or end through all eternity, but
holding infinite time within its orb; not, as some say, created or
capable of being destroyed. We believe it on account of the
grounds already stated, and also on account of the
consequences resulting from a different hypothesis. For, it must
add great weight to our assurance of its immortality and
everlasting duration that this opinion may, while the contrary
opinion cannot possibly, be true. Wherefore, we may trust the
traditions of old time, and especially of our own race, when they
tell us that there is something deathless and divine about the
things which, although moving, have a movement that is not
bounded, but is itself the universal bound, a perfect circle
enclosing in its revolutions the imperfect motions that are
subject to restraint and arrest; while this, being without
beginning or end or rest through infinite time, is the one from
 which all others originate, and into which they disappear. That
heaven which antiquity assigned to the gods as an immortal
abode, is shown by the present argument to be uncreated and
indestructible, exempt alike from mortal weakness and from the
weariness of subjection to a force acting in opposition to its
natural inclination; for in proportion to its everlasting
continuance such a compulsion would be laborious, and
unparticipant in the highest perfection of design. We must not,
then, believe with the old mythologists that an Atlas is needed
to uphold it; for they, like some in more recent times, fancied
that the heavens were made of heavy earthy matter, and so
fabled an animated necessity for their support; nor yet that, as
Empedocles says, they will last only so long as their own proper
momentum is exceeded by the whirling motion of which they
partake.255 Nor, again, is it likely that their everlasting
revolution can be kept up by the exercise of a conscious will; for
no soul could lead a happy and blessed existence that was
engaged in such a task, necessitating, as it would, an unceasing
struggle with their native tendency to move in a different
direction, without even the mental relaxation and bodily rest
which mortals gain by sleep, but doomed to the eternal torment
of an Ixion’s wheel. Our explanation, on the other hand, is, as
we say, not only more consistent with the eternity of the
heavens, but also can alone be reconciled with the
acknowledged vaticinations of religious faith.256

It will be seen from the foregoing passage how strong a hold the
old Greek notion of an encircling limit had on the mind of Aristotle,
and how he transformed it back from the high intellectual
significance given to it by Plato into its original sense of a mere
space-enclosing figure. And it will also be seen how he credits his
spheres with a full measure of that moving power which, according
to his rather unfair criticism, the Platonic Ideas did not possess. His
astronomy also supplied him with that series of graduated transitions
between two extremes in which Greek thought so much delighted.
The heavenly bodies mediate between God and the earth; partly
active and partly passive, they both receive and communicate the
moving creative impulse. The four terrestrial elements are moved in
the various categories of substance, quantity, quality, and place; the
aether moves in place only. God remains ‘without variableness or
shadow of a change.’ Finally, by its absolute simplicity and purity, the
aether mediates between the coarse matter perceived by our senses
and the absolutely immaterial Nous, and is itself supposed to be
pervaded by a similar gradation of fineness from top to bottom.
Furthermore, the upper fire, which must not be confounded with
flame, furnishes a connecting link between the aether and the other
elements, being related to them as Form to Matter, or as agent to
patient; and, when the elements are decomposed into their
constituent qualities, hot and cold occupy a similar position with
regard to wet and dry.

IV.
In mastering Aristotle’s cosmology, we have gained the key to his
entire method of systematisation. Henceforth, the Stagirite has no
secrets from us. Where we were formerly content to show that he
erred, we can now show why he erred; by generalising his principles
of arrangement, we can exhibit them still more clearly in their
conflict with modern thought. The method, then, pursued by
Aristotle is to divide his subject into two more or less unequal
masses, one of which is supposed to be governed by necessary
principles, admitting of certain demonstration; while the other is
irregular, and can only be studied according to the rules of probable
evidence. The parts of the one are homogeneous and concentrically
disposed, the movements of each being controlled by that
immediately outside and above it. The parts of the other are
heterogeneous and distributed among a number of antithetical pairs,
between whose members there is, or ought to be, a general
equilibrium preserved, the whole system having a common centre
which either oscillates from one extreme to another, or holds the
balance between them. The second system is enclosed within the
first, and is altogether dependent on it for the impulses determining
its processes of metamorphosis and equilibration. Where the internal
adjustments of a system to itself or of one system to the other are
not consciously made, Aristotle calls them Nature. They are always
adapted to secure its everlasting continuance either in an individual
or a specific form. Actuality belongs more particularly to the first
sphere, and possibility to the second, but both are, to a certain
extent, represented in each.
We have already seen how this fundamental division is applied to
the universe as a whole. But our philosopher is not content with
classifying the phenomena as he finds them; he attempts to
demonstrate the necessity of their dual existence; and in so doing is
guilty of something very like a vicious circle. For, after proving from
the terrestrial movements that there must be an eternal movement
to keep them going, he now assumes the revolving aether, and
argues that there must be a motionless solid centre for it to revolve
round, although a geometrical axis would have served the purpose
equally well. By a still more palpable fallacy, he proceeds to show
that a body whose tendency is towards the centre, must, in the
nature of things, be opposed by another body whose tendency is
towards the circumference. In order to fill up the interval created by
this opposition, two intermediate bodies are required, and thus we
get the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire. These, again, are
resolved into the antithetical couples, dry and wet, hot and cold, the
possible combinations of which, by twos, give us the four elements
once more. Earth is dry and cold, water cold and wet, air wet and
hot, fire hot and dry; each adjacent pair having a quality in common,
and each element being characterized by the excess of a particular
quality; earth is especially dry, water cold, air wet, and fire hot. The
common centre of each antithesis is what Aristotle calls the First
Matter, the mere abstract unformed possibility of existence. This
matter always combines two qualities, and has the power of
oscillating from one quality to another, but it cannot, as a rule,
simultaneously exchange both for their opposites. Earth may pass
into water, exchanging dry for wet, but not so readily into air, which
would necessitate a double exchange at the same moment.
Those who will may see in all this an anticipation of chemical
substitution and double decomposition. We can assure them that it
will be by no means the most absurd parallel discovered between
ancient and modern ideas. It is possible, however, to trace a more
real connexion between the Aristotelian physics and mediaeval
thought. We do not of course mean the scholastic philosophy, for
there never was the slightest doubt as to its derivation; we allude to
the alchemy and astrology which did duty for positive science during
so many centuries, and even overlapped it down to the time of
Newton, himself an ardent alchemist. The superstitions of astrology
originated independently of the peripatetic system, and probably
long before it, but they were likely to be encouraged by it instead of
being repressed, as they would have been by a less
anthropomorphic philosophy. Aristotle himself, as we have seen,
limited the action of the heavens on the sublunary sphere to their
heating power; but, by crediting them with an immortal reason and
the pursuit of ends unknown to us, he opened a wide field for
conjecture as to what those ends were, and how they could be
ascertained. That the stars and planets were always thinking and
acting, but never about our affairs, was not a notion likely to be
permanently accepted. Neither was it easy to believe that their
various configurations, movements, and names (the last probably
revealed by themselves) were entirely without significance. From
such considerations to the casting of horoscopes is not a far remove.
The Aristotelian chemistry would still more readily lend itself to the
purposes of alchemy. If Nature is one vast process of transmutation,
then particular bodies, such as the metals, not only may, but must
be convertible into one another. And even those who rejected
Aristotle’s logic with scorn still clung to his natural philosophy when
it flattered their hopes of gain. Bacon kept the theory of substantial
forms. His originality consisted in looking for a method by which any
form, or assemblage of forms might be superinduced at pleasure on
the underlying matter. The real development of knowledge pursued
a far different course. The great discoverers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries achieved their success by absolutely reversing
the method of Aristotle, by bringing into fruitful contact principles
which he had condemned to barren isolation. They carried terrestrial
physics into the heavens; they brought down the absoluteness and
eternity of celestial law to earth; they showed that Aristotle’s
antithetical qualities were merely quantitative distinctions. These
they resolved into modes of motion; and they also resolved all
motions into one, which was both rectilinear and perpetual. But they
and their successors put an end to all dreams of transmutation,
when they showed by another synthesis that all matter, at least
within the limits of our experience, has the changeless consistency
once attributed exclusively to the stellar spheres.
When Aristotle passes from the whole cosmos to the philosophy of
life, his method of systematic division is less distinctly illustrated, but
still it may be traced. The fundamental separation is between body
and soul. The latter has a wider meaning than what we associate
with it at present. It covers the psychic functions and the whole life
of the organism, which, again, is not what we mean by life. For life
with us is both individual and collective; it resides in each speck of
protoplasm, and also in the consensus of the whole organism. With
Aristotle it is more exclusively a central principle, the final cause of
the organism, the power which holds it together, and by which it was
originally shaped. Biology begins by determining the idea of the
whole, and then considers the means by which it is realised. The
psychic functions are arranged according to a system of teleological
subordination. The lower precedes the higher in time, but is logically
necessitated by it. Thus nutrition, or the vegetative life in general,
must be studied in close connexion with sensation and impulse, or
animal life; and this, again, with thought or pure reasoning. On the
other hand, anatomy and physiology are considered from a purely
chemical and mechanical point of view. A vital purpose is, indeed,
assigned to every organ, but with no more reference to its
specifically vital properties than if it formed part of a steam engine.
Here, as always with Aristotle, the idea of moderation determines
the point of view whence the inferior or material system is to be
studied. Organic tissue is made up of the four elemental principles—
hot, cold, wet, and dry—mixed together in proper proportions; and
the object of organic function is to maintain them in due equilibrium,
an end effected by the regulating power of the soul, which,
accordingly, has its seat in the heart or centre of the body. It has
been already shown how, in endeavouring to work out this
chimerical theory, Aristotle went much further astray from the truth
than sundry other Greek physiologists less biassed by the
requirements of a symmetrical method.
After the formal and material elements of life have been
separately discussed, there comes an account of the process by
which they are first brought into connexion, for this is how Aristotle
views generation. With him it is the information of matter by psychic
force; and his notions about the part which each parent plays in the
production of a new being are vitiated throughout by this mistaken
assumption. Nevertheless his treatise on the subject is, for its time,
one of the most wonderful works ever written, and, as we are told
on good authority,257 is now less antiquated than the corresponding
researches of Harvey. The philosopher’s peculiar genius for
observation, analysis, and comparison will partly account for his
success; but, if we mistake not, there is another and less obvious
reason. Here the fatal separation of form and matter was, except at
first starting, precluded by the very idea of generation; and the
teleological principle of spontaneous efforts to realise a
predetermined end was, as it happened, perfectly in accordance with
the facts themselves.
And now, looking back on his cosmology, we can see that Aristotle
was never so near the truth as when he tried to bridge over the gulf
between his two spheres, the one corruptible and the other eternal,
by the idea of motion considered as a specific property of all matter,
and persisting through all time; as a link between the celestial
revolutions and the changes occurring on or near the earth’s
surface; and, finally, as the direct cause of heat, the great agent
acting in opposition to gravity—which last view may have suggested
Bacon’s capital discovery, that heat is itself a mode of motion.
Another method by which Aristotle strove to overcome the
antithesis between life as a mechanical arrangement and life as a
metaphysical conception, was the newly created study of
comparative anatomy. The variations in structure and function which
accompany variations in the environment, though statically and not
dynamically conceived, bring us very near to the truth that biological
phenomena are subject to the same general laws of causation as all
other phenomena; and it is this truth which, in the science of life,
corresponds to the identification of terrestrial with celestial physics in
the science of general mechanics. Vitality is not an individualised
principle stationed in the heart and serving only to balance opposite
forces against one another; but it is diffused through all the tissues,
and bestows on them that extraordinary plasticity which responds to
the actions of the environment by spontaneous variations capable of
being summed up in any direction, and so creating entirely new
organic forms without the intervention of any supernatural agency.

V.
We have now to consider how Aristotle treats psychology, not in
connexion with biology, but as a distinct science—a separation not
quite consistent with his own definition of soul, but forced on him by
the traditions of Greek philosophy and by the nature of things. Here
the fundamental antithesis assumes a three-fold form. First the
theoretical activity of mind is distinguished from its practical activity;
the one being exercised on things which cannot, the other on things
which can, be changed. Again, a similar distinction prevails within
the special province of each. Where truth is the object, knowledge
stands opposed to sense; where good is sought, reason rises
superior to passion. The one antithesis had been introduced into
philosophy by the early physicists, the other by Socrates. They were
confounded in the psychology of Plato, and Aristotle had the merit of
separating them once more. Yet even he preserves a certain artificial
parallelism between them by using the common name Nous, or
reason, to denote the controlling member in each. To make his
anthropology still more complex, there is a third antithesis to be
taken into account, that between the individual and the community,
which also sometimes slides into a partial coincidence with the other
two.
Aristotle’s treatise on the soul is mainly devoted to a description of
the theoretical faculties—sense, and thought or reason. By sense we
become acquainted with the material qualities of things; by thought
with their forms or ideas. It has been already mentioned that,
according to our philosopher, the organism is a system of contrary
forces held in equilibrium by the soul, whose seat he supposes to be
in the heart. We now learn that every sensation is a disturbance of
this equilibrium. In other words, the sensorium being virtually any
and every mode of matter, is raised from possibility to actuality by
the presence of some one force, such as heat or cold, in sufficient
strength to incline the balance that way. Here we have, quite in
Aristotle’s usual style, a description instead of an explanation. The
atomic notion of thin films thrown off from the object of sense, and
falling on the organs of sight or touch, was but a crude guess; still it
has more affinity with the discoveries of a Young or a Helmholtz than
scholastic phrases about potentiality and actuality. That sensation
implies a disturbance of equilibrium is, indeed, an important truth;
only, the equilibrium must be conceived as a balance, not of possible
sensations, but of molecular states; that is to say, it must be
interpreted according to the atomic theory.
Aristotle is more successful when he proceeds to discuss the
imagination. He explains it to be a continuance of the movement
originally communicated by the felt object to the organ of sense,
kept up in the absence of the object itself;—as near an approach to
the truth as could be made in his time. And he is also right in saying
that the operations of reason are only made possible by the help of
what he calls phantasms—that is, faint reproductions of sensations.
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com