Aristotle's Account of the Writings of Aristotle, and reception of his Philosophy.
The preservation of the original writings of Aristotle is a curious fact in literary history. Whilst the philosopher distributed his other property to his surviving family, he left the more precious bequest of his writings to Theophrastus, his favourite disciple and successor in the Lyceum. By Theophrastus they were bequeathed to Neleus, by whom they were conveyed from Greece into Asia Minor, to the city of Scepsis, where he resided. The heirs of Neleus, to whom they next descended, were private individuals, not philosophers by profession, who were only anxious for the safe custody of their literary treasure. The magnificence of kings had then begun to display itself in the collection of libraries, and the works of genius were sought out with an eager and lavish curiosity. It was a taste happy for the cause of literature; to which, perhaps, the example of Alexander's noble fondness for everything connected with intellectual energy had principally led. Aristotle himself, indeed, is said to have been the first to form a library. He was the first, probably, to form one on an extensive scale. The Scepsians, into whose hands his works had now fallen, fearful of the literary rapacity of the kings of Pergamos, resorted to the selfish expedient of secreting the writings underground. The volumes remained in this concealment until at length their very existence seems to have been forgotten; and they would thus have been lost to the world, but for the accidental discovery of them after the lapse of 130 years. His philosophy had been traditionally propagated, for we hear of Peripatetics at this time. Portions, indeed, of his works probably had continued in circulation among the disciples of the Lyceum, serving in some measure as a record of the principles of the sect. Much may have been preserved from memory, for we have little notion now of the impression made by rice roe instruction, when it was the only channel of knowledge to the generality. A peripatetic philosopher, accordingly, Apellicon of Teos, whom Strabo, however, characterizes as a lover of books rather than a philosopher—περιπατητής μάθηται καὶ φιλόσοφος—purchased the recovered volumes, and effectually retrieved them for the world. He employed several copyists in transcribing them, himself superintending the task. Unfortunately, much was irreparably lost, the writings being mouldered with the dampness of the place in which they had so long been deposited. In addition to these damages of time, they were now further impaired by misdirected endeavours to restore the effaced text of the author.
The works of Aristotle thus, through the care and the wealth of Apellicon, found their way back to Athens, their proper soil, though no longer perfect as the author had left them. Here they remained until the spoliation of the city by Sylla. The library of Apellicon was a tempting object of plunder to the Romans, who were now awakened to the value of literature; and Aristotle's works accordingly were carried away to Rome amidst the other rich spoils. At Rome they experienced a better fortune. Aristotle, Tyrannio, a learned Greek, who had been a prisoner of war Philo to Lucullus, and was then enjoying the freedom granted to him as a resident at Rome, was the principal instrument in their future publication. Obtaining access to the library of Sylla, he made additional copies of the writings. His labours were followed by Andronicus the Rhodian, who at length edited the works of Aristotle, at a distance of nearly 300 years from the time when they were composed.
Meanwhile other sects in philosophy had sprung up, and engaged the attention of the world. The Stoics and the Epicureans, among others, had formed their respective parties. Platonism had obtained permanent establishment at Alexandria. The disciples of Aristotle, on the contrary, had to struggle against the disadvantage of the loss of the authoritative records of their master's philosophy. When, however, these records were fully published, they were studied with extraordinary eagerness. A multitude of commentators arose, who exercised a profound ingenuity in explaining the genuine sense of the philosopher. As Aristotle himself by his personal teaching had transcended the fame of his contemporaries, so his philosophy rose up from its long sleep to triumph over every other that had previously engaged the public mind. Platonism, indeed, modified as it was by Ammonius and his successors, continued to be fostered in the early ages of the Christian church, in consequence of the theological cast which it had assumed, and its facility of accommodation to Christian truth. But in the progress of the church, when Christianity demanded to be maintained, not so much by accession from the ranks of paganism, as by controversial ability within its own pale, a more exact method of philosophy was required. Here, then, the philosophy of Aristotle asserted its pre-eminence.
But it was only a partial Aristotelian philosophy that was at first established. His dialectical treatises had been studied during the ascendancy of Platonism, for their use in arming the disputant with subtle distinctions, and enabling him accurately to state his peculiar notions in theology. The same occasion still existed for the acuteness of the expert dialectician, even after the decline of Platonism, in the state of theological controversies. It was still, therefore, chiefly as a dialectical philosopher, through the several treatises which pass under the name of the Organon, that Aristotle was known throughout Christendom. In western Europe, indeed, the cloud of ignorance which had covered the lands with thick darkness, limited the attainments even of the learned to a narrow field. The original language of Aristotle's philosophy was gradually almost forgotten, and the generality were restricted to such parts of his writings as were translated by the happier talent and industry of the few, who shone as luminaries in the night of the middle ages. The peculiar exigencies of the times, probably the taste of the learned themselves, led to the translation in particular of the dialectical treatises. The treatise on the Categories appears to have been the one principally known.
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1 Strabo, xiii. 2 Ibid., xiii., p. 699. Aristotle's account in Euseb. Prep. Ev. xv. 2, speaks of Apellicon as the author of some writings on Aristotle. 3 Plutarch in Sylla; Bayle's Dict. art. Tyrannio, note D; Brucker, Hist. Crit. Philos., vol. i. p. 790. Andronicus flourished about B.C. 60. The rise of philosophy at Rome was contemporary with him. Cicero in Tus. Q. ii. 1, says, "Philosophiae facit usque ad nostram aetatem." He speaks, too, in Fin. iii. 8, of finding "commentarios quaedam Aristotelios," in the villa of Lucullus. Athenæus, i. p. 3, says the books of Aristotle were sold by Neleus to Ptolemy Philadelphus, and conveyed into the Alexandrian library. This may also be true of detached portions of Aristotle's works, or copies of such portions. Aristotle's among Christians. Nor were these translations always made from the original Greek; but, on the contrary, were in most instances versions of versions. For its knowledge of Greek literature, western Europe was indebted to Arabic civilization. The Arabians had, together with their conquests in Spain, imported their knowledge of the Greek philosophy, the seeds of which had been scattered in the East by the learning of the Nestorian Christians. Translations had been made into Arabic, of the Greek authors, and among these, of Aristotle. Jews at the same period were resident in great numbers in Andalusia, the principal seat of Arabic literature; and these, by their commercial intercourse with Christians and Mahometans, served as a channel through which the Greek philosophy was carried on from the Spanish Arabians to the Christians of the West. For the purpose of communication, the Arabic versions of Aristotle were translated into Latin, the universal language of early European literature; and thus was the foundation laid of that scholastic philosophy, through which the dominion of Aristotle was afterwards extended over Europe.
But the occupation of Constantinople by the Latins, in the beginning of the 13th century, was the opening of a new era in the literary history of Europe. Greater facilities were afforded by this event for the knowledge of the Greek language; and Aristotle began to be no longer known chiefly as a logician. His physical, metaphysical, and moral treatises were more extensively explored and studied; though at first objection was made to the physics by the papal authority. He was thenceforth fully recognized under the title of Princeps Philosophorum. His dialectic, indeed, maintained its ascendancy in the scholastic philosophy; but it was not applied exclusively, as at first, to theology. It was carried into those new subjects of inquiry which the extended knowledge of his writings had introduced to the learned. The spirit of disputatious subtlety, which, in the beginnings of the scholastic philosophy, had displayed itself in the quarrels between the Nominalists and Realists, afterwards found employment in the application of logical principles to speculations in physics and metaphysics. At the same time theology became more and more corrupted by the refinements of systematic exposition, until at length the accumulated mass of error became too evident to be borne, and, among other causes, produced a re-action in the reformation of the church.
The abuse of the Aristotelian philosophy, thus mischievously shown, tended greatly to shake the empire which it had held over the minds of men. Had Luther stood alone in the work of reform, Aristotle would have been altogether banished from the schools of the reformed. But his roughness of hand was tempered in this point, as in others, by the milder spirit of Melanchthon.
Melanchthon, though he had too deep an acquaintance with classical literature, not to feel the charm of Plato's writings, yet justly vindicated the superiority of Aristotle's philosophy as a discipline of the mind. He was therefore instrumental in supporting the dominion of Aristotle in the schools, whilst he rejected the errors to which the peripatetic philosophy had falsely administered. Afterwards the disputes among Protestants themselves served to perpetuate the re-established philosophy of Aristotle, and, from the same cause as before, the subtleties of his Dialectic and Metaphysics were studied rather than the Aristotle's more practical parts of his system. Thus, even after the Philos-labours of Bacon in dispelling the mists which the Aristotelian philosophy, such as it descended through the doctors of the scholastic ages, had diffused, Aristotle's works continued to be read and taught in Protestant universities. His philosophy, during an empire of centuries, had occupied so many posts in the field of literature, that no system, however great an improvement, could at once displace it; for we find even Bacon himself, in the process of counteracting it, and introducing his own method, compelled to use a phraseology founded on the dogmas of the scholastic creed.
It is then of great importance to examine the system of Aristotle in its authentic records. Such an examination will convince us that the philosopher is not to be censured for that depravation of philosophy to which he was made subservient; but that, had his system been rightly understood, and pursued in the spirit of its author, the schoolmen could never have found in it just ground for the extravagances into which they deviated. We are compelled, indeed, to take our estimate of it from such imperfect relics as time has spared to us out of a far greater mass of his original writings. Fortunately, however, those relics include a great variety of treatises, affording a specimen at least of his mode of philosophizing in every department of science.
State of Philosophy before Aristotle. General Character of his Philosophy.
Aristotle was the first philosopher who really separated the different sciences, and constituted them into detached systems, each on its proper principles. Before his time philosophy had existed as a vast undigested scheme of speculative wisdom, fluctuating in its form and character according to the circumstances and the genius of its leading professors.
Thus the two great fountains of Grecian science—the Italic school, founded by Pythagoras—the Ionic, by Thales—were both in their principle mathematical; though, when we look to their actual results, as they were moulded by their respective masters, the Italic may be characterized as the Ethical school, the Ionic as the Physical. Both appear to have been drawn from the same parent-source of Egyptian civilization and knowledge. That mystic combination of mathematical, physical, and moral truth exhibited in the theological philosophy of Egypt, found a kindred spirit in Pythagoras. Hence that solemn religious light shed over his speculations. Mathematical truth was the basis of his system. He made numbers the elements of all existing things; the objects of the physical world being conceived by him to be "imitations," or "representations," of the abstract natures of numbers. But the system, as a whole, was a mysterious contemplation of the universe, addressed to the moral and devotional feelings of man. Thales was a philosopher of a much more simple cast. Like Pythagoras, he was devoted to mathematical study. He is said to have instructed the Egyptians how to measure the height of their pyramids by means of the shadows; and several of the theorems of the elements of Euclid are attributed to him. But he did not, like Pythagoras, fall into the error of confounding and blending the facts of
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1 Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, part i. p. 19, ed. Jebb, Lond.; Lewis's Life of Wickliffe; Lewis's Life of Bishop Peacock; Mosheim's Ecclesi. Hist., vol. ii. p. 216, 218, Lond. 1823; Percy's Life of Bishop Grosseteste; Recherches Critiques sur l'Age et l'Origine des Traduct. Lat. d'Aristote, par M. Jourdain, p. 16, 84, 94, Paris, 1819. 2 Melanchthon in Aristot. et Platon., ii. p. 370, iii. p. 351; Bayle's Dict. art. Melanchthon, note K.; Brucker, Hist. Crit. Phil. iv. p. 282. 3 Diog. Laert., in Aristot., exemplum, exemplum facit. 4 Metaph. i. 6, ii. p. 848, Du Val. Metaph. xii. 3. p. 974. Aristotle's natural philosophy with the abstract truths of science.
According to him, it was sufficient to show that water might be regarded as the primary element of all things. He sought no deeper cause in any speculation concerning the mode in which this element subsisted. The successors of Pythagoras and Thales variously modified the theories of those great masters. The physical philosophy, however, of Thales, as the more simple and intelligible, and probably also from the greater intercourse of Greece with its Asiatic colonies than with its Italian, more especially prevailed in Greece; until we find Socrates, who had been the disciple of Archelaus of that school, complaining that the concerns of human life had been abandoned for the subtleties of physics. In the hands of Socrates philosophy resumed its moral complexion. Had it devolved on Xenophon to take the lead as the successor and interpreter of Socrates, things would probably have continued in this course, and ethical science would henceforth have triumphed in the Grecian schools. But the genius of Plato succeeded to the rich patrimony of the Socratic philosophy; and Plato was not one, whose ambition could be content with less than the reputation of founding a school, or whose imagination could be tied down to the realities of human life. The mystical theory of numbers taught by Pythagoras must have possessed a powerful charm for such a mind as that of Plato: at the same time his power of eloquent discussion found its own field of exertion, in speculation on those moral truths with which the lessons of Socrates had inspired him. He had also been a hearer of Cratylus, and through him had been instructed in the theory of the "perpetual flux" of nature, the favourite doctrine of Heraclitus. Plato accordingly applied himself to the combination of these various systems. The theory of Pythagoras was to be retained consistently with the perpetual change of all existing things according to Heraclitus, and with the immutability of nature implied in the Socratic definitions. Definitions could not apply to any perceptible objects, if it were allowed that all such objects were constantly changing; nor could numbers sufficiently account for that immense variety of objects which the universe presented. There must therefore be some existences, independent of the perceptible universe, to serve as the objects of definitions; and there must be also an infinity of various archetypes, corresponding to the various classes of external objects. Hence he devised his doctrine of \( \nu \varepsilon \rho \eta \), or ideas; a doctrine naturally suggested to an imaginative mind, by the fixedness and universality of the terms of language, as contrasted with the perpetual variation of the course of nature. To these abstract natures he assigned a real being, as objects of intellectual apprehension alone, accounting for the existence of sensible objects from their "participation" of these intellectual universals. Thus he raised a structure of physical philosophy on a basis of metaphysics and logic conjointly: or, in other words, philosophy, in its passage through the school of Plato, had been invested with a dialectical character. Dialectic, the science, according to Plato, which speculates on these universals of the intellectual world, was held forth to the student in wisdom as the dominant philosophy, the consummation and end of all sciences.
Such was the state of philosophy when Aristotle began to teach, and in which he had himself been trained: but Aristotle was not a system in which his penetrating mind could rest satisfied. He thought too deeply and accurately, not to discover that this cardinal doctrine of Platonism, the doctrine of ideas, specious as it was, was only a shadowy representation of the real objects of philosophy; and that, in order to rest the sciences on a sure basis, a more exact analysis of the principles of human knowledge was required. He accordingly addressed himself to the task of developing a really intellectual system of nature, in the stead of that imaginary intellectual system which the enthusiasm of Plato had created.
He found the different sciences separated from their roots, and vegetating only as stunted branches on a stock of dialectic unnatural to them. Even dialectic itself, in this state of things, was neglected. Its proper nature was unknown in that conjunction of logic and metaphysics which had usurped its name; and its relation to the other sciences was misapprehended. In overthrowing the doctrine of ideas, therefore, he had to make an entire reform of philosophy. And, in fact, he did appear no less as a reformer of the ancient philosophy, than Bacon was of the scholastic system. In each case, idols were enthroned in the niches and shrines of the temple of science; and the hand of the reformer was required to cast them down and break them in pieces. If indeed we impartially consider the case, we shall find that Aristotle was animated by the same spirit which dictated the method of the inductive philosophy, and that his reform was directed to the same points. It was his object, as well as Bacon's, to recall men, from their unprofitable flight to universals, to the real course of nature; and to direct them in the discovery of sure principles of science.
He was the first, accordingly, to exhibit a particular science drawn out into its proper system. There was, for instance, a great deal of logical and of moral truth scattered through the writings of Plato; but there was no regular statement of the principles either of logical or moral science, no distinct collection of the proper facts of those sciences, until the treatises of the Organon and the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle appeared. We may easily conceive the arduousness and importance of this service in the cause of philosophy. For any reformer to have fully carried it into effect in every science, we may indeed pronounce to be impossible. And we shall not wonder, therefore, that in some instances he should have failed, or have merely indicated the proper path of inquiry.
It was not indeed to be expected, that one trained in the dialectical philosophy of Plato should have emerged at once from the prejudices imposed by that system. Aristotle, though professedly opposed to the realism involved in Plato's doctrine of ideas, yet betrays the power of language over his own speculations, by the importance which he attributes to abstract conceptions as the foundations of scientific truth. It is a delusion, which the simple attention to the phraseology of one language (and there is no evidence that Aristotle knew any other language but his own) is apt to produce. In the analysis of the terms, we lose sight of the merely arbitrary connection between the terms and the objects designated by them, and suppose that we have penetrated into the
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1 Aristotle (Rhet. ii. 23) mentions that Aristippus, alluding to Plato's ambitious manner of expression on some point of philosophy, remarked, \( \alpha \lambda \eta \gamma \alpha \tau \sigma \mu \iota \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \sigma \alpha \tau \omega \) \( \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \), "our friend, at any rate (meaning Socrates), has nothing of the kind."
2 Cratylus found fault with his master Heraclitus for saying that "a man had never been twice on the same river; for no one," he said, "had ever been even once." (Metaph. iv. 5.) This was but a natural extension of the doctrine of Heraclitus.
3 \( \alpha \lambda \eta \gamma \alpha \tau \sigma \mu \iota \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \), \( \alpha \lambda \eta \gamma \alpha \tau \sigma \mu \iota \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \), \( \alpha \lambda \eta \gamma \alpha \tau \sigma \mu \iota \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \). (Plato, Republ. vi. p. 490, ed. Bekker.)
4 \( \theta \epsilon \iota \eta \phi \alpha \lambda \eta \gamma \alpha \tau \sigma \mu \iota \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \) \( \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \tau \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \) \( \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \). (Atticus Platonic apud Euseb. Prep. Eccl. xv. c. 18.)
5 \( \theta \epsilon \iota \eta \phi \alpha \lambda \eta \gamma \alpha \tau \sigma \mu \iota \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \) \( \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \tau \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \) \( \alpha \nu \sigma \alpha \tau \epsilon \tau \omega \). (Aristot. Anal. Post. i. c. 22.)
Aristotle's nature of the thing, when we have only explored the philosophical meaning of the term. Thus Aristotle, whilst he rejected the Platonic ideas, still conceived that there were universal principles in nature, in the knowledge of which true science consisted. He differed at the same time essentially from Plato in his view of these universals. Plato regarded the ideas as causes of the existence of sensible objects; whereas Aristotle considers the universals of which his philosophy treats, as causes of our knowledge of nature. Aristotle did not allow that these universals had in themselves any physical reality independent of the human mind, but he conceived that they pointed to the real internal nature of existing things.
Philosophy, accordingly, under his hands, stripped of its metaphysical mysticism, assumed a logical aspect. The foundations of science were laid in definitions of those essential natures which he conceived to be the substrata of universals; and from these definitions the particular truths of the sciences were to be deduced as a series of consequences.
From this view of the nature of science, it followed that he should employ induction, rather than determine notions; than to arrive at general principles, such as in modern philosophy are denominated Laws of Nature. In order to discover an universal principle, on which a system of science might be raised, it was necessary to state exactly that conception of the mind which belonged exclusively to any particular class of objects. The stating such a conception was, in the phraseology of Aristotle, the assigning of the ἀρχής of the ἔσων, or the giving a definition of the object as it really existed. A notion of this kind required an accurate analysis of thought. Every notion common to other objects was to be rejected; and after the rejection of these, that which remained exclusively appropriate to the object under consideration, was to be assumed as the proper universal by which its real nature was denoted. The process was not dissimilar to that by which the truths of modern science are elicited; except that the induction of Aristotle terminated in universals; whereas the induction of Bacon terminates in general principles; such principles being the utmost that can be obtained from outward observation of objects. It is precisely indeed in this point that the great difference consists between the science of Aristotle and that of Bacon. Aristotle, for example, inquires into the nature of light, and endeavours to define it exactly as it differs from all other natures. This definition is an expression of that universal on which the whole nature of light is conceived to depend. A modern philosopher pursuing the method of Bacon, examines facts concerning it, and, distinguishing those which really belong to it from those which do not, concludes from the remainder some general affirmative respecting it. A modern philosopher often draws a conclusion as to the nature of a thing, as when he infers that light is material, or that the soul is immaterial. But then he does not hold such inferences as universals in the sense of Aristotle, nor does he employ them to interpret the facts of a science. He acquiesces in such conclusions as ultimate principles. He finds, for example, the facts belonging to the falling off bodies on the earth's surface, and to the revolutions of the heavens, coincident in the same general law. He pronounces, therefore, that the principle signified by the term gravity, whatever its nature may be, is the same in both classes of facts. His conclusions at the same time in Natural Philosophy are independent of this assumption, as these would not be affected though the principle of gravitation were proved to be different in the two cases. If you overthrow, on the Aristotle's other hand, a speculative doctrine of the ancient physics, all the conclusions fall to the ground.
We shall wonder the less at the peculiar complexion of Aristotle's philosophy, when we observe that even modern philosophers have been by no means exempt from the realism which language tends to suggest, and which might almost be termed the original sin of the human understanding.
Such, then, according to Aristotle, was the character of philosophy, so far as it was purely theoretic. It furnished the mind with the means of contemplating nature surely and steadily, amidst the variety of phenomena which external objects presented, by fixing it on universal principles, eternal and unchangeable.
But this was not the only view which he took of philosophy. He did not limit it to contemplation alone. He regarded it further as ministering to human life under two other distinct points of view—as it was productive of some effect, and as it instructed us for action. Thus, he distributed philosophy in general into three branches: 1st, Theoretic, 2d, Efficient, 3d, Practical; including under Theoretic, Physics, Mathematics, Theology, or the Prime Philosophy, or the science more familiarly known by the name of Metaphysics; under Efficient, what we commonly term the arts, as Dialectic or Logic, Rhetoric, Poetics; under Practical, the moral sciences, as Ethics and Politics. Whilst, then, in order to a purely theoretic philosophy, he consistently endeavoured to present to the mind the primary elements of thought, attending rather to the order of human reason than to the phenomena of nature, he had a different aim in the two other branches of philosophy, and pursued a different method. In these, his aim was to enable the student to realize some effect, or to attain some good; in Efficient Philosophy, to lay before the mind those principles which constitute the arts; in Practical, those principles by which the goods of human life are attained by individuals or societies. Thus, in both these branches his object was precisely what Bacon's was in the whole method of his philosophy—to increase human power by increasing human knowledge. And he has accordingly adopted, in pursuing them, the same inductive method which Bacon has formally explored in the Novum Organum. We find him in these strictly attending to experience—deducing his speculative principles from facts, and pointing out their application to the realities of the arts and of human life. Under the term τέχνη, indeed, which we commonly translate art, he comprised much more than is understood by art. Chemistry, for instance, might justly be referred to this branch of philosophy, so far as its principles are applicable to the production of any effect. In fact, it corresponds more nearly with science, in the acceptation of the word science by Bacon, or to what is commonly understood by the term "applied sciences;" for Aristotle himself expressly asserts it to be the result of experience—observing, that memory of particular events is the foundation of experience, and that from several experiences art is produced.
So also, in his practical philosophy he directs us not to seek a speculative certainty of principles, but to be satisfied with such a result from the experience of human life. He further even cautions us against treating this department in the a priori method of his theoretic philosophy, in remarking that the doctrine of universal good was an useless speculation in that kind of inquiry. Had he viewed Natural Philosophy in its application to the
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1 Metaph. i. 1; Analyt. Post. ii. last chap. 2 Mag. Mor. i. 1; Eth. Nic. i. 6. Aristotle's arts; he would surely have introduced the inductive method there also; and in truth he has done so, so far as particular departments of nature are explored in his writings in order to particular arts. But his works professedly treating of Natural Philosophy belong to a higher speculation, according to his estimate, than those which concern human life. He conceived the things of the material world to be ended with an unoriginated and indestructible nature, and therefore the eternal objects of scientific truth, whilst every thing belonging to man was temporary and variable. The former, therefore, were not satisfactorily investigated until they were referred to their ultimate fixed principles; but of the latter it was sufficient to obtain such knowledge as the contingency of the objects admitted. He perceived, from his accurate and extensive knowledge of human nature, that there was no ground for that realism in morals which the more uniform aspect of the physical world tended to inculcate. The immense variety of objects to which the appellation of "goods" was applied, impressed on his acute mind the conviction, that there was no one fixed and invariable principle implied by that term; and that the philosophy of moral subjects, accordingly, was to be sought simply in an observation of facts, without endeavouring to trace them to some further principle.
It will illustrate this arrangement of the sciences to look to the Theory of Causation, or the classes into which the ancient philosophy distributed the several principles of scientific truth. Now, the classes of such principles assigned by Aristotle are, 1st, the Material, or that class which comprehends all those cases in which the inquiry is, out of what a given effect has originated. From the analogy which this class has to the wood, or stone, or any actual material, out of which any work of nature or art is produced, the name "material" has been currently given to the class. But it is not commonly so termed by Aristotle, whose description of it is more precise and philosophical. Unfortunately, the adoption of the term "material" has been the source of great misunderstanding of Aristotle's doctrine. It has been supposed to imply that inquiries coming under this head refer to something physically existing, some real object, as wood or stone; whereas, according to Aristotle, it is simply a view of antecedents, that is, of those principles whose priority is implied in any given fact. The material cause, then, is properly an intellectual class of principles—one method of analysis, by which the mind simplifies to its own view the variety of existing objects.
The second class of causes is that to which all inquiries belong, which respect the proper characteristic nature of a thing. To this Aristotle gives the name of ὁρίσις, form or exemplar. It corresponds with what are termed in modern philosophy "laws of nature." According to Aristotle, and to the spirit of the ancient philosophy in general, it is the abstract essence or being of a thing—that primary nature of it on which all its properties might be conceived to depend. Bacon, indeed, has retained the scholastic name "form" in his philosophy, and applied it to denote the generalizations of his philosophy—a general fact, from its excluding all merely accidental circumstances, being in a manner the proper form of the particular facts from which it is deduced.
The third class of causes comprehends all inquiries into the motive or efficient principles of a thing. It differs from the material cause—which it resembles so far as it is an investigation of antecedents—in its reference to such antecedents only as are the means in order to an effect. We may contemplate a given effect as such, and not simply as a mere event; and in that case should inquire into the power by which it was produced, or the Motive Cause. It is to this class that the term cause is popularly applied, by analogy from the works of human art, in which we are able to discern the connection between means and results. Aristotle, however, did not suppose that we could discern any such connection in nature; not intending more by this class than those principles of the mind under which all effects, as such, might be arranged.
The fourth class in the ancient theory of Causation is, what in the language of the schoolmen has obtained the appellation of the Final Cause, or, to express it more after the mind of Aristotle, inquiries directed to the perfect nature or tendency of any existing thing. For example, when we appeal from virtue militant in the world to virtue triumphant in heaven, and derive precepts of duty from this ultimate view of virtue, or of the end to which it is tending, we argue from a final cause in the sense of Aristotle: so, again, when it is contended that the eye was formed for seeing, because its nature is perfected in the act of seeing; or, in general, whenever it is inferred that such is the nature of a thing, because it is best that it should be so. According to modern views, design is always implied in a final cause. In Aristotle, it is a philosophical view of an intrinsic tendency in nature, analogous to the effect of design.
The division of philosophy adopted by Aristotle corresponds with this division of causes. Physical science, as concerned about objects, of which one appears the result of another, or rather of which one is found to be produced after another, is an investigation of material causes. The inquiry is into the law of that continuation and succession observed in the natural world,—what the antecedents are in this course,—what the ultimate principles, to which the mind may carry its analysis of the succession of natural events.
Metaphysics and mathematics, as employed about notions of the mind, are sciences belonging to the Formal Cause. They endeavour to draw forth that secret philosophy by which the mind administers the world of its own ideas; and, in this process, to arrive at those ultimate abstractions, into which all other principles may be resolved, as into their ultimate forms; metaphysics and mathematics differing only so far as mathematics consider ideas of quantity exclusively, whereas metaphysics embrace all our abstract notions.
Dialectic and the arts in general are inquiries into motive causes, since it is by the arts that human power is exerted in producing certain effects. The principles of rhetoric, for instance, are the means by which the effect of persuasion is produced. In order to produce any effect, we must observe what acts, what moves, what influences— The final cause is the science of human actions, or practical philosophy. Actions, being the exertions of inward principles towards some end, cannot rightly be judged of as to their nature, by the view of them merely as effects, but must be considered in their tendency. A compassionate action, for example, may in its actual effect be productive of evil; but we cannot estimate the nature of the action from this result, but must further inquire whether the result was coincident or not with the effect intended; that is, we must inquire into its final cause.
But though this is the appropriate classification of the principles of the several sciences, it does not follow that any particular science is restricted to one particular mode of speculation. The several kinds of causes are all employed as modes of analysis under the same head of philosophy. As all philosophy indeed ultimately refers to the principles of the human mind, so far every science is a speculation of the formal cause. In Aristotle's system of physics, the doctrine of final causes occupies in fact the principal place, instead of being employed, as in modern philosophy, in subordination to the inquiry into the material cause.
**Theoretic Philosophy.**
*Physics, Mathematics, Metaphysics.*
In proceeding to examine in detail the several sciences included in this threefold division of philosophy, and contained in the extant writings of Aristotle, those which he has classed under the head of theoretic philosophy, as being the only proper sciences in his view, naturally come first to be considered. These, as we have observed, are physics, metaphysics, and mathematics.
There is the less occasion for considering these three sciences distinctly, as Aristotle in his treatises of them has not strictly maintained their separation, but has often blended their different principles in the same discussion. In this department of philosophy, he receded less from the dialectical system of Plato, and felt the influence of that system attracting him into its vortex. As Plato, by drawing off the attention of the philosophical inquirer from nature itself to the ideas of his intellectual world, was led to confound all the sciences in one philosophical reverie; so Aristotle, in the theoretic branch of his philosophy, looking to the ultimate principles of the sciences as they exist in the human mind, rather than to the phenomena of each, overlooked their real differences in his mode of treating them. The ground of this promiscuous discussion is to be found in that classification which he adopts of the objects of these three sciences. They are all, in his view, conversant about τὸ ὅλον, or things that are; differing in the mode in which they abstract the notion of Being from existing things. The science which considers Being in union with matter, or as it is evidenced under those variations which the material world presents, is physics. That which considers Being as it is conceived separate from the variations of the material world, though not (probably, he observes) abstracted from matter, is mathematics. Lastly, that to which the name of metaphysics has been given by his commentators, but to which Aristotle himself assigns the name of theology, or the First Philosophy, is the science which considers Being separated both from the variations of the material world and altogether from matter. It appears, therefore, that the objects of his inquiry in each of these three sciences were ultimately the same. He is engaged in all—in investigating those universal principles under which he conceives all existing things are arranged by the mind. For this is the meaning of Being in his philosophy. It stands for any of those conceptions of the mind by which the various natures or properties of existing things are denoted. The sciences, accordingly, not differing fundamentally in his view, he was naturally, though very erroneously, led to combine them in speculation.
Hence the abortive and futile character of his physical philosophy. Instead of looking to the phenomena of the material world, he was employed in deducing consequences from metaphysical and mathematical data; arguing from the mere abstract notions of the mind to the realities of external nature. Thus, instead of being an investigation of the laws of nature, it was an airy fabric of speculative reasoning from assumed principles. Whilst he thought that he was delivering incontrovertible truths of physical science, he was only analyzing the connections of the notions of the human mind, and arranging them under their appropriate terms. No other method, indeed, is open to the philosopher, who would penetrate the veil of the actual phenomena, and establish a certainty of science beyond the concessions of nature, but to resort to abstract definitions. These being once laid down, the truths of science follow by necessary connection; for they are then the mere development of general assertions into the particulars implied in them. But, as it thus appears, the certainty and necessity of the conclusions are simply the consistency with our original meaning. It is absurd to suppose them otherwise, because this would be equivalent to asserting that our meaning was not what we asserted it to be. Aristotle indeed himself allows, that truth of fact and truth of science are not mutually implied in each other. "Impossible and possible, and falsehood and truth," he observes, "are either hypothetical—as it is impossible for a triangle to have two right angles if this is so, and the diameter of a square is commensurate with its side if this is so—or absolute. But absolute falsehood and absolute impossibility are not the same; since, for one not standing to say he is standing, is false, but not impossible; and for a harper not singing to say he is singing, is false but not impossible; but to stand and sit at once, or for the diameter to be commensurate, is not only false, but impossible." Still he perversely sought to unite both kinds of truth in his physical inquiries; and in the vain attempt, lost sight of the absolute truth contained in the facts presented to his observation.
The first portion of his physical philosophy, contained in the treatise entitled *Natural Auscultations*, is devoted to inquiries into the principles of the science; in order to ascertain those fundamental conceptions of the several objects of the science, from which all conclusions concern-
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1 The same principle applies to the arts also, so far as the skill in any art is exerted in action. We then judge of the art so exemplified by its tendency to produce the proper effect; of the wisdom, for instance, of the politician by the adaptation of his counsels to the welfare of his country—not simply by their result, which may accidentally be untoward.
2 *Nat. Anax.* ii. 7, and xiii. chap. 1, 3, and 4. See also *Nat. Anax.* ii. c. 2.
3 De Causa, i. 12, p. 442, Du Val. Also *Metaph.* xiii. 5; and v. c. 12. Theoretic ing them were, in the *a priori* spirit of his physical philosophy, to be deduced. Agreeably to this order of inquiry, he sets out with discussing the question, whether these principles should be ultimately referred to one or more than one, and laying down his own doctrine of three principles, to which he gives the denomination of 1. matter, 2. form, 3. privation. These are the well-known principles, of which so perverse a use has been made by the schoolmen, and which have consequently occasioned much undue censure of the Aristotelian system of physics. That system, indeed, is sufficiently condemned in its *a priori* character, but is guiltless of the absurdity which the scholastic refinements have cast upon it. These three principles are nothing more than general conceptions of the mind, as it endeavours to class the various objects of the sensible universe, and to refer the succession of events without itself to some ultimate unchanging views within itself. It has been already explained what is meant by a material cause, the ἐξ ὧν or ὑπὸ τοῦ of Aristotle. These principles, then, are only different modifications of this cause. They are antecedents, or notions at which the mind ultimately arrives, in an analysis of its complex notions of natural objects; and therefore antecedents, because they must be presupposed in every contemplation of the natural world. The terms by which they are denoted are merely analogical. Aristotle, proceeding on a principle of the Pythagorean school,—indeed the common doctrine of philosophers before him,—argues that, as contraries cannot generate contraries, there must be at least two opposite classes of principles. In the changes observed in the course of the world, one object is succeeded by another; something has passed away, something is produced. Two fundamental notions, therefore, are involved in every contemplation of nature, and these are expressed by the terms Form and Privation; imperfectly characterizing these subtle abstractions, though shadowing them out justly, so far as the relation denoted corresponds with that between the present form of any material object and the previous forms now superseded by it. For example, a statue is a form now constituted in the stead of that infinite multiplicity of figures of which the marble or brass in its unmoulded state was susceptible, and of which it is, as it were, "deprived," in the very act of producing the statue. The very analogy, however, is apt to induce us to suppose that there is something real implied by the terms form and privation in the language of Aristotle. Hence the ridicule with which the statement of privation as a physical principle is commonly received. But if rightly understood, it holds a just and important place in the physical philosophy of Aristotle; and to see the proper nature of it, it should be observed, that it applies no less to immaterial objects than to material. For instance, if we look at man physically, we observe that he is capable of moral improvement. Supposing him, then, civilized and improved beyond his ordinary state, we perceive in such a case a transition from a state of barbarism to a state of culture. The state of culture, then, is the form of which Aristotle speaks; the state of barbarism, which may be in infinite varieties of form, the privation. Or, a person becomes healthy from being diseased; health is the form superinduced, the privation is of every species of disease. But besides those principles which are excluded in the physical constitution of any thing, and so referred to the head of privation,—and those principles in which the peculiar constitution of the thing there is found to consist, and which are therefore referred to Philo the head of form,—there are evidently other principles which remain the same in all variations of form. The actual nature of the physical objects remains unchanged; and the notion, therefore, by which that nature is represented to the human mind, must be respected, in assigning a cause for the physical constitution of a thing; as being an antecedent out of which it proceeded. To this notion, or class of principles by which the ultimate common nature of different objects is denoted, Aristotle applies the name of ὕλη, or matter; this notion being analogous to the stuff or substance of which different works of human art are constructed, as marble or brass is the material of which different statues are made.
Now, beyond these it is impossible to proceed in the philosophy of physical existence. They comprise, in fact, the whole of modern investigations in physics, though these last have been prosecuted in an order exactly the reverse of that of Aristotle. These have ended where he began; but they have had these several principles in view. That *abscissio infiniti*, prosecuted in the inductive method of philosophy, is analogous to the "privation" of Aristotle's system. It is a continued process of separating from any subject under examination, of those natures or principles which do not constitute the proper nature of the subject, and thus gradually narrowing the inquiry more and more, until we have at last obtained some ultimate fact, the proper nature of the thing. This ultimate fact, accordingly, Bacon terms the form of the thing, adopting that expression to denote the law or principle by which it exists. It is the result, we observe, which remains to be affirmed, after rejecting and excluding other principles; or, to speak in analogical language, after the subject has been deprived of all those forms in which its proper nature does not consist. Again, Bacon directs that a collection be made of all those "instances," instances, to which the form in question seems to belong. These instances, so far as they agree in this respect, correspond with the material principle of Aristotle. They exhibit that common nature, in some one form of which the particular nature sought must be found.
Aristotle, of course, did not conceive of these principles according to the view of them here given. The design of his inquiry is, by an analysis of nature, as that term is applied in physics, to obtain those fundamental notions to which all the various notions involved in the speculation of nature might ultimately be referred. For he explains things that have their being by nature to be such as have in themselves a principle of motion and rest, as contrasted with works of art, the principle of which is in the artist. Aristotle's object, accordingly, is to examine this inherent principle of motion and rest, which is the nature of a thing, and to show how it operates in producing the various forms observed in the world around us. His error was not unlike that of one who should profess to give an account of visible objects solely from what they appear to the eye, and who should accordingly describe such objects as flat surfaces, variously shaded and coloured. From this view of the object of natural philosophy, he was led to account for the processes of generation and corruption, and the changes which occur in bodies by alteration, increase and decrease, local motion, mixture. Consequently, he states his ultimate principles of matter, form, and priva-
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1 Nat. Anec. i. 6, p. 322, Du Val. 2 Metaph. vii. 7 and ii.; xiv. c. 8; ἐκ τῆς ἀρχῆς τάλας, ἢν ὁμ., p. 1003, Du Val. 3 Nat. Anec. i. 8, ἡ ἀρχὴ ἀρχῶν ἐστιν, ἢν ὁμ., p. 1003, Du Val. 4 Nat. Anec. ii. c. 1, ἢν ὁμ., p. 1003, Du Val. 5 Metaph. xiii. c. 1, ἢν ὁμ., p. 1003, Du Val. The discovery of the principle to which the denomination of form is assigned, is, in Aristotle's system, as in Bacon's, the ultimate point of physical inquiry. The investigation of the principles of matter and privation is in order to the discovery of the form; which is thus the completion or completion of the process of nature. That principle of self-motion which, according to Aristotle, is the object of physics, is then traced to its effect on the thing produced, and we have obtained the proper being of the thing.
From this view of the principle of form, as the result of a self-working power in nature, results the peculiar character of Aristotle's physical philosophy. He thought it evident, from such facts as the provident care shown by spiders, ants, and other animals, and the service of the leaves of plants in protecting the fruit, that nature intrinsically possessed this power of working certain ends. The form, then, of every physical object being the attainment of such an end, and the form also constituting the being or nature of the object, occasion was furnished for speculating a priori from the supposed perfection, or view of what was best, in any things, to the form or law in which its nature consisted. This mode of speculation was embodied in those maxims of ancient philosophy, that "nature does nothing in vain;" that "nature always works the best that the case admits;" that "nothing by nature is imperfect." The consequence was, that the very point to be ultimately investigated was assumed at the outset of the inquiry, and all the subsequent steps were merely hypothetical. And thus it is that Aristotle expressly asserts the necessity which belongs to physical facts to be hypothetical—dependent, that is, on the assumption of the end pursued by nature, in like manner as the conclusions in mathematics are dependent on the assumption of definitions.
It is curious to observe the traces of such a doctrine in different systems of philosophy, as they appear under different modifications. In some of the older theories, we find indications of it in the hypothesis of two opposing principles, as love and enmity, by which it was proposed to solve those appearances in nature which were adverse to the notion of the tendency of nature to the best. In the systems of Parmenides and of Hesiod, love and desire—in that of Anaxagoras, intellect—were the expressions of this tendency. In the philosophy of Plato, it was evidenced in the rejection of the material world from the class of permanent and real existences; this doctrine being a ready transition from the notion, which attributed the physical constitution of things to their dependence on some ultimate principles. Modern deists have argued in the same way, when they have rejected an account of theoretic things alleged to have proceeded from the Author of nature, because these things did not correspond with what they had determined to be "best" in nature. In Aristotle, on the contrary, it was shown in the opinion of the eternity of the material world; for the perfection of nature consisting in those ultimate forms to which it is tending, the existence of the material world has been always necessary as a condition in order to the end.
The great doctrine of the ancient physics, that "nothing could be produced out of nothing," required no distinct consideration according to the theory of Aristotle. Inquiring into nature simply as a principle of motion, he was only called upon to show how those changes which took place in the material world might be satisfactorily accounted for. It was no part of his philosophy to demonstrate that any particular material, or combination of materials, was employed in the laboratory of nature for effecting her productions and transmutations. All he assumes is, that some material or other is employed in every instance of a physical object, to effect that perfect constitution of it in which its "form" consists. It is not indeed a physical object, unless it is conceived in conjunction with "matter," but provided it has "matter"—that is, has a nature capable of affecting the external senses,—what particular kind of matter it may have, is irrelevant to his inquiry. For example, whether water or air must pre-exist in the production of ether, is not the point with which he is concerned. It is enough that there is in every physical effect a principle of motion operating. It follows, from the existence of such a principle, that there must be some "matter;" otherwise the material effect—the effect cognizable by the senses—would not have been produced.
The analogous inquiry in his system is, which are the prior principles in the order of transition, so that from the presence or absence of these the constitution of any particular body results? What are those which never pass into each other, and which may therefore be regarded as elementary principles of motion?
Hence his detailed investigation of Motion, considered in the technical sense, in which the term is employed in his philosophy, as it is exhibited in physical changes of place, or quantity, or quality; generation and corruption; the action and passion of bodies; and mixture. Hence also his discussion in his physics of questions which, in modern philosophy, are more properly regarded as the province of the metaphysician: as the nature of infinity, time, and place; all which, however, belong to his inquiry, as implied in the various processes of motion.
A speculative difficulty, however, occurred to him in the prosecution of this physical theory, like that which perplexed the material philosophers in respect to the pre-existence of matter. He had to account for the production by motion of a form not previously existing. This he explained by the subtle distinction between potential and actual being. This, in fact, is his analysis of motion. He states it to be an exertion in act of that intrinsic efficacy which is in a thing to produce a particular form.
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1. The doctrine of transubstantiation is wholly built on, and maintained by, an Aristotelian philosophy of this kind. The remark will readily be extended to other refinements of scholastic theology. 2. Hence, he observes, the term nature is metaphorically applied to denote the being, esse, of any thing. (Metaph. v. c. 4.) 3. Nat. Anac. ii. c. 8. Μαλάκια ἐν φύσει τοῦ πρῶτον ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχαίου. De Anima iii. c. 12. Ἐνίκη τοῦ πρῶτον ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχαίου. De Gen. et Cor. ii. c. 10; Polit. i. c. 15; De Caelo et Caeli. ii. c. 10; Polit. i. c. 15. 4. De Anima. iii. cap. 10 and 12; De Caelo. i. cap. 4, and ii. cap. 5, 8, 11; De Gen. et Cor. ii. c. 10; Polit. i. c. 15. 5. Nat. Anac. ii. cap. 9. 6. See Bishop Butler's Analogy. Introd. p. 9; also Origen. com. Cels. ii. p. 102, ed. Cantab. 7. In Cael. ii. cap. 1, he speaks of the eternity of the universe as the only opinion consistent: ὅτι μέντοι ἂν ἦν ἄλλη. 8. Metaph. xiii. cap. 6. Ἡ ἀρχὴ ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς ἐν τῷ ἀρχαίῳ, ἐξ ἣν ἀρχήν ἐν τῷ ἀρχαίῳ ἔχει τὸ πρῶτον ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχαίου. 9. De Gen. et Cor. i. cap. 3. Ἡ ἀρχὴ ἀπὸ τῆς ἀρχῆς ἐν τῷ ἀρχαίῳ, ἐξ ἣν ἀρχήν ἐν τῷ ἀρχαίῳ ἔχει τὸ πρῶτον ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀρχαίου. 10. Nat. Anac. iii.; De Gen. et Cor. i. cap. 3. He considers this power of working ends in nature, as analogous to the skill of a physician working his own cure. Nature, which is thus in his view as an animation or life of all existing things, realizes in herself those principles, which were previously inherent in her constitution, and are then developed, when an actual effect is found to take place. Nothing, therefore, is produced, in his system, which was not before in existence. What already existed potentially, is simply produced into actual being, and manifested to our perception in some physical object. To describe it in terms of modern philosophy, we should say it was a transition from metaphysical existence to physical; from an object of the mind only, cognizable by the internal principles of our constitution, to an object of the external senses—the mind perceiving the principle of motion as a principle—the senses giving us the primary impression of the principle moving or operating on matter.
This doctrine of potential being, transmitted through the scholastic philosophy, and through that perverted to realism, has given occasion to represent a coincidence on this point in the system of Aristotle with the ideal theory of Plato, the very part of Plato's philosophy which Aristotle most directly opposed. But it should be observed, that the forms of which Aristotle speaks, are not like the ideas of Plato, constituent of physical objects. They are the philosophy of nature considered as an instinctive principle of motion—general principles under which the mind classes the operations of physical power, analogously to its own external operations.
Leaving, then, the question as to the material itself, of which physical objects are composed, untouched, Aristotle examines what principles reject and exclude one another in the various changes of the material world. For these are the causes of the transitions of one nature into another, and of generation and corruption: the presence of one involving the privation of all those forms of matter dependent on the presence of the other. What these mutually excluding principles are, he decides by a reference to the sense of touch; that being the proper evidence to us of the existence of body: since, though sight may give us the first notices of the existence of a material thing, it does not inform us of the material nature of the thing; which we infer from the resistance to the sense of touch. Accordingly, Aristotle explains what is sensible to be what is tangible. The contrarieties then ascertained by touch, and which account therefore for all the different forms of matter, are hot and cold, dry and moist; the first two as active principles, the last two as passive. The touch, indeed, informs us of other contrarieties, but they are all reducible to these four heads, with the exception of light and heavy. These last are excluded from the class of physical principles; since, though Aristotle, in common with other ancient philosophers, held them to be positive and absolute natures, he found, that they could not act on each other, and therefore could not affect any physical change. As hot and cold cannot co-exist, nor can moist and dry, these four principles admit only of four combinations, and the effect of each combination is a different element. The combination of hot and dry is fire; of hot and moist, air; of cold and dry, earth; of cold and moist, water. Any one of these elements may pass into another by the privation of one of the combined principles: since then, the contrary principle, which had been only excluded by the presence of its contrary, combines with the remaining one; e.g., water is transformed into air, by the privation of cold, and the consequent combination of hot with the moist which remains; or both principles combined may be superseded by the two opposites, as when fire and water may be changed into each other. Thus there is a subordination of principles wherever the principle of motion is exerted in act. First, there must be matter, that is, a principle susceptible of the contrarieties; then the contrarieties; and last of all the material elements themselves. When the change effected involves an entire change of the material from which it proceeds, the process is that of generation and corruption; but when the change is simply in the affections of some existing body, as when the same person from being unmusical becomes musical, or the food of an animal is converted into its substance, the process is that of alteration.
Thus does Aristotle account for all the changes which take place in the world immediately about us. Whether we observe things produced altered in their sensible qualities, or in bulk, or in place (and to one or the other of these every physical effect may be inferred), the changes observed may be traced to the operation of a principle which is either one of these four already mentioned, or some modification of them; for all the intermediate principles between two contrarieties are to be regarded as contrary, and capable therefore of effecting physical changes in the same manner as the extremes.
But the changes which occur immediately in the world around us, constituted, in the view of the ancient philosopher, a very inferior part of the objects of physical science. The luminaries of the celestial world were regarded by Aristotle as superior to man himself, and the study of their laws as a higher employment of the intellect than the philosophy of human life. Besides, however, the intrinsic excellence of this branch of physics, it demanded his attention from its necessary connection with the full development of his theory of motion. All the other physical changes, it appears, imply local change, which may therefore be inferred to be prior to every other. Further, to keep up the constant succession of generation and corruption which is carried on in the world, there must be some principle ever in actual being; and the revolution of the heavenly bodies continuing incessantly, exhibits a principle of local motion adequate to this effect. Aristotle, accordingly, was led to philosophize on the motions of the heavens, in order to trace up the propagation of motion in this lower world, through its successive impulses, to the prime mover. This being discovered, his philosophy of nature is then completed, since nature is then fully explored according to his analysis as a principle of motion and rest.
His whole astronomy is dependent on those speculative notions which he had adopted, of lightness and heaviness, as intrinsic and absolute properties of bodies. He considers lightness the same as positive tendency upwards, and heaviness as positive tendency downwards. But this view implied that there were certain fixed points, the extremes to which these qualities of bodies tended, and in which they naturally rested as they naturally possessed either lightness or heaviness. Each of the material ele-
ments, accordingly, had its proper place in the universe, corresponding to the degree of lightness or heaviness which he conceived them to possess; absolutely in themselves, and relatively to each other. Fire he placed in the extreme point upwards, earth in the lowest; air next to fire, and water next to earth. Each of these elements, therefore, he argued, as naturally tending either upwards or downwards, moved in a straight line, and could not consequently move naturally in a circle. Hence the earth must be at rest, and therefore be the centre of the universe. For if it revolved round the sun, as the Pythagoreans thought, it would be moving unnaturally, and therefore could not move eternally. Hence, also, no revolving body could consist of any of the four material elements. It must be some other material, to which circular motion was as natural, as rectilinear motion is to earth or fire.
On the ground of such speculative notions Aristotle proceeded in constructing his system of the universe; in opposition to the more enlightened researches of the Pythagorean astronomy, and the records of Egyptian and Babylonian observations on the heavens. In some instances, indeed, his view was more correct. He admits the spherical form of the earth, from the evidence of lunar eclipses, in which he had remarked that it always exhibits a curved outline; and infers its magnitude to be not very great, from the variation of horizon consequent on a little variation of our position on its surface. But, in acknowledging these facts, he was influenced by their accordance with his speculations a priori, as he rejected or misinterpreted other facts from their repugnance to these speculations. For the sphericity of the earth resulted from his theory of gravity. It was the effect of the tendency of all the particles of the earth to the lowest point; this lowest point being a centre of the two opposite hemispheres of the heavens. For, that the whole heavens were spherical, he supposed a necessary consequence of the perfection belonging to them, a solid being the most perfect mathematical dimension. The tendency, consequently, of all the particles of the earth to the lowest point, was a tendency towards a middle; or this lowest point would be a centre round which the earth would adjust itself in a spherical mass.
The reason assigned by Aristotle for the revolutions of the heavens, as appears, then, is precisely opposite to that of modern philosophy. He conceived revolution to be performed, not in consequence of a tendency to the centre, but of the absence of any such tendency in the revolving body. Revolution and gravity are, according to him, contradictory terms. The motions of the several heavenly bodies result from their being carried round by spheres, which consist of this revolving element. That they do not revolve in themselves he considers to be evident from the fact that the moon always presents the same side towards us. They are incapable indeed of Theoretic motion in themselves, he argues, in being spherical, nature seeming purposely to have denied them all power of motion in giving them the form least apt for motion. They revolve, therefore, from being bound in revolving spheres, the first in order of which is that in which the fixed stars are placed, and then the several planets, five in number, the sun, and next to the earth the moon; and to account for the apparent irregularities in the motions of the heavenly bodies, he supposes, following the theory of Eudoxus, that there were as many additional spheres employed in the revolutions of each body as it appeared to have different motions.
The oblique motion of the sun, viewed in connection with the successive renewals and decays of nature, as he approaches or recedes from the earth, suggested the most ready link for connecting the phenomena of the earth with those of the heavens. It is, accordingly, to the revolution of the sphere of the sun, that Aristotle ascribes the continuation of generation and corruption in unbroken series, and the consequent perpetuity of being in the world around us. It might be supposed that generation and corruption would be carried on at equal intervals; but the unequal temperament of material things prevents such a uniformity; and occasions that variety of duration, which we observe in different things within the sphere of the moon, or the limits of nature properly so called.
Still, however, it remained to be explained what it was that imparted to the sphere of the sun, as well as to the several other spheres, their principle of motion. To every thing that is itself moved there must be a mover; and the successive motions, therefore, as communicated from sphere to sphere, must be traced up to some ultimate principle, itself unmoved, in which they originate.
Here, then, we discern the close connection of Aristotle's physics with his metaphysics; and at the same time the ground of his applying to the latter science the designation of theology. The several spheres of the heavens, differing in element from the bodies of this lower world, and pursuing their unceasing and immortal revolutions, presented a distinct class of essences, beings, or substances, to the speculation of the philosopher. To ascertain that in which they moved and had their being, was an inquiry, with regard to them, analogous to his investigation of the principle of motion in the natural world. This principle of motion to these celestial substances would be being itself, or the very vital energy itself in which they had their being. At the same time, in exploring this primary being, he would be tracing those general principles, by which the mind held together the various objects of physical contemplation, to one ultimate law or master-principle, in which, as in a single theorem, all the truths of science should be comprised.
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1 De Caelo, ii. 12, ἐν τῇ ὁλόκληρῃ κυκλικῇ ἀπεικονίζεται τὸ πᾶσα ἡμέρα ἀπεικονίζεται. Also Metaph. i. 1. Herodot. Ennerp. 109. 2 He speaks of it in Meteor. ii. c. 5, p. 562, as shaped like a tympanum. 3 Mathematicians, he says, had computed its circumference to be 400,000 stades, or about 40,000 miles. 4 Hence, he observes, "those who supposed the region about the columns of Hercules conjoined with that of India, and the sea to be thus one mass, seem to conceive what is not very incredible, alleging, as they did, in evidence of their conclusion, that elephants were found at both extremities." (De Caelo, ii. 14, p. 471.) 5 De Caelo, ii. 9. 6 The Pythagoreans connected with this notion the beautiful fancy of the music of the spheres. Aristotle expresses his admiration of the thought, but denies its possibility. The stars move with the spheres, he says, like the parts of a ship with the ship, and therefore can make no sound. (De Caelo, ii. 9.) 7 Metaph. xiv. c. 8. Eudoxus assigned fifty-five spheres on the whole; or, deducting those added to the sun and moon, forty-seven. Aristotle only states this as what may reasonably be thought; leaving, he says, the assertion of its necessity to others more confident, ἐξαρχαίνοντες, than himself, p. 1003, Du Val. Eudoxus of Cnidus went into Egypt about 360 B.C., and introduced the regular astronomy from Egypt into Greece. Aristotle gives him the high praise of recommending his view of pleasure as the chief good, by the distinguished morality of his life. (Eth. Nic. x. 2.) 8 De Gen. et Cor. ii. c. 10. 9 Nat. Anax. viii. c. 4, 5, 6, 8; De Caelo, i. c. 9; Metaph. xiv. c. 6 and 7. 10 Metaph. iii. 2, ἢ μὴ γὰρ ἀπεικονίζεται, ἢ ἀπεικονίζεται, ἢ ἢ ἀπεικονίζεται ἢ ἀπεικονίζεται, ἢ ἢ ἀπεικονίζεται ἢ ἀπεικονίζεται. This intimate connection of theology with metaphysics, in the ancient philosophy, was a natural consequence of the separation which heathenism established between theology and religion. In the civilized states of antiquity, religion was pursued only as a matter of policy, and not as a rule of life to the individual. Whatever was the established creed of the state, it was the recognized duty of the good citizen to support as established.
Not involving any question of truth or falsehood in the particular creed adopted, it readily admitted of any additions of superstition not repugnant to the laws and manners of the state, but imperiously rejected all questioning of the principle itself, that the established religion must be practically adopted. It may be said to have been the great principle of their religion, that it should be no question of truth and falseness. The religious feelings of the human heart were thus unnerved. Their strength was spent in showy pomp or cumbrous ceremonies, if they were not corrupted by demoralizing orgies. In this state of things, the better and wiser part of men were driven into a metaphysical religion. They could not acquiesce in the views of the Deity conveyed in the popular superstitions; and the subject could not but recur to them in the reasonings of their hearts, as soliciting earnest inquiry. They searched for God, accordingly, not seeking what to do, but what to know. Whatever the truth concerning him might be, it was not to be expressed in any acts of adoration. Though the whole world might be found his temple, he was not to be the Holiness of their shrines. Though the heavens were telling of his glory, and the stars were singing together for joy at his presence, yet no praise was to ascend to him in the perfumes of their altars, or the melodies of their choral hymns. Thus, devotion being banished from the heart, reared a tabernacle for itself in the wilderness of a theological philosophy; and thus Socrates and Plato, and Aristotle and Cicero, and other illuminated sages of heathenism, continued, without hypocrisy, professors of the established religion, whilst they sought a purer knowledge of God in the thoughtful abstractions of their own intellect.
Looking, then, at the admirable order of the heavenly bodies, the philosopher saw, in their unvarying regularity, the immutable and eternal nature of the great principle on which their motions depended. He did not, it seems, attribute to them a proper divinity in themselves; for he refers their perpetuity of motion to the ultimate principle or First Mover, the Deity of his system. But he speaks as though they possessed a divine nature, calling them divine bodies, and applying to them the term θεῖοι, or ὅληθεῖοι; which name, he says, was uttered by the ancients with a divine meaning. He also says expressly that we must think of them as partaking of life and action. He must be supposed, however, by such expressions, to be giving only an analogical description of the perfection, in which they display the efficacy of the First Great Principle. Contrasted with the unstable things of the earth, they evidence the principle of motion perpetually operating without interruption; whereas the successions of generations and corruptions about the earth only approximate to the unbroken perpetuity of the heavenly motions. We ought indeed to interpret in the same manner his ascription of power to nature as a principle of motion. It seems as if he was excluding the agency of the Deity; but in truth he is only analyzing one mode of the operation of the First Principle. For he thinks that all things attain the good of their nature, so far as they have something divine acting in them. It is this divinity in them which is the primary source of all perceptions of pleasure; the indistinct apprehension of which he supposes to be the motive of exertion in all things that are capable of action, though they may be unconscious of its being so. Hence it has been maintained, that the doctrine of Aristotle differed but little from the pantheism of Spinoza. The operations of nature, then, as well as the revolving spheres of the heavens, are divine, inasmuch as they illustrate more or less perfectly the animating principle of all motion,—the operation of Deity itself. At the same time, it must be observed, there is no notion of the Deity inculcated as the Creator and Governor of the Universe. It is simply as the Life of the Universe—the Intellect—the Energy—as what gives excellence, and perfection, and joy to the whole system—that his philosophy explores the Deity. It is, in short, pure Being, abstracted from all matter, and therefore only negatively defined as without parts or magnitude, impassible, invariable, and eternal. But whilst his system included no providence, it has the merit of excluding the operation of chance and accident. These, he observes, are not capable of being causes of anything; they are merely descriptions of what takes place contrary to some presupposed design, or some tendency in nature.
In his metaphysics, properly so called, he considers this Aristotle's Philosophy
His First Principle strictly in a metaphysical point of view. His professed object here is, to inquire into "Being so far forth as it is Being, and the general properties belonging to it as such." Having traced the changes which occur about the earth to a fixed principle, he had presented one unchangeable point of view in which the human mind might contemplate the vast and restless variety of physical objects. It remained for him, then, to examine this ultimate principle in itself; and its various applications, or properties, as he describes them, as the foundation of all science.
His employing the term "Being" so definitely, gives the appearance of his being engaged in the investigation of realities here; just as, in his physics, he appears to be describing secret processes of nature rather than philosophizing on the course of nature. Hence we might be induced to think, that in reading the metaphysics of Aristotle we are exploring the mysteries of ontology. The expressions indeed of Aristotle, and perhaps his example in some parts of his metaphysics, afforded occasion to the ontology of the schools. Aristotle, however, is not to be charged with the realism and absurdity of that system. These may be traced chiefly to a circumstance already adverted to—the introduction of Aristotle's philosophy into the western church by the medium of Latin translation. The term *ousia*, by which he denotes existence in the abstract, as distinct from any object of which it is affirmed, having been rendered in Latin by *substantia*; it came to be supposed, that the natures or principles represented by the term had a real subsistence. Thus the doctrine of Aristotle respecting Being, was understood in a sense precisely the reverse of that which the philosopher himself intended. The analogy on which the application of the term *substantia* to metaphysical subjects was founded, became obscured by the actual force of the term itself. Instead of its being regarded as denoting only a relation between our conceptions corresponding to that between a thing supported and what supports it, the idea was suggested of a reality, or even of a material nature, as implied by the term.
Rightly, however, to understand Aristotle's notion of Being, as it is the object of metaphysics, we should distinguish between Being, as it is in nature generally, and as it is in the human mind in particular. For it is in this last sense that it must be understood, when it is stated, that Being abstracted from all objects whatsoever, is the object of the universal science; since there is no other sense, in which a Being which is not in any thing can be conceived, but as it is the pure object of intellect, or is in the intellect solely. Looking, then, at nature at large, we must apply Being, in its first and proper sense, to individual objects really existing; and in a secondary sense, to the attributes of such; because, the first notion of Being in nature is suggested by the actual existence of the object; and our next notions result from the operations of our minds about the object already presupposed in existence. But the case is different, when the objects whose being we are considering, are objects of intellect in themselves. Here the abstract notions of things are the first in order; these are, relatively to the mind, the realities about which it is engaged; whereas the actual objects in nature are, in this point of view, the secondary beings. The reason is, that an object of the mind, as such, exists in its proper nature when it is entirely abstracted from all matter, but loses that nature in proportion as it is conceived in any actual form of physical being.
Hence, in the science of metaphysics, the proper if not the only substance, or *ousia*, is the form or abstract nature of things. This, as explained by Aristotle, is the exemplar or representation in the mind of a thing as it exists in nature. As, then, the primary substances in nature are the things themselves as they are found and observed in nature, so the primary substances in the world of the mind are those abstract forms by which the truth and reality of things are there shadowed out. The science of metaphysics, then, is strictly conversant about these abstract forms, just as natural philosophy is conversant about external objects of which the senses give us information.
The object, then, of Aristotle in his metaphysics, is to explain the nature of those general principles, by which the mind represents to itself the objects without it as they really are; which principles are thus the foundations of all philosophical truth. Hence, in the technical language of ancient philosophy, he describes this science as the science of First Causes—the First Philosophy—or by the general title of Philosophy. But a science such as this is precisely what modern writers have designated by the Philosophy of the Human Mind, though they have differed from Aristotle in their mode of investigation: they having directed their attention principally to the operations of the mind, whilst he has confined himself, in this department at least of his philosophy, to the objects about which the mind is conversant.
In his inquiry into these principles, Aristotle had to encounter two extremes of opinion maintained by philosophers before him—the doctrine of Protagoras, Empedocles, and others, who held that there was no fixed standard of such principles in nature, but that every thing was relative to human perception; and the ideal theory of Plato, which, by the hypothesis of self-existent universals, introduced a subtle materialism into the philosophy of mind.
He points out the practical absurdity of the former opinion, according to which contradictories were equally true, and every proposition was equally true and equally false—by asking, why a man walks to Megara, and does not remain still, thinking that he is walking; why he does not step down a well or a precipice, as it may happen, the first thing in the morning, but uses caution, as not equally convinced that the falling in is a good, and not a good? Again, that men do not regard all notions as equally true, is plain, he observes, from this, that no one who may have supposed himself during the night at Athens, when he was in Libya, walks to the Odeum. He refutes, however, this sceptical doctrine more expressly, by distinguishing between the reality of things as they exist absolutely or relatively to our perceptions. There may be no reality of Being, either in things perceived or in the perceptions, these being affections of the percipient power. But it is impossible that there should not really exist some subject-things which produce the perception, and are independent of perception. Whereas those who make being dependent on perception, by asserting that whatever appears is true, imply that nothing would exist if there were no living creatures. Hence it appears that Aristotle virtually admits the distinction made by Theoretic modern metaphysicians between the primary and secondary qualities of matter. He affirms, that whilst we have ideas of things without us which are simply our own perceptions, or acts of the perceiving mind, there must also be some really existing natures without us on which these perceptions are founded.
The ideal theory of Plato tended to the same scepticism as the doctrine of these elder philosophers, but on a different principle. Plato destroyed all the certainty of our knowledge, by fixing the objects of it entirely out of the range of human intellect, and teaching men to abandon nature and experience in the pursuit of imaginary beings—the ideas, or archetypes of the beings of the sensible world. He established in his system other beings separate from nature as the objects of philosophy, whilst his predecessors denied that there were any proper objects founded in nature. But both he and they equally removed all grounds of conviction from the mind of man. Aristotle, accordingly, strenuously combats the doctrine of ideas as adverse to all sound speculation. He loses no opportunity, in the course of his discussions, of alluding to it and refuting it. He considers it as overthrowing all science, by multiplying, instead of reducing to certain definite principles, the variety of the objects of contemplation. "It is like," he says, "any one wishing to reckon, but who, thinking himself unable when he had less, should make more, and then reckon."
The ideal theory was, as we have before remarked, a modification of the Pythagorean theory of numbers, or a mixture of logical and mathematical truth. Hence the importance assigned by Plato to mathematics, as introductory to the philosophy of ideas. The theory of Pythagoras was, it seems, purely mathematical. What he called numbers, appear to have been imaginary limits to which, as to their ultimate ratios, he referred the proportions observed in the universe. Plato proceeded a step further, and endeavoured to realize these ultimate natures by the help of the abstractions of language; but still retained so much of the mathematical conception of them, as to make the science of them dependent on the knowledge of mathematics; describing the objects of mathematics as intermediate to the ideas and sensible objects.
Aristotle shows, then, in opposition both to the Pythagoreans and to Plato, that there are no such principles as numbers really existent in nature as primary and constituent elements of things.
There is no point, in fact, on which Aristotle has spoken more plainly and decisively, than on the non-existence of universals. It is to individuals alone that he allows a real existence. He remarks, that when any principle is asserted of several things, it is by analogy; as in fact there are distinct principles in each distinct thing; "for what belongs to each thing, is the principle of whatever belongs to each." Thus, "whilst the universal man is the principle of man, Peleus is the father of Achilles—your own father of yourself." In things generically distinct, as colours and sounds, the principles differ, but are the same by analogy. In things specifically the same, the principles differ, not in species, but as they are distinct in each individual; e.g. the matter, the form, and the moving power, are distinct in this and that man; but in the general principle, τὸ καθ' ἅπαν λόγον, they are the same. So clearly has he laid it down, that none but individuals have a real existence, and that all other beings are relations, or results of the operation of our minds about individuals.
In extending our survey to the several subjects included in the metaphysics of Aristotle, we must remember, that the science of which he is treating had hitherto been blended with logic under the general name of dialectic. It was hardly to be expected, therefore, that Aristotle, in making the separation, should altogether forget the prejudice which had united them. Nor must we wonder, therefore, that much of the work should be employed in discussing the meaning of terms, and in observations addressed rather to the disputant in words, than to the inquirer into the principles of philosophy. But we should be too hasty in judgment, if we condemned such discussions as foreign to the purpose of the metaphysician. The accurate examination of the notions expressed by such terms as being, oneness, sameness, contrariety, power, is illustrative of the connections of our ideas; for these terms are not dependent on the peculiarities of any one language, but are uniform characters of human thought. It is a curious and important inquiry, accordingly, to ascertain that connection of ideas of which these terms are the general expressions; to trace, e.g. all the various modes of thought to which we apply the term contrariety, or which we characterize under the general description of qualities.
The inquiry into the mind, considered in itself as a principle of life and thought, forms, as we have already hinted, no part of Aristotle's metaphysics. In his philosophy such an inquiry belongs to physics, since he regards mind as a principle connected with matter. This inquiry he has prosecuted in a Treatise On the Soul, and in several smaller treatises On the Parts and Motions of Animals, On Perception, On the Duration of Life, Youth and Old Age, Life and Death, Respiration, Memory, Sleep and Waking, and Dreaming; to which may be added also the book On Physiognomy, and his larger work the Treatise on Animals, which, though properly a work of natural history, is also illustrative of the nature of Soul, considered as the living principle in all animated beings. In these several works, it may be observed on the whole, there is less of mere speculation, and a more open display of that power of real philosophy, the διάνοια αὐτούς, which he so eminently possessed. We find him stating and examining facts, drawing from them conclusions in the spirit of a modern inquirer, and at the same time with the severe accuracy of his own method.
The ingenuity of the ancient philosophers was exhausted in attempting to assign the nature of the soul or living principle. There was no one of the elements, except earth, which did not find its advocate in some theory of the soul. It was represented also as a combination of all elements, or as blood, or intrinsic motion, or a harmony and conjunction of contraries. Aristotle, pursuing the system of his physics, wisely avoids endeavouring to refer the soul to any particular class of material objects, explaining the nature of it, as it is an instance of the union of the two principles, matter and form, in a common result. It is an instance of the principle of matter, so far as there must be an organized body susceptible of life in every thing that lives. It is an instance of the principle of form, so far as that nature, in which the life of the creature consists, is perfectly developed in the animated body. His definitions... Theoric accordingly, maintains the distinctness of body and soul as two principles combined, without defining what the soul is in itself. He illustrates their union by the analogy of the eye and the sight. There must be the eye in order to sight; but the eye, though perfect in its structure, is not an eye unless the principle of sight be superadded to it.
Thus, considering the principle of life as distinct from the organized system in which it is evidenced, he proceeds to inquire into its peculiar laws, by examining the mode of its operation. He divides its mode of operation into five classes, according to the objects about which it is exercised. It is, 1st, a principle of nutrition, in which respect it is common to vegetables and animals; 2dly, of perception; 3dly, of appetites and affections; 4thly, of intellect; 5thly, of locomotion. Wherever there is perception, there are also, he states, appetites and affections, and consequently all these modes of operation of the living principle are evidenced in brutes, with the exception of intellect, which belongs to man exclusively.
His observations on perception are highly important, as tending to show the existence of living powers in animals, distinct from the organs by which those powers are displayed. He affirms that there is always a medium interposed between the perceiving power and the object perceived,—appealing to the sense of sight. Sight, he observes, is not produced by placing the object on the eye, nor yet can be produced by the object itself at a distance, and consequently must result from something intervening between the eye and the object, so as to make an impression from the object on the eye. He mistook, indeed, the nature of this medium, conceiving light to be the active development of the abstract nature of transparency in some body, as in air or water, and not material or capable of motion. But the conclusion itself is just; and it shows that the eye perceives only as an instrument of communication with external objects to an internal power of the soul. The senses which appear to militate with this conclusion are those of touch and taste, which seem to be produced immediately, without any interposed medium. But there is no reason, he argues, to conclude the flesh to be the feeling power in itself because it acts instantaneously; for an artificial membrane spread over the body would produce the like instantaneous effect; and supposing the air to grow all around us, we should in like manner have immediate perception of all objects of sense, and thus appear to have perceptions of sight, and hearing, and smelling, by one sense.
Perception, then, according to Aristotle, is the power of the soul to receive immaterial impressions from material objects, as the wax receives impressions of a seal without the brass or gold of which the seal is made. The impressions thus received he regards as the basis of all our knowledge, insomuch that a creature destitute of perception would be incapable of understanding and learning. Touch is the sense indispensable to existence, and the only one so indispensable. All the other senses, he says, have been added for the good and perfection of the animal—τὸ ἀνάγκης. The sensations are distinct, however, from the ideas of the mind. The sensations in themselves are never delusive,—the same thing is always sweet or always bitter; but they may be followed by different ideas in different minds. To a sick person, what is naturally sweet may seem bitter, or, from accidental position with respect to the spectator, an object may appear different from what it is; as, for example, the apparent diameter of the sun. To the ideas thus formed immediately from perception, Aristotle gives the name of phantasms; and the power of perception thus modified he calls phantasia or imagination. The delusiveness sometimes attributed to the senses themselves originates in this faculty of imagination consequent on sensation. Together with memory, it constitutes the whole intellectual nature of brutes. In man it furnishes the first notices in order to the operation of his intellect. By the operation of the intellect on these notices the first simple ideas are formed, from which the mind proceeds to its complex and general notions.
In considering the nature of the intellect, Aristotle introduces an important distinction between the mere capacity or faculty of knowledge, and the actual knowledge possessed by the mind; that is, between the intellect and the principles of the intellect. He employs the well-known illustration of "a writing tablet in which nothing is actually written," to distinguish the thinking faculty in itself from the thoughts with which it is furnished. But he does not suppose, as this illustration might suggest, that ideas are objects distinct from the mind itself. Where the object of thought is itself immaterial, as when the mind is reflecting on itself, there, he observes, the thinking power and the object of thought are the same. He conceives, however, that the mind is capable of existing without thinking, and consequently does not resolve the whole understanding of man into consciousness. Hence, according to him, whilst the passive intellect, or the mind as it consists of principles with which the senses have furnished it, perishes, the active intellect, the power itself by which we think, exists in its proper nature when separate, and is immortal and eternal.
It may be perceived, from this view of Aristotle's Theory of the Soul, how far he acknowledged the immortality of man. So far as the nature of man is purely intellectual, he conceived it capable of existing separately from matter, and in some sense divine; but so far as it consisted of affections, which he describes as λόγοι συλλογικοί, principles in matter, he regarded it as mortal and necessarily perishable with the body. He pronounces nothing of the nature of that immortality which he thus attributes to the intellect, speaking of it in a rhetorical manner rather than with the precision of philosophy. At any rate, as only asserting an immortality of such an abstract and undefined nature, he seems not unjustly to have been represented... Efficient Philosophy.
Dialectic.
Aristotle, we have remarked, was the first to separate the proper science of Dialectic from that confusion with Physics and Metaphysics in which it had been entangled and perverted. In doing this he laid the foundation of a sound and practical logic. There was a basis of truth, he saw, in the doctrine of Plato, which referred our knowledge of all sensible objects to certain abstract universal natures, the objects of pure intellect. But he saw also that Plato had entirely overthrown the right application of the doctrine, by imputing to these universals a real being; and, instead of treating them as the causes simply of our knowledge, identifying them with the actual ele-
ments or grounds of existing things. Having stated, therefore, the proper nature of these universals to be that of conceptions of the mind, by which it represents to itself things as they really are, and in this sense speculated on them abstractedly in the Metaphysics, he further considers them, in the treatises of the Organon, as they are employed dialectically, or are subservient to the communication of knowledge between man and man. There was indeed another view of the application of these universals, and prior to that of their employment in discourse, which remained to be considered: This was their use in enabling the mind to connect the phenomena of nature, or as they are properly the causes of our knowledge. But the state of philosophy in his time did not lead him to such an investigation. It was reserved for an age of more diffused civilization, and the adventurous genius of Bacon, to display the principles of that analysis by which the mind arrives at general principles, and obtains a real science of nature. The practice of colloquial discussion on questions of philosophy, recommended as it was by the instructiveness and interest of the conversations of Socrates, attracted the attention of the Greek philosophers to the mode of establishing conviction by deductions from admitted principles. Aristotle, accordingly, in elucidating the nature of universals as the causes of our knowledge, was naturally diverted from the higher path of investigation, to explore them as they acted through the medium of language. In pursuing this inquiry, he laid down the principles of a general science, applying to argumentation as such, to the inferences of the reasoner from probabilities, as well as to the most rigid demonstrations of the mathematician.
Dialectic, in its widest sense, is the method of deducing the probabilities on either side of a question, so framed as to involve one of two contradictory propositions in the answer, according as the affirmative or negative of it is taken. The discussions to which the term Dialectic refers being carried on by a series of questions and answers, the design of the art was, to furnish the means of sustaining these intellectual exercises, by supplying not only principles of correct reasoning, or rules of logic properly so called, but various modes of proof and helps to the invention of arguments. To have a ready command of propositions on any given point, and of objections that might be brought against it, so as to be completely armed for debate, was the perfect accomplishment of the dialectician. This most obvious application of the science produced unfortunately, in the haste to supply arms for the disputant, instead of a philosophy of language, a misnamed science, conversant only about the intricacies of verbal quibbling. Zeno the Eleatic, Euclid of Megara, and Antisthenes, took the lead in framing systems according to this view of Dialectic. Nor do the dialogues of Plato, though rich in examples of reasoning, suggest any more just and exact method. Hence the logic which prevailed at the time of Aristotle, and which, from the long concealment of his writings, continued, even after his improvements in this branch of philosophy, to be the
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1 Origen c. Cel. ii. p. 67, ed. Spence. 2 It was the authority followed by Pliny in his Natural History. Pliny, viii. 16, says in allusion to it, "vir quem in ilia magna secutorum ex parte praefandum roer." 3 So called in contradistinction to Zeno the Cittian, founder of the Stoics, from Vella in Italy, his birth-place. 4 The treatise on plants edited with his works is acknowledged by critics not to be Aristotle's, but that of Theophrastus. The treatise De Mundo may also be regarded as now decidedly rejected from the number of his works, as also the Collection of Wonderful Narrations, and perhaps the Fragment on the Winds; the internal evidence of these tracts being against their imputed authorship. It is very probable that the works of Theophrastus were mixed with those of Aristotle, from the circumstances already mentioned respecting the transmission of the volumes of Aristotle. 5 Anal. Priori. I. c. 1 and 30. Anal. Post. I. c. 11. 6 Top. viii. cap. 5 and last chapter; Cicero De Fin. ii. cap. 6, and Top. ad Trob. cap. 2. Aristotle's Philosophy
system of the Greek schools, was a mere collection of subtile points of argument, without any attempt to analyze the process itself of argument. His Dialectic is the reformation of that irregular and perplexed system. Whilst he adopts and explains the general notion of the science, as a method of defending or impugning an opinion, he takes a larger, more philosophical view of the subject; investigating the grounds, both in the nature of language and in the connections of thought, on which all arguments must rest. Hence his just boast, that, "with regard to the dialectic art, there was not something done and something remaining to be done,—there was absolutely nothing done;" for those who professed the art of disputation resembled the rhetoricians of Gorgias's school. As these composed orations, so the other framed arguments which might suit, as they imagined, most occasions. These their scholars soon learned. But they were in this manner only furnished with the materials produced by the art,—the art itself they did not learn." He goes on in the same passage to observe, that "upon rhetoric much had been written; but on the art of reasoning, nothing. The whole of what he had composed on that subject was from himself;"—that he had "derived no benefit from former labours:" expressing his hope, accordingly, that what he had "left undone would be forgiven, and that what had been done would meet with a favourable acceptance."
It is a singular fact in the history of science, that his labours in this arduous work should have suffered an unjust depreciation in modern times, by being estimated in contrast with the analysis of Bacon: whereas, according to his own challenge, and as the reason of the case suggests, they admit only of comparison with the efforts of his predecessors, and of the Stoics, who, though following him, wrought upon the ancient model of the science, and exhibited that in its utmost perfection. If we compare the method of Aristotle with what is known of the wrangling discipline of the Stoics, we shall then judge with more fairness of the philosophical character of his labours. His disciples were content to be ignorant of such dialectic as the Stoics taught, though, from the untoward prevalence of that system down to the time at least of Cicero, it has probably been often confounded with that of Aristotle, and thus reflected its own disrepute on his more scientific system.
With the method, however, of Bacon, the Dialectic of Aristotle has no natural rivalry. In the period of literature preceding the researches of Bacon, it happened that ingenious men, with a natural devotedness to the studies by which their minds had been moulded, sought to resolve the mysteries of science by a profound Aristotelian philosophy. Thus were principles of physics and metaphysics mixed up with the theory of language; as, on the other hand, principles belonging to the theory of language were previously applied to the analysis of nature. The writings of Aristotle were regarded as a kind of Scriptural philosophy, beyond which there was no appeal in controversies of science. And when an authority of this kind is once established, it is easy to see that a philosophy of mere words will soon follow. Expounding and commenting on the text of the master supersedes the questioning of nature herself, just as a mere textual theology supersedes an enlarged study of the facts and scheme of Divine revelation. But this perversion is not to be regarded as the tendency of Aristotle's philosophy. Practically, indeed, he does not altogether keep clear of the seductions of realism; but in him it is only a practical infirmity. Theoretically, he was perfectly aware that "the subtlety of nature far exceeds the subtlety of human intellect;" and that, accordingly, to ascertain what things are, we must know them otherwise than according to dialectic. He would have dialectic employed for the purpose of stating and examining all the questions and difficulties belonging to any subject—not to supersede an acquaintance with phenomena. He observes, that when, in inquiries concerning what a thing is, men are ignorant of the circumstances connected with it, they pronounce only dialectically and emptily; thus pointing out the futility of applying an instrument of discussion to the business of philosophical investigation. So far, then, as dialectic, by sifting a question thoroughly, clearing up apparent inconsistencies, and pointing out where the truth lies, may be regarded as an organ of philosophy, so far Aristotle authorizes the inquirer to employ it. It may serve as the precursor and companion of investigation, but not as the substitute; and thus he describes it as a method of "trying," ἐπιστροφήν; whereas philosophy is a method of "knowledge," γνῶσις. It is quite opposite to his idea of dialectic to suppose it capable of furnishing principles. These, he expressly says, belong to the several sciences, by which they must be supplied to the dialectician according to the matter in hand. To the philosophical disputant they are the data with which he sets out; or rather, so far as he is concerned with them, the hypotheses which he proceeds to discuss in their various points of view, tracing their connections with, or opposition to, other principles. Aristotle, therefore, evidently did not intend that the philosopher, as such, should rest in the speculations of dialectic; and though he has not provided in his writings an instrument of investigation, giving only indirect hints of such a method, he supposes it actually resorted to in practice by the philosopher. His Dialectic, accordingly, instead of being put in contrast with the Novum Organon, is to be regarded as an auxiliary system, introductory to the latter, and enforcing its use.
The error of the scholastics in applying dialectical principles to the philosophy of nature, arose from their ignorance of the nature of philosophical truth. They do not seem to have been aware that philosophical principles are but expedients which the mind adopts for arranging the various objects of nature: otherwise, they would have seen that a science conversant wholly about the connections of our notions as expressed in language, could have no subserviency to the investigation, properly so called, of other sciences. When the facts of this science were reduced to certain fixed principles, the whole object of the science was accomplished—the result would be a philosophy of language; and to carry this philosophy into other matters, was an incongruity like that of uniting principles of mathematics and ethics. There was at the same time a ground for their error, in the universality of language, as the medium by which the truths of every science are expressed; and its comprehensiveness, as it has the power of signifying by single terms an immense variety of objects. These imposing attributes of language gave at least the semblance of philosophizing to their *a priori* speculations. But had they studied more sincerely the writings of their master, they would have seen the real use to which the universality and comprehensiveness of language might be applied, without trespassing on the legitimate province of investigation.
A slight consideration of the nature of language may suffice to show the proper business of Dialectic. Language is the record of the observations of mankind on the course of nature. It is, as it were, a popular philosophy. Whatever may be its origin—whether words be merely conventional signs, as Aristotle teaches—or have a foundation in the nature of the things denoted by them—still, their application to observed facts in the course of nature, is the result of the operation of the human mind; and words, in this use of them, are the creations of the intellect. The intellect takes up and applies the existing signs furnished by language, however derived, to mark and preserve for its future direction the dictates of its past experience. Thus, the application of the term "burning" to the observed effect of fire on a combustible body, is an act of the mind recording its experience of that effect. Having recorded its experience by this term, it thenceforth uses the term as a substitute for the actual experience. Proceeding on that fundamental law of human belief and action, that all things will continue in their observed course, it trusts to the word thus obtained as a guide to future conduct. It is sufficient to say that any thing "burns," to give us a representation of the effect of fire, and direct us in our actions with regard to that thing. Accordingly, by the use of terms, observations, in themselves individual facts, are generalized. The term, originally the record of a single experience, serving practically in the stead of a repeated experience, comes to stand for a number of individuals. From its practical application to a multitude of similar events, it obtains a speculative multiplication as the general expression of many particulars, or, in short, becomes a class-term.
It is thus that language may be regarded as a popular philosophy of nature. Each term denoting some observed event or object, is a general principle, connecting the several events or objects to which it admits of being equally applied. Whilst it practically enables us to decide and act in a number of individual cases, it also speculatively presents the means of anticipating a number of particulars, as notions implied in it; or, in other words, is a theory of the particulars which it denotes.
But when we have once obtained a variety of terms, thus representing in each of them a multitude of particulars, we can further generalize our observations by reflection on the notions themselves, and recording our observations on these, in like manner as on the real events and objects of nature. We then notice whether the notions implied by one term, are distinct from, or are included in, the notions implied by another; and, accordingly, we regard the terms respectively denoting them, as classes, either totally distinct, or as more or less comprehensive. We observe, for instance, whether the terms, "man," "animal," "vegetable,"—all being records of our observations on nature,—give us information of the same particulars, or of others entirely different: and we find that "man" and "animal" are but different views of the same individual, as for instance of Socrates; whilst the term "vegetable" is no expression of any observation whatever on the same individual. We find that "animal" represents to us more individual objects than "man;" so we regard it speculatively as a class including in it "man;" and both the terms "man" and "animal," as classes entirely distinct from the class "vegetable," because none of the observations referred to in either of the former are the same with those referred to in the latter.
These principles of language are the data on which the dialectical system of Aristotle is constructed. It is evident, from the mere statement of them, that there is such a thing as a scientific application of language to the purpose of instruction; for it is clearly seen to act as an instrument of knowledge by its very nature, independently of any art in the use of it. And it is for the philosopher, therefore, to inquire how it acts in producing this effect.
Now, in order to a science of Dialectic, the first step appears to be, to reduce those various observations on existing things, so far as these observations are characterized by language, into some definite classes; for we thus bring them out of that perplexing infinity which defies all grasp of the intellect, and obtain a few comprehensive theories, under which the whole intellectual world may be surveyed. These classes will represent to us all the different forms or modifications of being, so far as it is capable of being denoted by language. The next step is to examine the principle of classification in itself, and notice the varieties of form which it takes; as the observations that are made on any individual give us more or less comprehensive, more or less invariable and scientific, views of the individual. The first step leads us to the Predicaments or Categories, general designations under which all the various abstractions of the mind are conveniently arranged for the purpose of the dialectician. These constitute, as it were, the fixed land-marks by which he may know the limits of each notion with which he has to do in any discussion. They are the great sections in the geography of the intellectual world which it is his office to explore and describe. The next step leads us to the Predicables, or various modes of classing the same object. Here we enter on that part of the science which is purely dialectical. In the arrangements of the Categories, the inquiry is partly metaphysical, partly logical. We are there philosophizing on the notions of the mind in connection with language; but here, we examine the principle of classification evidenced in language, *in itself*, and endeavour to obtain comprehensive views of all the varieties of form under which it appears.
Thus far the science of Dialectic was sketched out before the time of Aristotle. The Pythagorean philosopher, Archytas of Tarentum, has the merit of having instituted
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1 Aristippus complained of mathematical science, that it gave no account of good and evil. (*Metaph.* iii. c. 2.) As unreasonable is the complaint of the barrenness of invention of the Aristotelian logic. Aristotle, however, asserts that mathematics do give information about τὸ μᾶλλον. (*Metaph.* xi. c. 3), evidently misled by an abstract term, equivocal in its wide extent of applications. His reason for the assertion will appear the better by observing that he included astronomy, among other branches of natural philosophy, under mathematics.
2 *De Interpret.* those arrangements of the objects of the intellect, which Aristotle adopted and explained under the title of the Categories. The objects of the mind are evidently referable to two ultimate classes. We either contemplate objects as they exist simply, or we abstract some particular attribute of them, and invest it with a being of our own creation. But as these attributes are various in kind, we require some more distinct classification of them; and this is furnished in the ten Categories. 1. Being; 2. Quantity; 3. Quality; 4. Relation; 5. Place; 6. Time; 7. Situation; 8. Habit; 9. Action; 10. Passion:—Being denoting, primarily, objects as they are conceived actually to exist in nature; secondarily, the notions of them as so existing; and the remaining Categories denoting the mere abstractions of the human mind. These several terms are admirably explained by Aristotle in his treatise on the Categories; and thus he commences his dialectic with a broad and deep foundation of metaphysical truth for the structure which is to follow. This treatise being further introductory to a method, not simply of reasoning, but of producing conviction on any subject, he includes in his survey the principles denoted by the terms, "opposite," "contrary," "prior," "co-existent," "motion," "having,"—terms of frequent recurrence in the ancient philosophy, and therefore demanding notice in a work on Dialectic.
Aristotle has no distinct treatise on the several heads of classification, or classes of Predicables as they are technically termed; but has interwoven some account of them in the Metaphysics and Topics—evidently regarding this department of his subject as already known to his hearers. He states them as four—property, definition, genus, accident. They are deducible from the consideration of the several points of view under which the same object may be contemplated. We may view it, either as it falls under some general observation, and is accordingly denoted in language by some class, the "genus,"—or in some circumstance belonging to it,—and this circumstance may be either peculiar to it, in which case it is a property,—or occasional, in which case it is an accident. Further, as the property of a thing may include all the peculiarities belonging to it, or only some one or more of these peculiarities; if it includes all, it becomes the definition of the thing,—in the latter case it is simply a property: so that there result the four classes already mentioned. In logical treatises we commonly find another class subjoined—the differentia or characteristic; and Aristotle himself refers to it, though he does not consider it necessary to regard it as a head of classification distinct from genus. It differs indeed from genus, only inasmuch as, so far as any class is called a differentia, it is so relatively to some other genus in which it is included as subordinate. How it is that the properties and accidents of an individual are considered as classes, will be evident from the generalizing power of language already noticed.
In the Categories, then, we have the Metaphysical Being of things, so far as it is denoted by language, drawn out into its various modes, and distinctly characterized in each. In the classes of Predicables, we have the Dialectical or Logical Being, or the various modes of existence created by language, through its power of comprizing multitudes under single terms. If, for example, we say "Socrates is wise," the metaphysical being here asserted is an abstraction of the mind, coming under the category of Quality: we are speaking of Socrates, not as he is individually, but as the quality of wisdom exists in him. But in the same expression the dialectical or logical being
asserted is, the existence of Socrates as an individual in the class to which the term "wise" belongs.
It is highly important to observe this distinction between metaphysical and dialectical being; as the right understanding of the whole doctrine of propositions and syllogisms is dependent on it. Every proposition then, viewed dialectically, is the reference of one class of objects to some other class; in the case of an affirmative,—the exclusion of one class from another, in the case of a negative. The "being," or the "not being," is the being implied or not implied in a certain term. The schoolmen, unfortunately, neglecting the distinction here adverted to, and thus reverting to that confusion of logical and metaphysical science which Aristotle's whole philosophy had laboured to remove, included both kinds of being under the common term "universals." Evidently, however, it cannot properly be said of being, as it is apprehended by the mind, that it is an universal. A notion of the mind is in itself an individual; and its extension to more objects than one is simply an effect of the mental power of generalization. But the logical being is by its very nature an universal; since a term, so far as it is a class, comprizes in its meaning every individual that admits of being referred to it as a class.
Accordingly, to examine propositions dialectically, we have only to inquire into the relative comprehensiveness, or relative exclusion, of the terms conjoined in it. In this point of view, all propositions, on any subject whatever, are reduced to four kinds:—universal affirmative, in which one class is affirmed of the whole of another; universal negative, in which two classes are mutually excluded; particular affirmative, in which one class is affirmed of some of the particulars included in the other; particular negative, in which one class partly excludes another. These are the only varieties of form under which any two classes of objects can be combined in affirmations or negations. Every proposition, accordingly, in order to be brought under the survey of Dialectic, must be referred to one or other of these forms, as the case may be. Hence we may proceed to examine these ultimate forms to which propositions are reducible, independently of the things themselves about which the propositions are, and draw from them logical principles applicable to every particular case. Thus, the form of an universal affirmative, "every A is B," in which the letters A and B are put as the representatives of any objects whatsoever, is the proper dialectical datum, from which the whole logical nature of any universal affirmative proposition may be explored. So also with regard to the remaining abstract forms.
Aristotle, accordingly, in his treatise on Interpretation, and in the commencement of his Prior Analytics, has thus examined the nature of propositions, and deduced practical rules by which their force as principles employed in reasoning may be readily ascertained. It has been objected to him, that he resorted to these abstract symbols rather than to more familiar means of illustration, in order that he might leave the truths of the science partially veiled at least in obscurity. There may be some truth in the assertion generally, that he did not intend that his written works should be accessible to the public without the accompaniment of oral exposition. But it does not apply here. The observation already made on the nature of dialectical being, may be sufficient to clear up any misconstruction of the philosopher on this point. The simple principle of classification, which is all that Dialectic is concerned with, could not so strictly be ex-
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1 Topic. i. c. 4. 2 Plutarch speaks of the metaphysics as useless for general instruction, and rather as a suggestive treatise to those who had been originally disciplined: ἀναγκαῖον τοῦ παιδεύσαντος αὐτὸν ἀγωνίζεσθαι. (Life of Alex.) Aristotle's Philosophy.
Efficient Philosophy.
amined, in any other way but that which expresses the principle itself nakedly. Every thing else is irrelevant to the matter in hand. So far as any thing else is attended to in a proposition, so far the mind is diverted from the logical point of view. His use of symbols, therefore, is only an illustration of his accurate and perfect method of developing the science.
In his Prior Analytics he passes on to the consideration of syllogisms, or arguments logically viewed. Here it is that the dialectical theory is properly unfolded. Syllogisms are the perfect developments of the theory of language, as language is expressive of being,—manifestations of the general fact, that every term denoting being is the representative of a class of observations more or less comprehensive on some object. This theory is first intimated in the ordinary use of single terms. It is next more disclosed in the connections of terms, i.e., in propositions affirming or denying one term of another. It is lastly laid open in the syllogism, in which the principle of classification is exemplified as the tie of connection between two terms affirmed or denied of each other.
Since, then, the evidence of the connection subsisting between the terms brought together in any affirmation or negation is the point in every argument; it is evident that the reasoning on any subject whatever may be exhibited abstractedly from the particular subject about which it is. Terms can only be connected as they are classes more or less comprehensive of each other; and this relative comprehensiveness is evidenced at once, as before shown, by the abstract forms of the propositions in which they are connected. Three abstract propositions, accordingly, in which the terms whose connection is explored, are, first (i.e., in the premises), separately stated in their relation to some intermediate class or middle term,—and then in their relation to each other (i.e., in the conclusion), as it is the result of their premised relations to the intermediate class,—will enable us, without reference to any other consideration, to judge of the conclusiveness of the argument. The syllogism is nothing more than this abstract statement of an argument.
Aristotle examines all the varieties of form which arguments thus abstractedly stated, or syllogisms, admit; whether from the position of the middle term in the premises, or from the different combinations of the four great classes of propositions; pointing out, under what arrangement of the middle term, what particular modes of argument alone are valid. From his whole examination, the conclusion results, that, under whatever form an argument may be expressed, the principle of the reasoning is the same in every case; each instance developing the theoretic power of language, according to which every term, so far as it denotes being, is a class, more or less comprehensive, of observations on the thing whose being it denotes.
This ultimate principle of all reasoning is commonly stated in the form of a theorem, enunciating, that "whatever is predicated (affirmed or denied) universally, of any class of things, may be predicated in like manner of anything comprehended in that class." This is that form of it known by the scholastic designation of the "Dictum de Omni et Nullo." From the mode in which this principle has been introduced in systems of logic founded on the method of the school-authors, a prejudice has been excited against Aristotle, as if he had employed the principle in establishing the conclusiveness of arguments already granted to be conclusive. Aristotle, however, does not introduce the principle in any formal manner, as a dogma or a priori ground of logical truth. On the contrary, it pervades the whole of his system, as resulting from every part of his inquiry. He is only concerned to show that every argument, however varied in its mode of expression, is reducible to a form by which the truth of his theory shall be evidenced in it. Syllogisms are not proved by the principle, but the principle itself is proved by the nature of the syllogism, as any other philosophical truth is deduced from varied observations and experiments. In short, by his reference to the principle, he does not prove the conclusiveness of a given argument, but accounts for it.
It is necessary to observe that most of the technical phraseology of modern treatises of logic is derived, not from Aristotle immediately, but second-hand, from the scholastic expositors of his doctrines. These ingenious professors of science, in carrying the notions of his physics and metaphysics into the science of logic, obscured, by the barbarian dialect in which the truths of the science were thus delivered, its proper nature as an art of language. Thus, according to them, we hear of the "substance," and "matter," and "form," both of propositions and of syllogisms, and other such irrelevant designations. On the contrary, the technical expressions of Aristotle himself are extremely few, and those strictly appropriate to the subject, elucidating the characteristic nature of the science as conversant about words. The scholastic method, however, from its long usurpation, has so engrafted itself on our modes of writing and speaking, that some acquaintance with its detail is in fact become necessary to us at this day; and may so far, therefore, be regarded as constituting a legitimate part of modern Dialectic. But when the cumbrous technicalities of this system are made a ground of objection to the Aristotelian logic, it may be explicitly answered, that these are not parts of Aristotle's system, as it is found in the Organon, but are the refinements of his commentators.
Having pointed out the several classes of syllogisms, into some one or more of which every valid argument must fall, Aristotle, in pursuit of the adaptation of his works to the business of disputation, proceeds to show the various expedients in argument resulting from the consideration of these abstract forms. This part of his subject is prosecuted through the remainder of the first book of his Prior Analytics and the second of the same treatise.
The examination of syllogisms is followed up in the Posterior Analytics by an inquiry into demonstration; and in the Topics, into arguments founded on probable premises. The full discussion of the syllogism was promised by Aristotle, inasmuch as the syllogistic process is common both to demonstration and to probable conclusions; and accordingly, as the more general subject of investigation claimed the first notice in a scientific treatise of Dialectic. Properly, indeed, being the only part of the science which is really universal,—belonging to argumentation as such, under whatever form, whether by induction, example, or enthymeme (all of which are only different modes of expression of the syllogism), and whether the premises assumed be necessary or probable,—it is the only province to which the science of reasoning legitimately extends. In examining distinctly the nature of demonstration and of probability, we depart from the rigorous limits of the science of reasoning, and approach those of rhetoric. But it is useful, at the same time, to examine these subjects as detached from rhetoric, and in their connection with logic; so far as we then confine our attention to the mere force of different kinds of argument on the understand-
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1 The use of unmeaning symbols in logic rests on the same footing as their use in geometry and algebra. 2 A proposition that is false is truly a proposition, whereas what is called an invalid argument is strictly no argument at all, because it does not exemplify the classification implied in the right use of terms. whereas rhetoric combines also the view of them in their effect on the will. We then consider them as they are capable of producing either knowledge or opinion; whereas, in the latter case, we look at them in that complex result which is implied in persuasion. It was for the former purpose that they were required for the dialectical disputant: and thus it is that the consideration of them forms an important part of the Organon. For the same reason the treatise on Sophisms, which forms the conclusion of the Organon, is directed not only to the solution of fallacies which may exist in the syllogistic process, or in the reasoning strictly viewed as reasoning, but to such also as may be traced in arguments where the process itself, the mere logic of the case, is perfectly correct.
The discussion of demonstration is an exposition of the nature of science, \textit{episteme}, as it was understood by the ancient philosophers. They restricted the application of the term to the knowledge of necessary truths; such truths as, when ascertained, were known at the same time to be incapable of being otherwise. Aristotle, then, is employed, in the Posterior Analytics, in discussing the nature of the principles on which science, as it was then understood, must be built. Here he had to encounter perplexities and misconceptions introduced into the subject by the Platonic philosophy. In Plato's system knowledge was mere reminiscence. It was a penetration of the mind through the veil of the sensible universe interposed between itself and the realities of the intellectual world—it's return to those purer perceptions which it had enjoyed before its union with a body. This doctrine was altogether founded on a fallacious view of the nature of demonstration. Because in demonstration the conclusion is necessarily implied in the premises, it was conceived that a science or proper knowledge of any particular was in all cases founded on a knowledge of the general principle in which it was implied. But this was an inversion of the order of knowledge, which commences with the particular, and ends in the general principle. In mathematical and metaphysical science the two things coincide; the notions of our mind being, on the one hand, in themselves particular facts, from which we may argue, to general principles; and, on the other hand, in their application to the business of philosophy, being the general principles of our knowledge. But Plato argued from this coincidence in these sciences to the sciences in general, and therefore confused demonstration with the scientific arrangement of facts. Aristotle, we find, was not free from the same fault in his Physics; but in his theory of Demonstration he has strictly provided against it. He has here pointed out the difference between the proof of matter of fact and of matter of abstract speculation. Instead of inculcating the necessity of establishing every conclusion in science by syllogism or a demonstrative process, he shows that all demonstration proceeds on assumed principles; which principles, accordingly, must be obtained from observations generalized, and not from reasoning.
There is one part of the work which deserves a more particular notice, as throwing light on his whole method of philosophizing, while it shows how far he approximated to the induction of modern philosophy. To obtain an accurate notion of the being of any thing, we require a definition of it. A definition of the thing corresponds, in dialectic, with the essential notion of it in metaphysics. This abstraction notion, then, according to Aristotle, constituting the true scientific view of a thing,—and all the real knowledge consequently of the properties of the thing depending on the right limitation of this notion,—some exact method of arriving at definitions which should express these limitations, and serve as the principles of sciences, became indispensable in such a system of philosophy. But in order to attain such definitions, a process of induction was required—not merely an induction of that kind, which is only a peculiar form of syllogism, enumerating all the individuals implied in a class instead of the whole class collectively—but an induction of a philosophical character, and only differing from the induction of modern philosophy so far as it is employed about language. We shall endeavour to show this more fully.
There are, then, two kinds of induction treated of by Aristotle. The first, that of simple enumeration. Its use is, where we have not beforehand ascertained a class to which we may refer the subject of our conclusion, and the search is in fact for a middle term. In this case, then, a collection of all the individuals which are supposed to make up the class, serves instead of a middle term. Assuming, accordingly, that these individuals are equivalent to the class, we draw the conclusion, that what has been affirmed or denied of these collected individuals may be affirmed or denied of the class. This, then, is nothing more than a syllogism. There is no process of investigation involved, but it is assumed, that we have found the assertion made, true in all the individual instances; and the induction itself is simply the process of bringing them under a principle of classification.
But there is also a higher kind of induction employed by Aristotle, and pointed out by him expressly in its subserviency to the exact notions of things, by its leading to the right definitions of them in words. As it appears that words, in a dialectical point of view, are classes more or less comprehensive of observations on things, it is evident that we must gradually approximate towards a definition of any individual notion, by assigning class within class, until we have narrowed the extent of the expression as far as language will admit. The first definitions of any object are vague, founded on some obvious resemblance which it exhibits compared with other objects. This point of resemblance we abstract in thought, and it becomes, when expressed in language, a genus or class, under which we regard the object as included. A more attentive examination suggests to us less obvious points of resemblance between this object and some of those with which we had classed it before. Thus carrying on the analysis,—and by the power of abstraction giving an independent existence to those successive points of resemblance,—we obtain subaltern genera or species, or subordinate classes included in that original class with which the process of abstraction commenced. As these several classifications are relative to each other, and dependent on the class with which we first commenced, the definition of any notion requires a successive enumeration of the several classes in the line of abstraction; and hence is said technically to consist of genus and differentia; the genus being the first abstraction, or class to which the object is first referred, and the differentia being the subordinate classes in the same line of abstraction.
Now the process by which we discover these successive genera is strictly one of philosophical induction. As in the philosophy of nature in general, we take certain facts as the basis of inquiry, and proceed by rejection and exclusion of principles involved in the inquiry, until at last,—there appearing no ground for further rejection,—we con-
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1 Analyt. Post. ii. c. ult. 7, 4, l. 13. 2 Ibid. ii. c. 13, Zetos ἢ ἐν ἀπολογίᾳ τε τα ἰδία και ἀληθεῖς, ἀρχὴ ἢ ἀνάγκη τοῦ ἐξετάσεως, ἡ ἀ. λ. p. 175, Du Val.
clude that we are in possession of the true principle of the object examined; so in the philosophy of language, we must proceed by a like rejection and exclusion of notions implied in the general term with which we set out, until we reach the very confines of that notion of it with which our inquiry is concerned. This exclusion is effected in language, by annexing to the general term denoting the class to which the object is primarily referred, other terms not including under them those other objects or notions to which the general term applies. For thus, whilst each successive term in the definition, in itself, extends to more than the object so defined,—yet all viewed together do not; and this their relative bearing on the one point constitutes the being of the thing. This is thus illustrated by Aristotle: "If we are inquiring," he says, "what magnanimity is, we must consider the instances of certain magnanimous persons whom we know, what one thing they all have so far forth as they are such; as, if Alcibiades was magnanimous, or Achilles, or Ajax,—what one thing they all have; say 'impatience under insult,' for one made war, another raged, the other slew himself: again, in the instances of others, as of Lysander or Socrates,—if here it is, 'to be unalterable by prosperity or adversity,'—taking these two cases, I consider, what this 'apathy' in regard to events, and 'impatience under insult,' have the same in them. If now they have nothing the same, there must be two species of magnanimity." So, again, he suggests a similar process in order to ascertain the nature of any thing. He directs that the investigation should commence from the genus: since, having discovered the properties or sequences of the genus, we have also the sequences to the next class in the series,—and so on from that class to the next in order,—until by this continued process we reach the individual object examined. In the course of investigation, also, he observes that we should attend to whatever is common, and examine to what class of objects that belongs, and what classes fall under it? and for the same reason select analogies; since in both these instances we obtain genera, under which the object investigated may be arranged. The process is virtually the same, as if we should investigate a law of nature. But the induction of Aristotle, having for its object to determine accurately in words the notion of the being of things, proceeds, according to the nature of language, from the general, and ends in the particular; whereas the investigation of a law of nature proceeds from the particular and ends in the general. Dialectical induction is synthetical, whilst philosophical induction is analytical, in the result. The former labours to particularize as much as possible, counteracting the uncertainty occasioned by the generalizations of language; whilst the latter is engaged in penetrating the confused masses in which objects first present themselves to the mind, and exploring their most general and characteristic form. Thus, the induction of Aristotle was strictly ἐπιστήμη, or the bringing term on term, each successively limiting the application of the preceding one in regular series, so that at length a distinct notion may be presented of the object defined. The notion thus obtained in words is the λόγος or expressed reason of the being of the thing; and hence perhaps the prevalence of the name logic as appropriate to this branch of science, etc., instead of the more general and ancient designation of dialectic, which expresses rather the application of the science to practice than its philosophical nature.
It would appear, then, that Bacon has not done justice to Aristotle in the contemptuous manner in which he has spoken of the induction taught by Aristotle. It is certainly limited in its design, as having for its object the correct statements of the particular notions on which an inquiry turns, rather than the discovery of new truth; and it is not set forth with that fulness of method which Bacon developed in the Novum Organum. But it is sound and valid so far as it reaches, and proves that Aristotle was not intent on corrupting philosophy with dialectic, but rather on applying dialectic to that very purpose which Bacon himself so much insists on—the bringing the intellect even and unprejudiced to the business of science. Of the application of induction in its full philosophical extent, Aristotle presents abundant specimens, and particularly in his treatises on Ethics and Rhetoric. His discussion of the passions in the latter treatise is a masterpiece in that way. He sets out, indeed, abstractedly with definitions of the several passions, but these are the results at which he has arrived by induction, being obtained, as his subsequent observations show, by a close interrogation of nature, by examining accurately, what belongs, or does not belong, to each particular passion, and thus adducing its exclusive character or proper form.
Rhetoric.
As the speculative sciences had been confounded under a vague notion of dialectic, so had rhetoric, in the ostentatious study of it prevalent before the time of Aristotle, drawn into its system the practical sciences of Politics and Ethics. Observations had been accumulated on the mere accessories of the art; but the proper business of the rhetorician, the inquiry into the argument itself of which a composition must consist, had been overlooked. Aristotle had therefore to dig a foundation for the fabric of a real science of rhetoric. He had to clear away misconceptions; to show the data on which rhetorical science must proceed, and the relative importance of its several parts.
He commences, accordingly, with pointing out the nature of its connection both with dialectic and with moral science. It is first and most directly connected with rhetoric, inasmuch as it is a general method of providing arguments on any subject whatever. As dialectic examines and discusses the principles of various sciences, considering them in their relations as principles in the abstract, and not as the principles of this or that science, and is so far equally conversant about all subjects; so rhetoric inquires generally into the nature of principles of persuasion, and therefore is also of equal application to the various subjects of human thought. In the discussion of these abstract principles under the head of dialectic, it was found that they were referable to two general classes—that they were either probabilities or necessary truths. And Aristotle, accordingly, after having explained the nature of syllogism, or the more general connection of
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1 Anal. Post. ii. c. 13, p. 175, Du Val. 2 Anal. Post. ii. c. 14. 3 See also Anal. Prior. ii. c. 23, p. 125, Du Val. 4 Aristotle uses the adverb ἀρχαίον, as in Metaph. vii. c. 4, but not the noun ἀρχαῖον to denote the science. Efficient principles, which is independent of their peculiar nature, proceeded to investigate the nature of deductions as drawn from necessary principles or from probabilities. The consideration of this distinction anticipates in some measure the province of rhetoric, touching on the point, as we have already observed, in which rhetoric differs from logic strictly so called. As the science of eloquence, its office is to speculate on the effect of different principles in producing conviction, and not simply on their abstract relations, and therefore it must examine the relative force of arguments as they are probable or necessary. Principles, in short, as they are grounds of credibility, and not as they are the basis of a reasoning process, constitute its proper subject; and in this respect it coincided with a part of the ancient dialectic. But it differs again from dialectic, inasmuch as it is connected also with moral science. In dialectic the force of man's moral nature on his opinions is not considered. Will such or such an opinion result from such or such arguments, according to the procedure of the human intellect in forming its judgments,—is the whole inquiry of dialectic. But rhetoric further considers, what is the practical force of such and such arguments; what effect are they found to have in actual experience; not according to their mere speculative force, but as acting on the complex nature of man; through which it happens that questions are not examined on their positive merit as simple questions of truth, but with feelings and sentiments thwarting or biasing the discriminations of the judgment. Here, then, is opened a wide field for a philosophical inquiry of a peculiar character, distinct from dialectic, and yet strictly founded on it and implying it throughout, as well as of the highest importance in order to the success of truth in the world. This inquiry is what Aristotle institutes under the head of rhetoric.
He has shown the most perfect comprehension of the nature of the science which he had undertaken to develop in this view of it, by holding it in exact balance between the two sciences of dialectic and morals with which it is associated. There is much of logical matter in the course of his inquiry, and still more of ethical; but he never suffers us to forget that we are not examining those sciences in themselves now, but in their relations to one compounded of both. He would have the rhetorician versed in dialectic, and deeply acquainted with human nature; but he is intent on showing him how he is to apply his knowledge of both these sciences to the proper business of rhetoric—the influence on the mind of the hearer or persons addressed. It is not a vague and popular knowledge of those sciences which he is inculcating throughout, but a popular application of authentic principles drawn from them both, and a popular application founded on a deep philosophy of human nature.
This philosophy consists in an investigation of the kinds of evidence by which the minds of men are commonly swayed in accepting any conclusion proposed to them, and of those principles of their moral nature by which their judgment is commonly influenced. The whole, accordingly, is an inquiry into what is probable or persuasive to a being so constituted as man.
Rhetoric, then, considers arguments not as they are abstractedly necessary or probable. This is a question relative to opinion alone; and the result from arguments under this point of view is, either a full conviction, or a presumption of some point in question. Rhetoric, on the other hand, looks simply to probability in the result. Whether an argument be necessary or probable in principle, is of no consequence to the rhetorician, provided it be persuasive in its effect. He has to consider, therefore, only a probability of this kind—on what grounds men commonly believe an argument to be just. Now men are found to receive arguments as conclusive on two different grounds—either as considering them logically sound, deducible from admitted principles, or as coincident with their own previous observations. Hence the distinction between probability and likelihood; probability denoting conclusions which appear to have been proved by some reason alleged—likelihood denoting conclusions grounded on matter of fact, the conclusion being something like what has been experienced. Aristotle distinguishes these two kinds of rhetorical arguments as probabilities, \(\sigma\alpha\tau\omega\), and signs, \(\sigma\gamma\mu\omega\). The precise nature of the distinction he explains more fully in his Analytics. In his Rhetoric he directs our attention rather to those practical forms which the two classes assume in enthymemes and examples; enthymemes being such arguments as state a conclusion with the reason of it—examples, arguments in which a conclusion is drawn from particular facts, or observations.
He points out, accordingly, the force and propriety of enthymemes and examples, as modes of producing conviction in themselves, and relatively to each other, according to the subjects in which they may be employed. And as enthymemes are the more comprehensive head—for, in fact, every argument from example is in principle an enthymeme, the example cited being in this case the reason of the conclusion—he dwells more explicitly on the nature of enthymemes. These he distinguishes, as they are entirely abstract arguments, unconnected with any particular subject, and equally common to all subjects; or as they are drawn from particular subjects, and belong to particular sciences. Instances of the former class (\(\tau\omega\), the loci of Cicero) are conclusions of the possibility of any thing from abstract considerations of possibility,—of the existence of any thing from the existence of that which implies it more or less. Instances of the latter (the \(\alpha\beta\) of his system) are conclusions drawn from some observation of the nature of human actions, or from some principle of government or commerce, &c.; to which the rhetorician has occasion to appeal, so far as some particular subject is considered in the arguments of every speech.
The matter of proof, or the grounds of credibility in themselves, being obtained, it comes in the next place to be considered how this proof is acted on and modified in the result by the complex nature of man, on whom the result is to be produced. The subjects to which rhetoric properly applies are those in which there is some opening for the action of the moral feelings. In questions of pure science the intellectual powers alone are concerned. There is no personal application to the individual; no reference to his own experience for the proof of the principles, as is the case with all inquiries involving human conduct; where a fairness of judgment is as much
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1 We must be careful, therefore, how we understand the assertion, that dialectic is concerned about truth, and rhetoric about opinion. It is to be understood simply that rhetoric has not for its object to discover what any particular thing is, but to discover what will give a persuasion or belief that it is. At the same time, those principles on which such a persuasion depends, are real truths about which the science is conversant; whence it is called by Aristotle the philosophy of discourse, \(\tau\omega\ \lambda\gamma\omega\ \phi\lambda\epsilon\sigma\epsilon\varrho\eta\), Rhet. ad Alex. cap. 1.
2 Anal. Prior. ii. cap. ult.; Rhet. ad Alex. cap. 9, 13, 15. Efficient required in order to an acknowledgment of the principles, as a clearness of intellect. Whatever may be the nature of a mathematical enunciation or a fact in chemistry, when it is once stated and proved, there is no question whether we approve or disapprove it. Its truth is suffered to rest on its proper footing. But a conclusion respecting our own nature, or involving our own conduct, immediately calls all our moral principles to the survey of it. Our hopes, and fears, and wishes, are heard pleading for or against it. And here, then, is the proper province of the rhetorician. He is the advocate by whom the case is to be laid before these internal judges; he is to prepare the evidence for their reception; and by his knowledge of their former judgments, to present the truth before them in such form, that it may obtain a fair hearing, and be affirmed in their decisions.
For the convenient arrangement of rhetorical arguments, Aristotle divides rhetoric into three different kinds, according to the different occasions on which it was employed among the Greeks:—1. The deliberative, or its use in political debates; 2. the judicial, or its use in popular assemblies, as those of Athens, in which the people collectively exercised the judicial functions; 3. the demonstrative, or its use in panegyric and invective, when the orator had only to gratify his hearers by the display of eloquence. In these several heads of inquiry he has given an admirable philosophy of the motives by which mankind at large are commonly actuated in their conduct and opinions. And here we should notice the peculiar complexion which the happiness and the virtue, described in this part of his philosophy, assume. He is led to speak of happiness as the great object of human desires—the point from which all views of expediency obtain their colouring. But here he is not concerned to illustrate that happiness to which the aim of mankind should be directed, but that which is in fact sought in the world as it is. He therefore portrays those various distinct forms with which self-love invests the idea of happiness; it being evidently more to the purpose of the orator, to conform his arguments to the views entertained by his hearers, however theoretically false, than to a more just theory, of which they have no conception. Virtue, again, is here a law of honour. It is an appeal to those right feelings which exist in the nature of man, by which virtue is approved and vice disapproved. Independently, however, of discipline and mature reflection, these feelings are not found in fact always duly exerted; and there is ground, therefore, for a popular kind of virtue, in a philosophical survey of those principles by which the human heart is commonly swayed in its decisions of right and wrong. This law of right is at least an approximation to perfect virtue. It is an irregular and uncertain application of the criterion of praise, which belongs to virtue, leading to the preference of the more ostentatious virtues to the less obviously praiseworthy; and to the exaltation of some qualities to the rank of virtues, through the want of discrimination in the popular estimate. Thus virtue becomes, in the popular view, a power of doing good, rather than an internal habit of self-moderation. Men acquiesce in that general notion of it, under which it most strikes their attention and calls forth their admiration. But this is evidently the virtue to which the orator must make his appeal. He cannot calculate on finding his hearers moral philosophers, or persons whose sentiments have been highly cultivated. He must therefore proceed on those broad principles which may be presumed to exist in the heart of every man; and to these he must conform his arguments in order to produce a moral impression.
Further, as the habits of thinking and feeling among men are found to be affected by peculiarities of circumstances, it is necessary for the orator to have studied also the varieties of human character, and to have reduced these to general principles for his practical direction. Aristotle, accordingly, has not lost sight of this point in his Rhetoric, but has shown a keen discrimination in the outlines which he has given of the effects of different governments, different periods of life, different worldly fortunes, in modifying the human character.
He had strongly condemned former rhetoricians for making the whole art consist of an appeal to the passions; but at the same time he was aware that such an appeal was a necessary part of the orator's address, and that no arguments, no merely intellectual proofs, could avail, independently of this. To neglect, indeed, the affections in arguments concerning human conduct, is to neglect the proper authorities to which the whole process of proof is ultimately addressed. Wherever evidence is not absolutely irresistible, and there is room for doubt,—though there be no further object than simply to produce belief,—the hearer naturally proceeds in his analysis of the evidence, until he brings it home to himself; and finds that it terminates in some principle of his own nature. This it is that at last determines the wavering balance. The philosophy of rhetoric, therefore, required of Aristotle to give outlines of these ultimate arbiters of all rhetorical questions. And we are indebted accordingly to his masterly view of the subject, for an accurate and beautiful delineation, in the course of his principal treatise of rhetoric, of the leading passions of human nature. Of its excellence as a specimen of the inductive method of philosophizing we have already spoken.
In treating both of the virtues and of the passions, Aristotle's view was to enable the orator not only to recommend his arguments to the moral sentiments and feelings of an auditory, but to bring also to their support the natural prejudice from authority. We involuntarily ascribe, to one who appears in the character of an instructor, the advantages of superior knowledge and kind intentions; and the prejudice in favour of authority is thus reasonably founded on a respect for wisdom and virtue. It is important, then, to the orator to avail himself of this prejudice. There must be nothing in a speech that may counteract the natural tendency to believe in the speaker. On the contrary, his whole argument must conspire with it. It must give the impression that he is a man of intellectual ability, as well as of right sentiments and feelings. Hence Aristotle deduced a third class of rhetorical proofs under the head of ethos or character; the pathos or appeal to the passions, and the argumentative proof as such, constituting the two other heads of classification. He thus shows how a speech may at once carry conviction, interest the feelings of the hearer, and give the weight of personal authority to the speaker.
In the popular views of rhetorical science, the subjects of style and method engross an undue importance. We are thus led to think that eloquence consists in the skilful use of the ornaments of style, in the flow of periods, and the structure of the composition, advantageously distributing its lights and shades. The attention is diverted from the material itself of eloquence, the strong framework of argument, without which no eloquence can subsist. Aristotle, in proceeding to the discussion of style, has cautiously maintained the subordination of this part of rhetoric, to the proper business of the art—persuasion; treating it as a necessary condescension to the weakness of the hearers. If, however, the manner in which we express our thoughts may contribute to the reception of our assertions and arguments,—and it be allowed that the principles of Taste are real parts of the human constitution,—the consideration of style must enter into a philosophical system of rhetoric. The effect of the style is part of the whole result of the composition on the mind of the hearers, and is so far, therefore, an ingredient in that probability about which rhetoric is conversant.
In conformity with this view of the importance of style, Aristotle lays down perspicuity as the great principle of good composition. It is with him "the virtue of style." All the ornaments of language, whether from the structure of periods, or from the various modes of thought by which a point, or a propriety, or a dignity, or an animation, is imparted to a subject, are explained by him in reference to this fundamental law.
Nor has he left unconsidered the arrangement of the parts of a speech; though this also was in his opinion scarcely a legitimate portion of the art. Former rhetoricians had encumbered their systems with numerous artificial divisions, giving precise rules for the composition of each distinct head. Aristotle's more exact method admits no other divisions but the proposition and the proof; the former founded on the necessity of stating the subject of discussion, the latter on the necessity of proving the point stated; though he afterwards allows the convenience of a fourfold division into, 1. the preem or introduction; 2. the proposition; 3. the proof; 4. the epilogue or peroration.
So deeply and fully has the science of rhetoric been considered by Aristotle. His principal treatise on the subject, the Rhetoric, in three books, addressed to his disciple Theodectes, and his Nicomachean Ethics, are perhaps the most perfect specimens of systematic sciences extant in ancient or modern literature. For extent and variety of matter, the Rhetoric may be ranked even above the Ethics. It has been justly characterized as "a magazine of intellectual riches. Nothing is left untouched on which rhetoric, in all its branches, has any bearing. His principles are the result of extensive original induction. He sought them, if ever man did seek them, in the living pattern of the human heart. All the recesses and windings of that hidden region he has explored; all its caprices and affections—whatever tends to excite, to ruffle, to amuse, to gratify, or to offend it—have been carefully examined. The reason of these phenomena is demonstrated, the method of creating them is explained. The whole is a text-book of human feeling, a storehouse of taste—an exemplar of condensed and accurate, but uniformly clear and candid, reasoning." It is professedly adapted to the business of the orator, that being the original occasion of an art of rhetoric. But it is in fact a body of precepts for good writing, furnishing authentic principles of criticism in every department of prose composition. His smaller treatise, in one book, entitled The Rhetoric to Alexander, is more strictly a science of political eloquence, being written, as the introductory address to Alexander intimates, in obedience to the king, who had requested a work of that description. The same philosophical views of eloquence may be traced in this work; but more popularly set forth, with less of technical precision, and more of apposite illustration from examples.
Poetics.
No work of Aristotle has been more justly estimated than the fragment which has survived to us under the name of his Poetics. Imperfect as it is, it has been uniformly regarded as the great authority of the laws of criticism in poetry: subsequent writers having only extended and illustrated the principles laid down in it. The excellence of this little work, which is only one book of the three of which the whole treatise is said to have consisted, shows how much we have to regret the entire loss of other works of Aristotle on the same subject. The treatises On Tragedies and On Poets, mentioned in the catalogue of Laertius, probably contained much valuable information concerning Greek writers, whose works, perhaps whose names in some instances, have not been transmitted to us.
That portion which time has spared of the Poetics, is almost exclusively confined to the consideration of dramatic poetry; but the philosopher, with his usual depth and reach of thought, has here laid a broad foundation of principles applicable to the whole inquiry. He derives the nature of poetry in general from the principle of imitation inherent in man. Two natural causes, he says, appear to have originated poetry; the natural power of imitation,—and the pleasure which all men take in imitation, that is, in recognizing likenesses between distinct objects. These two causes thus stated by him are in fact but one principle: the pleasure resulting from imitation being the principle itself of imitation, viewed in its tendency or proper effect, the production of pleasure; though, in the language of his philosophy, the first would be the motive cause, the second the final. Poetry, then, according to him, is the science by which the natural principle of imitation is realized in its tendency; or a collection of observations on the mode by which pleasure is produced in imitations of which language is the instrument. Hence the business of the poet is stated by Aristotle to consist in representing things, not "as they have been, but as they might be;" and therefore is described by him as of a more philosophical and excellent nature, than that of the historian. The pleasure of imitation will not be answered, unless a likeness be recognized between the objects and events described, and the objects and events of nature; otherwise it will be a mere pleasure in the execution, or in some circumstance of the work. The poet, therefore, in order to accomplish the end of his art, must possess a philosophical power of observation. He must have compared objects and events, and detected points of resemblance, and thus formed for himself general principles on which his imagination may model its ideal world. At the same time he differs from the philosopher very much in the same way in which the orator differs from the dialectician. He has not to consider what is abstractedly like in things, but what will be viewed as like in its effect on the sentiments and feelings of men. Therefore it is that his creations are clothed with a beauty and loveliness surpassing nature. The resemblances which he shadows out partake of those hues which the wishes of the human heart reflect upon them.
These fundamental notions of the art pervade the sys- tem of Aristotle's Poetics, though, from the briefness of the work in its present imperfect state, they are by no means fully developed in it. In the work, indeed, as it now is, the basis of the poetic imitation—the actions, passions, and manners, of which a poem is descriptive—are exclusively considered; and we have no inquiry, as in the Rhetoric, into the principles of human nature by which the pleasure resulting from the imitation is modified in its effect. From this circumstance, as well as from his accounting for the pleasure of poetry on the ground of a natural delight in tracing out resemblances, Aristotle has been sometimes thought to have placed the excellence of a poem in the mechanism of its story, and to have neglected altogether the intrinsic poetry of thought and expression. But we shall not do justice to the comprehensiveness of his views, if we estimate them by the limits of the present work. He seems here to have premised only, what ought naturally to occupy the first place in a philosophical system of the art.
It must be remembered, also, that Greek poetry was essentially dramatic. It was expressly composed with a view to public recitation or exhibition; and in poetry of this kind the character of the incidents would hold a much greater importance than in poetry intended chiefly to be read. The incidents would here hold a place analogous to the thoughts and expressions of the poem submitted to the contemplative study of a reader. This may further account for Aristotle's laying so much stress on the interest of the plot in tragedy.
The definition of tragedy given by Aristotle is remarkable, as savouring more of the spirit of Plato's philosophy than of his own. Describing its nature as it differs from epic poetry and from comedy, he further characterizes it as, "by means of pity and fear, working out the purification of such passions." The purification of the soul was the object to which Plato directed the noble enthusiasm of his philosophy. By converse with the ideas of the intellectual world, he would have the soul disenchanted of the spells which bound it to sensible objects, and cleansed of the impurities of its earthly associations. Aristotle's description of the effect designed in tragedy, applies this doctrine to the particular emotions of the soul produced by pity and fear. His idea appears to be, that tragedy, by presenting the objects of those passions, without the grossness and the violence with which they are attended in actual life, teaches us to feel the passions in that degree only in which an impartial spectator can sympathize with us. By familiarity with these pure abstractions—the true philosophy of the passions so called forth—a moral effect is worked on the heart; the mimic occasions on which it is rightly exercised serving as a real discipline of purification. The question, on what the peculiar pleasure of tragic incident depends, is not distinctly considered by Aristotle. But it may be accounted for on his principles, from the view already given of the purification effected by tragedy, connected with his doctrine, that pleasure is the result of every affection rightly exerted. That moderation of the passions of pity and fear which tragedy has for its aim, is that right exertion of them to which pleasure has been attached by nature, as a consequent.
**Practical Philosophy.**
**Ethics.**
We have observed, that under the head of Practical Philosophy, Aristotle delivers the principles of those sciences by which the goods of human life are attained by individuals or societies. According to this view, the practical sciences are reducible to two: 1. Ethics, by which man is furnished with the principles belonging to his natural good as man; 2. Politics, which inquires into the principles on which the constitution of societies may be made subservient to human good. Economics ought perhaps to be stated as a third branch of science under this head, though, in the view of ancient philosophy, it naturally falls under politics, so far as it concerns the regulation of families: families being regarded as the elements of the political union.
In taking a review of Aristotle's ethical system, it would be injustice to the philosopher to withhold the expression of our admiration of the real wisdom displayed by him in this department of science. We are little aware, living as we do in the sunshine of gospel-truth, what a reach of thought it required, in those times, to see the science of Ethics in its proper light, as a discipline of human character in order to human happiness. The ethical writings of Aristotle, composed amidst the darkness of heathen superstition, abound with pure and just sentiments; and, instead of depressing man to the standard of the existing depraved opinions and manners, tend to elevate him towards the perfection of his nature. They may indeed be studied, not only as an exercise of the intellect, but as a discipline of improvement of the heart; so much is there in them of sound and practical observation on human nature. They are directed, it must be allowed, solely to the improvement of man in this present life; but so just are the principles on which he builds that improvement, that we may readily extend them to those higher views of our nature and condition to which our eyes have been opened. And no greater praise can be given to a work of heathen morality, than to say, as may with truth be said of the ethical writings of Aristotle, that they contain nothing which a Christian may dispense with; no precept of life which is not an element of the Christian character; and that they only fail in elevating the heart and the mind to objects which it needed Divine Wisdom to reveal.
He has left three principal treatises in this department of philosophy, familiarly known by these names: 1. *The Nicomachean Ethics*, or Ethics addressed to his son Nicomachus, in 10 books; 2. *The Magna Moralia*, in 2 books; 3. *The Eudemian Ethics*, or Ethics addressed to Eudemus, in 7 books; besides a short popular tract on the Virtues and Vices. *The Nicomachean Ethics* exhibits the most formal and complete development of his theory, and is the work on which his fame as a moral philosopher is chiefly rested. The other treatises are... It is well known what eager but unprofitable subtlety the inquiry into the Chief Good was prosecuted by the Greek philosophers. The speculation proceeded from a misapprehension of the nature of moral philosophy. They thought, consistently with their method in physics, that, as every action of human life appeared the pursuit of some good, there must be some abstract principle of good, the constituent of the moral nature of actions. Hence they were busied in exploring the several objects of human pursuit, and comparing them, and drawing conclusions as to their relative superiority in the order of pursuit. Had they, however, considered sufficiently the subject of their investigation, they would have seen the irrelevancy of any such inquiry to the business of moral philosophy. It was in fact a mere perversion of the terms "good" and "end," which constitute part of the technical phraseology of the science. These notions being once introduced into philosophy, an occasion was furnished for a priori speculation into the nature of goods and ends. It is easy to see what a field for ingenuity was opened in determining the point where the two notions coincided; and in this consisted the determination of the chief good, or the finis bonorum, as it is expressed by Cicero.
Now Aristotle examined human actions with a more philosophical eye. He readily saw through the vain realism of those speculations which supposed that there was some quality of good admitting of abstract disquisition into its nature. He was aware, also, that when the "ends" of action were spoken of, it was not with reference to some ulterior object, as was implied in all those theories which laid down a speculative definition of the chief good; but that it was the very characteristic of an action, to be in itself an end. Hence he was diverted from that track of inquiry which had misled, and which, after him, continued to mislead, other philosophers, and struck out for himself a new path of moral science. He has thrown his preliminary views, indeed, into a form resembling that of the speculative philosophers, in unconscious deference probably to the prejudices of the method in which he had been trained. Thus he sets out in his Nicomachean Ethics with a sketch of the chief good and ends of actions, according to his conceptions of its nature: and this is apt to excite an idea, that in reading this work we are only examining a rival system of the same kind with the Greek moral philosophy in general,—an idea which Cicero appears to have formed, since he speaks of Aristotle's having united two objects as together making up the chief good of man. On looking, however, closely into his actual process of investigation, we find it widely different in kind from those inquiries which we have already condemned, the agreement being simply in the technical form of the argument.
The chief good which he is intent on establishing is, the philosophical principle or general nature of actions as such. To describe it more fully,—he investigates the law, according to which, human actions attain the good which is their object, and which, as being the end really designed in all actions, whatever may be their immediate particular ends, is the great final cause of all—the end of ends. Aristotle speaks of moral virtue as conversant about affections and actions, πρὸς ἀποκαλύψεις καὶ πρὸς ἀποκαλύψεις. He discriminates by these terms between external and internal acts—between the works and sentiments of virtue. In strictness, however, actions are the only proper subject of ethical science; which is conversant about human affections, inasmuch as affections are implied in actions. Actions are affections exerted towards some object, and comprehend, accordingly, both external and internal acts. An action, then, according to Aristotle, is good, in which an affection attains its object; and, in that case, the action itself may be regarded as a means or end; the affection being realized, completed, satisfied, in it. Evidently, then, it may be inquired how the affections really obtain their objects in action, or what constitutes an action an end. But this is a very different inquiry from one that, by comparison of particular objects, searches after some definite sole object of pursuit. In this it is presupposed, that every object of a natural affection is an ultimate end, or an object in which that affection, whatever it may be, rests, as in its natural good. Accordingly, it is sought to ascertain how it is so; what that principle is by which any action whatever is really a good in itself and an end. Such a principle is analogous to the chief good of the speculative moralists, because it exhibits human actions in that point of view in which their goodness consists, or in which they accomplish that good towards which the affections naturally tend; but it differs so far as it restricts the notion of the chief good to no one distinct class of objects. It is simply a general account of the right constitution of nature exemplified in the multitude of individual instances. As Newton does not inquire what gravity is, but develops the law by which gravity acts; so Aristotic does not give an abstract notion of the chief good, but explores the principle by which it is realized in human life; and thus he obtains a view of it unconnected with any speculative opinions concerning the chief good or happiness of man. His theory leaves the notion of human happiness entirely relative. The philosopher and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, the barbarian and the civilized, each individual, in short, under whatever modifications of human life he may be conceived to exist, must, so far as he obtains the good sought in action, exemplify that law or ultimate principle which constitutes an action a perfect action, or good.
The whole of his several treatises of Ethics consist of a development of this his characteristic view of human good. He had observed how mankind, through the force of passion
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1 It is not only in speculative systems that we perceive the fallacy with regard to actions considered as goods and ends. Nothing is more common in life than to find actions estimated entirely by a reference to some ultimate good or end which individuals or societies have proposed to themselves, though perhaps not avowedly, as their chief good.
2 Eth. Nic. i. c. 6; Mag. Mor. i. c. 1, 2.
3 Ibid. vi. c. 2, 5; x. c. 6; Polít. vii. c. 3, 13; Cicero de Fin. ii. c. 22, "Id contendimus, ut officii fructus sit ipsum officium."
4 De Fin. ii. c. 6; see also Euseb. Præp. Evang. xv. c. 3 and 4.
5 Iserius mentions, in the Catalogue of Aristotle's writings, a treatise, πρὸς ἀποκαλύψεις, in 3 books.
6 Eth. Nic. ii. c. 3, 6, 9, &c.
7 Hence the just compliment to the peripatetic system by Origen (contra Cel. p. 10, edit. Spenc.), that it was "the most humane, and candidly acknowledged human goods more than other sects." The Stoics confounded natural and moral good: "quod est bonum omne laudabile est," &c. Cicero de Fin. iii. 8.
8 It is the proper account of the observations of Paley on "human happiness." (Mor. and Pol. Philosophy, i. ch. 6.) The various popular views of happiness are well set forth by Aristotle, in Rhet. i. 5. and evil habits, mistake and pervert their proper goods. Moral philosophy, he thought, might be applied to correct this misapprehension of men—to reform this perversion. The force of reason, at least, might be tried. He wished therefore to propose to their view the real goods intended for them by the constitution of their nature, and to call the attention of each individual to the pursuit of these in his own particular case. His practical design throughout accordingly is, to direct the principles of our moral nature towards their proper objects in such a way that they may rest in these objects as ends, and attain the proper good of man. When all the principles are so regulated that this effect takes place in each, the collective result is happiness, or the entire and consummate good of man. Whence he takes occasion to describe happiness in general terms, as in its nature "energy of soul," ἐνέργεια τῆς ψυχῆς, or "the powers of the soul exerted," according to that virtue or excellence which most consummates or perfects them." The mode of description is drawn from his physical philosophy. It is founded on a notion of some intrinsic power in the soul working like the operations of the natural world. His theory of happiness, then, contemplates this process of the soul at its termination, where the proper nature of the soul as an active principle is fully developed. The truth is, we have then a generalized fact, descriptive of the real state of the case, in the particular instances in which an affection is found to have been happily exerted. He takes, indeed, into his estimate of the chief good, the effect of the circumstances of the world on the virtuous exercise of the powers of the soul; adding the condition of "a perfect life," or an adequate duration of human life, and adequate opportunities in the world,—for the development of the moral principles. This, however, is only to assert that the law by which man attains the happiness of his nature, must, in order to be judged of truly, be contemplated in its tendency—in the effect that it would produce if it acted freely, without impediment from the world. To think that external goods are causes of happiness, he says, is like imputing the excellence of the music to the lyre rather than to the art of the musician. Prosperity, he also observes, has its limit in reference to happiness, since it may be excessive, and in that case would be an impediment to happiness. But this necessary qualification of the expression in his sketch of the chief good, gives the appearance of his including prosperity to a certain extent as a constituent of the good; whereas in this point, as well as in the whole form of his inquiry into the chief good, he is only following the abstract method of the ancient philosophy. In reality he is pursuing a course of investigation strictly inductive. The terms themselves, "a perfect life," sustain the idea of the soul's working out its own perfection, in which process the perfection of its physical existence would necessarily constitute a part.
Thus, too, the notion of pleasure, considered as an abstract good, is distinctly examined in his Ethics. The practice of ancient philosophy obtruded the question on his notice, whether pleasure was to be identified with happiness, or was to be regarded as an evil. He accordingly formally discusses it; refuting the existing opinions on the subject, and establishing, that pleasure was a good, so far as it necessarily accompanies the exercise of every principle of our nature; and consequently, that the highest pleasures are attached to the exercise of the highest principles. The discussion itself is thrown into a form highly abstruse and speculative; but the conclusion at which he arrives is entirely practical, and of the greatest importance in order to a just theory of virtue. It amounts to this, that the mere gratification of every natural affection, by its exertion in action, is not to be distinctly proposed and aimed at as the end of that affection. This would be to grasp at the result, and neglect the means in order to it. For, the gratification is, as explained by him, the mere result of the adaptation of the affection to its object, and consequent on the attainment of the object. It is the completion of the process of nature involved in an action. The attainment, therefore, of the highest pleasure attached to our nature, presupposes that the work of virtue has been performed in adjusting the moral and intellectual principles to their objects.
In proceeding to expand this great doctrine, in which his whole ethical system is included, Aristotle appears to have availed himself of the ancient theory of the Pythagoreans, according to which virtue was stated to be ἡ προσέκεισθαι ἀρετῇ—a "habit of propriety or duty,"—or the internal constitution of our nature. This notion seems at least to have afforded him an outline of his own theory of virtue, though he established it for himself on an extensive basis of original observation. Analyzing our moral nature into affections, capacities, and habits, he at once rejects from the estimate the two former views as inadequate to the effect, and steadily directs his observation to the force of habits in modifying our moral nature. He found that virtuous actions tended to form within us the character of virtue, and that a character so formed enabled us to act virtuously. As it was thus evident that habits were the bond of connection between virtuous principle and virtuous action, he decided that the principle by which the soul worked out its perfection, or, as we should rather express it according to our own ideas, by which the affections of our moral nature were rightly exerted, was in itself a habit.
He had observed also, that, in every instance in which good resulted from the exercise of the affections, there was a due regard to the personal character of the agent, to the occasion, to the matter in hand, to the persons respected in the action, to the purpose designed, &c.; that thus the virtuous character consisted in an exact adjustment of the internal moral constitution of man to all the circumstances of the world. On the ground, then, of this general fact, he concluded the nature of virtue to be an habitual principle of self-moderation, or, as he expresses it, "a habit influencing the choice, having its being in a relative mean." The abstract mode of ex-
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1 Eth. Nic. i. 7. 2 Ibid. i. c. 7, vii. 13, x. c. 8; Endem. vi. c. 13; Polit. vii. 1 and 13, iv. 11. 3 Ibid. vii. c. 11-14, x. c. 1-5, i. 8; Mag. Mor. ii. c. 7. 4 It may be illustrated thus: In travelling, we may have some place which we desire to reach pointed out to us in the distance; and we may imagine that we shall arrive at it by shaping our course directly towards it, and thus making it our immediate object. But this course would probably lead us into insuperable difficulties; whereas by going along the road leading to it, though that road may be circuitous and indirect, we safely and surely reach it. 5 Pleasure, accordingly, is defined by Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, i. 11, physically, as "a kind of motion of the soul, and a full and perceptible constitution into the proper nature." 6 Cave, Opus. Mythol.; D. Stewart's Phil. of Act. and Moral Powers. 7 Eth. Nic. ii. 6, ἡ ἀρετὴ ἐπιστήμη ἐστὶ πάντων τῶν ἐν τῷ ἰδίῳ ἰκανοῦ. pression is a continuation of the same physical notion under which his theory of the chief good is represented. The soul of man is conceived to be wrought to a temperament or mean state, all its affections and actions being in their due proportions.
To determine, however, this due measure of the affections, or this mean to which the constitution of the soul must be brought in order to the virtuous character, is the great question of ethics. To what arbitration shall we resort, to fix the evanescent boundaries of the territory of virtue?
Now, the instances in which this self-moderation belonging to the character of virtue is observed, become in themselves the objects of approbation, exciting in us sentiments of love, esteem, admiration, honour, and commending themselves at the same time to our intellectual perceptions. Hence the various expressions introduced into moral philosophy, of moral fitness, propriety, proportion—the decent, the fair, the honourable, the amiable, in conduct; the adoption of one or more of which tests of the morality of actions, has given its peculiar shade of opinion to different systems. Aristotle contemplates these sentiments of approbation, not as they are in themselves, but as they are outwardly evidenced by the praises of mankind at large accompanying certain actions. It is clear that men praise some actions and censure others. Here, then, is a conclusive evidence of the moral nature of actions. Where men—not any particular society of men, but the wide society of mankind—are unanimous in praising any action, there the quality of praiseworthiness may be imputed to the action itself; or the action is not only "good" in being the attainment of some natural end, but is further in itself the object of approbation. The combination of these two effects is expressed by Aristotle under the term \(\chiαλόν\), to which we have no perfect counterpart in our language, though the word "honourable," if understood in its full meaning, may sufficiently represent it.
Aristotle's classification of actions under the heads of different virtues is founded on this analysis of the moral nature of actions. A distinct class of natural objects of desire, to the pursuit of which within certain limits praise is attached, is in his system the ground of a distinct virtue.
His enumeration of the virtues is evidently incomplete. It seems chiefly intended as an evidence by induction, of that moderation of the affections in which he had stated the nature of virtue to consist. His division, indeed, of virtue is physical rather than logical—an enumeration of the parts of virtue rather than of the kinds of it: and his method, accordingly, did not require of him an exact statement of all the particulars comprised under the general term virtue. He has been accused of attending chiefly to the more splendid virtues. He was very probably led, by the very criterion of virtue which he employed, as well as by his view of the connection between ethics and politics, to sketch more prominently those particular virtues which recommend a man in society. And thus he has drawn beautiful little outlines of those charms of familiar intercourse—affability, frankness, agreeableness. His introduction, indeed, of these qualities among the virtues of his system, is a striking evidence of the practical nature of that virtue which he inculcates. It is a virtue which is not to be forgotten in any part of a man's daily life. Whilst it nerves his arm in dangers, distributes his bounty, shields him against temptations of pleasure, it unbends him in the hours of leisure, and is ever on his tongue, whether gravely pronouncing in his assertions and judgments, or playing in the salutes of his wit. These very instances show that he did not regard splendour as the exclusive attribute of virtue. On the contrary, he expressly speaks of it as only the heightening and decoration of the several virtues, and as meritorious because it presupposes all the virtues in their perfection. Another evidence of his not being exclusive in his regard to the more showy virtues, is his treating of gentleness. He selects the virtue of justice for more particular discussion. He distinguishes it as a particular virtue from the whole of virtue, which it denotes relatively—in its being the moderation of the love of gain or self-interest. Seduced, however, by the example of Plato, he departs, in his mode of treating this virtue, from the strict province of ethics into that of politics. The justice which he explains is a political virtue, applicable to the citizens of a common state rather than to man as man. And this confusion of ethical and political justice has led him into a speculative refinement, which gives the appearance of a forced effort to reconcile the notion of justice with his theory of virtue. Looking at justice as a dispensing power, he observed that it was concerned about "a mean" in things themselves, apportioning to each person his exact due, whether of reward or punishment. On the ground of this fact he points out that justice is not "a mean," as the other virtues are, but is "of the mean"—not in itself "a relative mean," but "relative to a mean." Had he considered justice solely as a moral habit, he would have seen that the distinction was unnecessary, since in this point of view it conforms precisely to his general notion of virtue in being a principle of self-moderation. There is, however, a foundation for the remark in the circumstance, that justice admits of greater exactness in its exercise than other virtues. "The rules of justice," says an excellent writer, "may be compared to the rules of grammar; the rules of the other virtues to the rules which critics lay down for the attainment of what is sublime and elegant in composition." In the other virtues we are thrown more on our sense of propriety in forming our practical decisions. In justice we have evident facts before us—the merit or demerit of individuals in themselves; and these form an external standard to guide us in our conduct over and above our internal convictions of right. So far, then, justice may be regarded as "of the mean," besides being also a point of propriety, or a mean within ourselves. Aristotle, it should be observed, had no other more appropriate word distinct from "justice" to express "honesty" or "integrity," and consequently was led to generalize too far in his analysis of justice.
Aristotle's discussion of friendship is open to similar objection. He has considered it in its outward effects as a social principle akin to justice, to which justice is subordinate and supplementary, rather than as an internal ethical principle—the moderated exercise of benevolence. in the heart itself. His observations, however, on the subject admirably illustrate the importance of friendship to the right constitution of society—the various modifications of the benevolent principle in the different relations of human life—together with the peculiar amiableness of virtue in itself. In the last respect, indeed, the discussion forms an essential part of his moral philosophy, as it tends to show his conviction that the moral principles have their seat in the heart.
Indeed, this part of his Ethics, as well as his inquiry into justice, should be accurately studied by all who would obtain just views of the comprehensive character of the virtue of his system. Together they comprise a body of relative duties. Under justice would be classed the duties of "religion, memory of the dead, filial reverence, patriotism, civil obedience, veracity, honesty," &c., so far as these duties flow from claims on our respect, and are prescribed by human laws: under friendship, the same duties as they are prompted by sentiment and feeling, and are known by the names of piety, gratitude, benevolence, fidelity, generosity, &c. Hence his beautiful summary of the character of virtue, when he says, that "it is of virtue both to benefit the worthy and to love the good; and to be neither apt to punish nor revengeful, but merciful, and placable, and indulgent; and there follow on virtue, kindness, equity, candour, good hope; moreover, such qualities as, to be domestic, friendly, social, hospitable, philanthropic, and a lover of what is honourable."
His theory, then, of virtue must be regarded as involving a minute and distinct attention to all the particular virtues. And herein appears its great excellence, as contrasted with those of some modern philosophers, who have endeavoured to trace up all the virtues to some one principle of our nature, as benevolence, or self-love, or prudence. All such theories are in truth mere accommodations of language, by which different classes of phenomena are arranged under the same terms; and they tend rather to give a shadowiness to the form of virtue, instead of striking it out in bold outline. Aristotle's theory is the law by which these different classes of facts are held together in fact, the common process by which the operation of each virtue is carried on; and which, when realized in the character of a man, gives him the command of all the virtues.
The ancient moral philosophy sought, like the modern, to resolve virtue into some one principle; but the endeavour of the ancients was rather to ground it on some intellectual principle. Socrates contended that the virtues were instances of prudence or knowledge, \(\sigma\gamma\omega\mu\eta\tau\alpha\), or \(\lambda\alpha\gamma\eta\tau\alpha\). Aristotle shows the foundation of this misconception, in explaining in what respect the production of virtue might be regarded as the work of the intellect. Each virtue consisting in the adjustment of the action to all the circumstances of the case, the virtue of each action must consequently depend on the practical judgment of the individual agent; and an agent who is uniformly virtuous must exhibit this practical judgment uniformly operating, enabling him to decide on the point in which the virtue of acting lies. This operation of the intellect on moral objects he designates as the intellectual virtue of prudence or wisdom. He speaks of it as "defining" or bounding the mean in which virtue consists; that is, as a speculative definition presents to the mind an exact notion of the thing defined, so the principles supplied by prudence give us a perception of the moral nature of an action. For example, suppose a man to have received some evident wrong—some injury done to him without provocation. The affection of resentment naturally leads him to requite the injustice on his assailant; but by what method of action he should do so, is a matter of question. He must know exactly in what way his resentment should be shown, in order to act virtuously; besides having as his general principle, the inclination to act virtuously. He must, therefore, have had some experience of human life—some practical knowledge of the nature of actions which have been approved as fulfilling the end of this affection. An experience, then, of this kind, applied to the exercise of all the affections, and operating invariably on the conduct, constitutes the prudence of Aristotle's system. It is thus intimately connected with the moral principles, as the moral principles are with it. It is the combined result, in the intellectual part of our nature, of all the virtues of the heart; as, on the other hand, prudence is the diverging of the intellect through the various virtues of the heart. Hence his conclusion, that it is impossible to be properly good—\(\alpha\gamma\omega\mu\eta\tau\alpha\)—without prudence, or to be prudent without moral virtue; and consequently, that all the moral virtues are inseparable, inasmuch as the possession of all is requisite for the perfecting of prudence.
In this account of prudence is to be traced the principle of moral obligation involved in Aristotle's theory of virtue. He considers the moral virtues as those of the inferior part of the soul, and therefore as formed to obey; whereas the intellectual principles, as being purely rational, had in their nature an intrinsic authority. Prudence, accordingly, being the intellectual virtue employed in conjunction with the moral in the production of virtue, is, from its nature, supreme over its associated principles, and demands of right their submission to its dictates. It must be confessed that such a ground of obligation is merely theoretic; and so Aristotle himself perceived it to be. As a principle of observation and reflection, it resembles in some measure the supremacy of conscience; but it does not come up to the force of that master-principle. Conscience rewards and punishes by its judgments, whereas the dictates of prudence carry no such sanction in them. Properly, however, the notion of "obligation" is inapplicable to his system. Not incalculating morality as a law, but as a philosophy, or art of life, he was not called upon to show why it should be obeyed as a law. It was enough for him to point out, from observations on human conduct, that it is in fact obeyed by all who attain their real good.
But though the principle of conscience has no place in his theory, it is certainly implied in his test of virtue and vice—the praise and blame of mankind. The universal consent of mankind on these points he considers as decisive of the moral nature of an action. But this is to allow a standard of right and wrong inherent in human nature, or what is equivalent to a conscience. If all agree in praising a certain modification of the affections, and in blaming another, it is clear that there must be some common principles in all to serve as the bases of these unanimous judgments. The same conclusion results from his admission of capacities of virtue, and of the existence of natural virtue, in man, antecedent to the
Practical proper formation of it in the character. Indeed, his analysis of prudence is in itself decisive of his real view of this point. Not only are the principles on which prudence is to speculate to be drawn from the heart; but the very deduction of these principles to the particular cases of conduct involves moral perceptions. For how else is the precise point in which the mean lies—in which the due measure of the affection exerted consists—to be ascertained? If the virtue of the action consisted in an absolute mean, a mere intellectual process, such as that of arithmetic or geometry, would enable us to ascertain it. But the mean in question being neither more nor less than what is proper, this implies a sense of propriety. Right conduct, according to him, is not such because it is neither excessive nor defective; but it is neither excessive nor defective because it is right. This is plain from his induction of the several virtues, in which he shows that there is a mean, because there is a point of propriety; so that a moral perception must precede every decision on moral questions. It is of the greatest consequence, in order to a right understanding of his account of virtue, to observe this necessary dependence of the knowledge of the mean, on the adjustment of the moral principles to their objects. The want of attention to it has led to absurd objections against Aristotle's theory. He has been interpreted as if he had said that we could have too much courage, too much liberality, &c.; which notion proceeds on the false assumption, that the mean laid down by Aristotle is a quantity; whereas it is only a proportion or correspondence existing between the principles of the agent and the objects of those principles. The term "mean," in fact, as employed by Aristotle, is merely negative, marking the exclusion of all unchastened feeling from the character of virtue.
But though his system is defective as an authoritative law, it develops a much nobler theory of duty than the philosophy which rests our obligation to virtue on a ground of interest. The "prudence" of Aristotle's ethics must be understood as widely different from the prudence of such a theory. The prudence which he teaches is no calculation of consequences. It is a practical philosophy of the heart, inseparably connected with the love of that conduct which it suggests: whereas, when we are taught to act on the ground of interest, the prudence then indicated is a mere intellectual foresight of consequences, independent of any exercise of the heart. Such a system, whilst it overthrows the distinction between right and wrong as a fundamental principle, requires either a very comprehensive power of intellect in order to its practical adoption, or an express revelation from the Deity, declaring the good and evil consequences annexed to actions. These are conditions which sufficiently expose its futility as a guide to duty. The heart of man leaves far behind this morality of consequences, and decides, even before the action itself has its birth, whether it is morally right or wrong. The appeal to the revealed will of the Deity is not only a petitia principii, inasmuch as no will of the Deity can be ascertained and proved divine, without the previous admission of principles of right and wrong; but is refuted by the simple fact, that theories of virtue such as that of Aristotle have been devised by men who had no belief in a Divine Providence. We speak not of the excellence of such theories, but of the mere fact of their existence as accounts of human duties. That "the difference, and the only difference," between an act of prudence and an act of duty is, "that, in the one case, we consider what we shall gain or lose in the present world—in the other case we consider also what we shall gain or lose in the world to come;"—is an assertion disproved at once by the fact, that Aristotle saw a difference between the two acts, independently of that consideration on which the notion of duty is there made to rest. Whether he has stated the difference correctly or not, is immaterial to this point.
The principle of self-love has also been well illustrated by Aristotle in its relation to virtue. He distinguishes between the culpable form of it, or selfishness, and that form of it which is auxiliary to virtue. Self-love, then, in its good sense, may be acted on by the virtuous man, whose character is already framed on the principle of "the honourable;" and in that case, he shows, it will be coincident with benevolence; since the person so pursuing his own interest will also effectually promote that of others. But this is not the case with the bad man; since, in pursuit of his views of self-interest, the bad man will at once injure himself and others by compliance with bad passions. It is evident from the above, that neither does he admit of benevolence being made a principle of conduct, otherwise than as a proper benevolence pre-supposes other moral principles, and is regulated consequently in its exercise by a prevailing regard to the "honourable" or right. He has also enforced his primary notions of duty by pointing out the proper amiableness of virtue, both as the only sure tie of attachment between man and man, and as the only thing which produces tranquillity, self-satisfaction, and delight, in a man's own bosom. On the latter point, indeed, he speaks almost in terms descriptive of the joys and pangs of conscience. So justly has he embraced in his view the most powerful auxiliary principles, without exalting them, as some philosophers have, to an undue place, by making the theory of virtue to rest on them.
Such, then, is that account of virtue which Aristotle's practical philosophy develops. He delivers it as the theory of perfect conduct, as that which is exemplified in operation whenever human good is realized in life. It is at the same time, it should be observed, an account of the nature of virtue, and of the internal process of our own constitution, by which virtue is produced. The affections being all habitually moderated by prudence, virtue is the result; and in that moderation consists the nature of virtue.
He was not, however, inattentive to the fact, that the speculative perfection of a practical rule is not realized in human life. He was aware that a complete subordination of the affections to the principle of prudence was a task of difficulty above the efforts of man as he is. So also his view of vice, as that state of man in which his principles are entirely corrupted,—the affections being conformed to evil, so that he continually and insensi-
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1 Endem. iii. cap. 7: Eth. Nic. ii. cap. 6, ἀμετικόν πλάσεις, μετέχοντας τοῦ διαφορᾶς—ἐπιστημῶν γὰρ εἰς τὸν ἄλλον.
2 A moral philosophy of this kind is in fact a revival in a new form of the theory of Socrates, which made virtue a science. It overlooks the affections in the production of virtue, as the theory of Socrates did.
3 Paley's Mor. and Pol. Philos. book ii. chap. 3.
4 Eth. Nic. vol. ix. cap. 8; Mag. Mor. ii. 13, 14; Polit. ii. 3.
5 See Bishop Butler, Serm. i.
6 Eth. Nic. ix. cap. 4; Ἐν τῷ συνεδρίῳ ὁμοίως καὶ ἑτέρως ἀξίως, ἐπιστημῶν τοῦ πράγματος διαφορᾶς, ὡς ἐπιστημῶν ὑποκείμενος ὑπὸ τῶν γὰρ ἐν τῷ συνεδρίῳ ὁμοίως καὶ ἑτέρως ἀξίως ἀξίως. Endem. vii. cap. 6.
7 Eth. Nic. vii. cap. 8; Ἀν ἢ ἤδη ἀποκαλύψεις τοῦ ἀποκαλύπτοντος, ἢ ἂν φάσῃ, ἢ ἂν τεχνῇ; ἦν δὲ ἕστι γὰρ ἡ ἀποκαλύψεις ἀποκαλύπτοντος. chooses evil rather than good—is a philosophical limit of the extent of human depravity, and not an account of vice as it actually exists in the world. It is indeed a just conclusion, from experience of that degradation to which our nature is brought—that hardening of the heart, as the Scripture terms it, by the habitual violation of our duty. As the end, therefore, as the perfect form of vice, this state of the heart should be sketched out by the moralist, to give their proper practical cogency to his admonitions. His outlines of virtue must be drawn from virtue realized in its tendency—from that condition of it in which it is the attainment of man's chief good; as vice, on the other hand, must be contemplated where it stands fully confessed as man's chief evil. There may be a virtue above our nature, as there may be a vice below it; and Aristotle notices both these extremes: but neither of these presents a standard of human excellence or human depravity, and therefore requires no distinct consideration in an ethical treatise. But the actual virtues and vices of men, as they are observed in the world, exhibit an endless variety of modifications within the theoretic limits of virtue and vice. The affections are more or less brought into subjection to the rational principle in different individuals; and men are praised and blamed in proportion as they have established this command over themselves, or have lost it. And hence a secondary or inferior kind of virtue results, as well as a less odious vice. As it is in the indulgence of the sensual affections that human frailty is most seen, Aristotle distinguishes this secondary virtue and vice by contrast with the particular virtue and vice of temperance and intemperance; as if they were simply what we express by continence and incontinence; but his distinction of their nature is a general one, and belongs to the whole character of virtue and vice. But in admitting a morality of this nature, he laboured under a speculative difficulty. Socrates had denied the existence of any such imperfect vice, on the ground that the virtues were sciences, and that it was impossible for a man to act against his convictions of the best. Aristotle, though not agreeing with Socrates in regarding the virtues as sciences, still, as he admitted an intellectual process in the production of virtue, felt himself required to explain how this higher principle was overpowered by the weaker, as it evidently was in the incontinent man. In the course of this explanation he has touched on the true philosophy of those facts in which the principles and practice of men are evidenced at variance. He has accounted in some measure for the apparent anomaly of the same person exhibiting at different periods such contrasts of character—at one time commanding the passions, at another yielding to them. For he delineates, it should be observed, under the characters of "the continent" and "incontinent," not two different persons, as in the case of "the temperate" and "in-
The question of the freedom of the will has been admirably treated by Aristotle. It is discussed as it ought to be in a treatise of moral philosophy, independently of those metaphysical difficulties with which it is commonly overlaid. What the nature of human will is, whether it must be regarded as free or necessary, according to our abstract notions of liberty or necessity, forms no part of his inquiry. He points out simply, what are the classes of actions in which an agent is generally held not responsible for his conduct; and excluding these, decides on the remainder—that, since in these, men are held responsible; as is shown by the praise and blame, reward and punishment, attaching to their conduct; there, the actions are voluntary. This is the extent to which the inquiry, so far as it is strictly ethical, ought to be carried. Whether we speculatively conclude the will of man to be free or necessary, practically we must proceed as if it were free; since to act on that supposition accords with the facts of human life; whereas, to act on the theory that we are under a necessity, would lead us against the common practice of mankind, by which we are treated as responsible. Aristotle indeed argues, that though the question be decided in the negative, it leaves the relative nature of virtue and vice on the same footing; if our virtues may still be imputed to us, so may our vices. But he more distinctly affirms the voluntary nature both of virtue and vice, on the ground that the \(\alpha\gamma\eta\sigma\) principle of the action, is \(\phi\tau\alpha\mu\eta\pi\eta\),—in ourselves—in our own power. Thus, though the virtuous or vicious habits that we have formed may dispose us to a particular course of behaviour, so that, as being under their influence, we cannot act otherwise, yet the actions so performed are voluntary; because it was in our power to do or forbear that course of conduct which led to the settled habit.
The principle thus described as "in ourselves," is, in Aristotle's philosophy, the motive of our actions. It is that from which the effect on our conduct has originated; and it comes therefore under that class of principles which we have described as constituting the motive or efficient cause. The term "motive," however, is sometimes transferred in popular use to the object or end of an action—which being something external to ourselves, gives occasion to question the voluntary nature of actions. But, in strictness, the end chosen by the agent or object at which he aims, is in itself no cause whatever of his acting, but rather the cause of the morality or immorality of his actions, or what constitutes their moral nature.
But the principles employed in the production of moral virtue are not the whole of our internal nature, nor are they the highest principles. And Aristotle's theory implies the exertion of all, and, if there be a relative su-
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1 Eth. Nic. vii. cap. 9; ἐν τῷ πράξει ἡμῶν ἀποφαίνεται. Rhet. ii. 4, ἐν τῷ πράξει ἡμῶν, ἐν τῷ πράξει ἡμῶν, ἀποφαίνεται. This insensibility is the result of confirmed habit; and the same result takes place in regard to virtue. The moral principles are less felt, as more internal principles, when perfected in the character; operating as it were without thought or effort, in the conduct. See Bishop Butler's Analogy, chapter on Moral Discipline.
2 Ibid. vii. cap. 8; ὅτι μὴ ἐν τῷ πράξει ἡμῶν ἀποφαίνεται. Ἐκεῖνος ἂν ἤθελεν, ἢ μὴ ἐν τῷ πράξει ἡμῶν ἀποφαίνεται, ἢ ἐν τῷ πράξει ἡμῶν ἀποφαίνεται.
3 Eth. Nic. vii. c. 7; Eudem. vi. c. 11.
4 Eudem. vii. c. 13; Eth. Nic. vii. c. 3.
5 Eth. Nic. iii. c. 1; 5; which is in substance the conclusion of Bishop Butler (Anal. p. i. chap. on the Opinion of Necessity). The whole doctrine of this chapter is coincident with the views of Aristotle, and illustrative of them.
6 Paley speaks of "private happiness" as "our motive." (Mor. and Pol. Phil. ii. ii. c. 3.) We use the term in the Aristotelian sense when we say that ambition or avarice is a person's motive, but not in saying that power or self-interest is so.
7 Eth. Nic. vi. c. 2; Eudem. iii. c. 11; Metaph. vi. c. 1.
Political priority among them, a preference of the higher. He assigns, accordingly, the greatest happiness to the exercise of the intellectual principles. These he had already analyzed, in tracing the connection of the intellect with virtue; and, dividing them according to the classes of objects on which they are exercised, had assigned the pre-eminence to Σοφία, or philosophy, the science of the highest objects.
That a philosopher, living, as Aristotle did, amidst the disorder and misery occasioned by the want of a true and practical religion, should have sought for a perfection of happiness out of the troubled scene in which moral virtue is disciplined, ought not to excite our wonder. The calm regions of philosophical contemplation—σοφικόν τέμπλον σερανοῦ—presented an absolute refuge to the anxious mind, eager to realize its own abstractions in some perfect form of human life. There, those principles which his theory had sketched, appeared to hold without exception; and those uncertainties and limitations which elsewhere attended their operation, either to vanish or be greatly diminished. It was a search, indeed, after that happiness which revelation has made known to us,—a happiness out of our present sphere of exertion and duty,—in which man might obtain the full end or consummate good of his being. Aristotle himself describes the pursuit of this ulterior happiness in terms indicative of this; as an immortalizing of our nature; as a living according to what is divine in man; as what renders a man most dear to the Divinity, most god-like. From not believing, however, any doctrine of the real immortality of man as a compound being,—though he held a partial immortality of the soul, that of the intellect,—he determined the excellence of human happiness from a view of the present condition only of man. In this exclusive point of view, the intellectual virtues would be justly entitled to the pre-eminence, though experience convinces us that even these are not without their alloy. He by no means, however, regards the exercise of these virtues an exemption from the necessity of cultivating the moral. To enjoy the happiness of the theoretic life is the highest privilege of our nature; but still our condition as men calls to the exercise of those virtues from which our proper happiness as men, as compound beings consisting of passions and intellect, and living in an evil world, results. No philosophy but that of Aristotle has maintained this proposition. Plato would lead his followers into the indolent reveries of mysticism; the Stoics would reduce theirs to indifference about human things; the Epicureans would absorb theirs in the fulness of present delights; Cicero would degrade the higher employment of the soul in the contemplative life below the ordinary moral duties, confounding the dignity and the indispensableness of an employment. But Aristotle directs us to pursue that happiness which is beyond our attainment as compound beings, at the same time whilst we actively exert ourselves in the discharge of those duties which belong to us as men.
Politics.
The observed inefficiency of ethical precepts in themselves to produce morality in the lives of men, and the consequent appeal to some external sanction for their enforcement, led to such works among the ancients as the Politics of Aristotle. The Christian observes the same fact, and draws from it a strong argument for the necessity of a divine revelation. Aristotle and other Greek philosophers looked to the influence of education directed by civil laws and institutions, and to the rewards and punishments of civil government, as the great instruments for bringing mankind to that course of action in which their real interest consisted.
Aristotle was induced to ascribe this moral force to the law of the state, through the current notion of ancient philosophy, which confounded moral and political good. The good of man as an individual was conceived perfectly coincident with his good as a member of society; and the science of politics, therefore, was supposed to include under it that of ethics. Had not these philosophers been misled by the abstract terms "good" and "expedient," they could hardly have thus blended together the heterogeneous objects of moral and political science. They would have seen that the social union is inadequate to the promotion of that good of man which results from his internal nature, and that it could reach no further than to the protection of the individual from external aggression on his person and property, and allowing him the unobstructed exercise of his virtue. "Civil government," says Bishop Butler, "can by no means take cognizance of every work which is good or evil; many things are done in secret, the authors unknown to it, and often the things themselves; then it cannot so much consider actions under the view of their being morally good or evil, as under the view of their being mischievous or beneficial to society; nor can it in any wise execute judgment in rewarding what is good, as it can, and ought, and does, in punishing what is evil."
In consequence of this mistaken view of the end of the social union, the ancient political philosophy was not a system of jurisprudence so much as a speculation concerning the most perfect form of government,—theories of social happiness, rather than the principles of laws by which the relative rights of men might be maintained. Ingenious men amused themselves with fancying how society might be modelled, so as to exhibit that ideal optimism which they had pictured to themselves; instead of attending to the real phenomena of human life, and deducing from them the right administration of society under its actually existing forms.
Aristotle, in common with other Greek philosophers, constructed a theory of politics on this delusive principle. Proposing to himself the perfect polity, as that in which the virtue and happiness of the man and the citizen exactly coincide, he proceeds to sketch out the form of it, and thus to obtain an outline of the institutions on which his ethical system must practically depend for its support. But he was not, like other philosophers, so fascinated by theory as to overlook the practical nature of the science. He complains of his predecessors, that however well they might have treated the subject in other respects, they had at least failed in the useful. They had contented themselves with devising forms of polity which could only be effected with a concurrence of every favourable circumstance, whereas the practical usefulness of the science required the delivery of principles applicable to the improvement and security of existing governments. We know, indeed, from the titles of other works on politics which he is said to have written, the Polities of One Hundred and Fifty-eight States, the four books On Laws, and
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1 Eth. Nic. x. c. 7 and 8. 2 Eth. Nic. x. c. 8; ad 11 τὸν ἐνδιαίνων ἀγαθοῦ καὶ ἀδικίας, ἡ ἀ. ἢ. 3 Draco, however, and Pittacus, were only framers of laws, and not of polities. (Aristot. Polit. ii. c. ult.) 4 See Bishop Butler's Sermon On the Ignorance of Man. 5 Ἡγετος τοῦ μηχανικοῦ, Eth. Nic. x. c. 8. the two books *On the Politician*, that he did not consider the subject as exhausted in the theory of a perfect polity. The observations, too, on justice and on civil policy, contained in his Ethics and Rhetoric, are proofs of the practical views with which he contemplated the subject; and even in the work now before us, which develops his professed theory of politics, the substance of the inquiry is sound and enlightened instructions of policy, drawn from experience of human nature, and applicable to all times and circumstances. From its connection with his Ethics, it was intended in fact to be applied by each individual in the practical business of education. He wished the individual to obtain by means of it that scientific knowledge of the effects of institution and discipline on the human character, which might assist him in the treatment of the particular cases of his own actual experience. It thus harmonized completely with his Ethics, the object of which was, as before stated (p. 519–20), to enable each man more effectually to realize his own particular good by a general knowledge of what was good for the species at large.
The perfect polity sketched by Aristotle is a theory of the end to which man, viewed in his social capacity, at its best estate, and unimpeded by external obstacles, may be conceived to tend. It is a view of the end or τέλος in his political system, corresponding to his account of the chief good in his Ethics. He arrives at it by the same train of thought which led him to his account of the chief good. He considered, first, that man, independently of any calculations of expediency, was naturally a political animal; as in his Ethics he assumes that man is endowed by nature with active principles tending to his own good. He admits that expediency is instrumental in cementing the union among men, but does not rest society on this principle; wisely judging that man is induced originally to associate with man by various internal principles of his nature, and not simply by motives derived from reflection on his wants, which last are in truth only secondary causes, and auxiliary to the former, in like manner as the principle of self-love is auxiliary to the natural affections on which virtue is founded. As, then, in his Ethics he went on to inquire what principle rendered actions perfect, exhibiting them attaining the end for which nature had constituted the affections, and as this principle formed the chief good of his ethical system, so in his Politics he carries on his view of the social nature of man to the point where the union to which it tends appears self-sufficient and perfect. The mode in which the social principles might be found to operate in this ultimate case would present the perfection of social virtue; and from this specimen of social virtue would be deducible, right forms of government, institutions, and laws, just as the several rules of right moral conduct are drawn from the whole moral nature of man contemplated in its perfection.
To put ourselves, accordingly, into that posture of mind in which Aristotle appears to have contemplated the subject, we must suppose the case of a society analogous to that of an individual. The analogy between the principles of the heart, as a constitution or system of related principles tending to a common end, and the elements of a political community, could not but be familiar to the mind of a disciple of Plato, who delighted in drawing his outlines of moral virtue from the imagery of social life. But Aristotle, though sometimes imitating the beautiful language of Plato in his ethical descriptions, has inverted the analogy, and framed his representation of a perfect society after the resemblance of the internal constitution of the heart. We must imagine, then, the various members of a community, when brought to the standard of perfection implied in the notion of a perfect constitution, all obtaining their respective dues in a manner analogous to the due moderation of the affections in the virtuous character. A "mean" is to be attained in the one case as in the other.
Agreeably to this view of his mode of speculation on the subject, Aristotle describes the perfect polity as a mixture of oligarchy and democracy, as a state which appears both these forms of government, and neither of them; in which no one of the component elements of society has a preponderance, but the claims of freedom, of wealth, and of virtue, are all duly considered. A form of government which is thus a "mean" throughout, Aristotle designates by the name of "Polity," appropriating to it the general name, and thus distinguishing it as the perfect form, the proper constitution of a πόλις, or city,—a city being the "end" of the social union.
If, indeed, not mere protection from mutual injury, but the promotion of virtue, were the object of the social union, as Aristotle contends, it must be allowed that that only can be a perfect constitution of society in which the standard of political rights is the same with that of moral right. In this ultimate perfect form, upon such a supposition, the science of politics becomes absorbed in that of ethics. The community in this case acts as the dispenser of the laws of morality; and its honours and its penalties are but the channels through which virtue works its own rewards of happiness, and vice its own punishments of misery. But this is, as we contend, on the other hand, to intrude on a province far beyond that of political science. Schemes for the moral perfection of society belong to the wisdom of a providence more than human, working good out of evil, and, from a boundless survey of all the relations of things, accomplishing important results by means apparently incompetent. Man, in his designs of moral good, has only to attend closely to the mechanism placed under his observation—to use the appointed means—to cultivate given powers—to provide against foreseen consequences—and then trust that the happiness, which must surely be the end of the whole under a wise and good Providence, will be the result of his well-ordered exertions. Thus, it is manifest to our view, that from the ungoverned passions of men evil will ensue. Society, therefore, may lawfully be employed as an instrument for preventing this misery, so far as external means can reach it; and so far, too, it may encourage virtue, and indirectly promote human happiness. But let it propose to itself "what is best" as the distinct aim of its constitution, and it bewilders itself with theories, no one of which will in any probability realize its plausible expectations; whilst, on the contrary, some evil must certainly ensue from artificial attempts on so large a scale. For it is impossible,
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1 These works are mentioned by Diogenes Laertius. A portion of the *Politics of One Hundred and Fifty-eight States*, relative to the constitution of Athens, has been preserved by Julius Pollux. 2 Eth. Nic. x. c. 12. 3 Nobility, according to Aristotle, is "ancient wealth and virtue;" or "the virtue and wealth of ancestors;" and does not, in his view, therefore, form a distinct head of claims. According to Laertius, he wrote an express treatise, *Περὶ Εὐγενείας*, in one book. 4 Bishop Butler's picture of a perfectly virtuous kingdom will readily occur here. (*Analogy*, part i. chap. 3.) 5 *Polit. i. 2, iii. 6.* 6 *Polit. i. cap. 2, Φυσικὴ ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγαθοῦ, τ. 7.*
Practical as Aristotle himself well observes, but that, "from false good in the outset, real evil must at length result." Aristotle, however, is justifiable in point of consistency here, with the rest of his philosophy. Excluding from the course of nature a providence distinct from nature itself, he proceeded, according to his system, to attribute an internal self-adjusting power to society considered as an effect of nature. The maxim, that "Nature does nothing in vain," is at the base of his moral and political philosophy, as well as of his physical. The perfect polity is an illustration of this maxim. It is the perfecting of the self-provisions of nature in the human species.
The real excellence, however, of Aristotle's theory of the perfect polity consists in this, that if we admit a Divine Providence, to whose foresight we ascribe the final cause or ultimate tendency of the social union, it is a negative description of the policy which should be pursued in every well-constituted state. It points out the manner in which the public welfare must be sought; that is, by not making any one of the objects commonly pursued in the political world the express object of pursuit to the community. On the hypothesis, that the happiness of the world is the care of Him who ordered it, every society should be so constituted as that no appointment of Providence be overlooked, but every part of the social machinery be brought into action. The love of conquest, for instance, will not be the aim of such a state. Such a policy would employ its military resources only, to the exclusion of its other materials of happiness. Aristotle particularly points out this in the instance of Lacedemon, whose whole policy was framed for war; whereas, as he observes, a state should be adapted for living well in peace, and enjoying that repose which is the end of its engaging in war. Nor, again, will the mere accumulation of wealth be the express aim of the state in its whole policy. Such a ruling principle would tend to degrade the great mass of the population, and to undo the very connection itself between the members of the community, by pushing the boundaries between the rich and poor to the extremes of opulence and pauperism; of which condition of things the natural result is the tyranny of an oligarchy. Lastly, if even liberty is made the exclusive aim of state policy, unhappiness is the sure result. Whilst the members of the community grasp at an unrestrained licentiousness, they disregard the various gradations of society, by which the sphere of human duties is enlarged, and the greatest securities against violations of liberty are provided; and thus a wild democracy usurps the place of a just polity.
Now, Aristotle's theory excludes all such gross schemes of policy. It admits only the general pursuit of the public welfare; which, like the private happiness sketched in his Ethics, is not to be made a distinct object under any particular form, but must be the general pursuit of the whole organization of the society; as private happiness is the result of the general regulation of all the moral principles. It is true that he supposes a society to constitute itself in order to its own moral happiness; and herein is the defect of his theory. But if it be considered that this was a necessary substitute in his system for a Divine Providence, his theory, it will be concluded, did not imply that the individual members of the community should expressly propose to themselves, as their object of pursuit, that happiness to which the social system itself should tend. It was evidently to be brought about by that mysterious agency which, from not admitting a real Providence, he was compelled to ascribe to nature.
This is further illustrated in his description of the three right forms of government, and the three improper or deviations from the former. He admits that the public welfare may be promoted under other forms—under a monarchy or an aristocracy, as well as under "a polity." These three forms are indeed coincident in principle, according to Aristotle, being variations produced by differences in the character of the people among whom they arise. The perfect "polity" presupposes an equality among the members of the society,—that all are capable in turn of governing, as well as of being governed. But there may in some cases be marked differences between a family, or an individual, or a class of individuals, and the bulk of the people; and in these cases the rule of justice requires that there should exist in the first a monarchy, in the latter an aristocracy. So far, indeed, does Aristotle carry this principle as to say, that any single person eminent in worth above the rest of the community, as one of a more divine nature, ought to have entire obedience from the rest, and to be perpetual sovereign. The three forms, then, of monarchy, aristocracy, and polity, are right: because, being founded on the relative merit of the members of each society, and the standard of merit being virtue, the rule of justice is maintained in them. The public good follows, therefore, not from the ascendancy of this or that principle of policy in the government in each case, but from a due regard to all the subsisting relations in the state. But in the corresponding perversions of these right policies—in a tyranny, an oligarchy, and a democracy—particular principles prevail, and particular interests, accordingly, are consulted, to the violation of justice and the sacrifice of public good.
Aristotle appears the only political theorist among the ancients who never lost sight of the moral nature of man in his speculations. The systems of other theorists, as Plato, Phaleas of Chalcedon, Hippodamus of Miletus, and the polities of Lacedemon, Crete, and Carthage, for the most part treated human society merely as a physical mass, capable of being moulded into particular forms by the mechanism of external circumstances. Aristotle, on the contrary, lays the chief stress on the force of "customs, philosophy, and laws," for producing the best constitution of society. Still as, in his Ethics, in order to the development of his theory of the chief good of man, he supposes a condition of human life adequate to the exercise of the moral powers; so, in his Politics, he supposes a concurrence of circumstances favourable to the existence of the perfect polity. In this theory, as in that, there must be no impediment from without to the operation of the principles. Here, as in the Ethics, the production of the desired effect is the combination of three principles—nature, custom, reason. Therefore, also, as there must be certain elements of virtue in the heart in order to the moral improvement of an individual, so there must be the proper elements of the perfect social life in the community where the perfect polity is to be reared. Then, upon these natural principles of the head and heart, a course of public education is to proceed, disciplining the members by custom and by reason to the perfection of the social character, in a manner analogous to the discipline of the private moral character.
We find the same fundamental agreement with the mo-
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1 Polit. iv. cap. 12, v. cap. 1. 2 Ibid. ii. cap. 9, vii. cap. 14. 3 Ibid. iii. cap. 17. 4 Ibid. iii. cap. 13, p. 355, Du Val. particular studies was evidently to contract the mental powers to that particular range of vision to which they were confined; whereas he sought rather to impart a largeness and masculine strength to the understanding, commensurate with the varied demands of the world in which human life is cast. It was what we should express by the education of the accomplished gentleman,—of one who, exempt from the drudgery of life, and having his actions freely at his own disposal, might be qualified for the highest functions to which nature has destined man in forming him a moral and social being. For it should be observed, that Aristotle throughout supposes an entire immunity from all servile employments, both to the happy man and the happy citizen. According to his view, a large proportion of mankind were physically incapable, either of the happiness of moral beings, or of that of social life. Persons so imperfectly constituted he conceived to be wholly dependent on others, and to be by nature relative beings or slaves, their proper nature being comprised in this relationship of dependence. To this class, accordingly, he would commit all the labours of agriculture, of the mechanical arts, and of the market, as well as the menial offices; whilst others more gifted by nature enjoyed leisure for the proper duties of man, in the various relations of a moral and social being.
The condition of slavery was thus, we perceive, rested by Aristotle on abstract philosophical grounds. He viewed it as an institution of nature; differing in this from other philosophers, and from the popular notion of his own countrymen, who either founded it on the right of conquest, or an assumed original difference between Greek and Barbarian. This was a far more liberal view of the subject than that which prevailed generally; since it implied, that no one had a right to retain another as his slave when the individual was not thus physically dependent on others. Every one had a right to be free, who was capable of enjoying freedom in the performance of the duties for which man in his perfection was constituted. This doctrine further imposed on the master a strict moral attention to his slave. The slave was thrown on him not only for support, but for direction in his duties.
That religion should have formed no part of the actual business of education in his system, was further consistent with his Ethics. The moral zōēs terminated in the perfect fulfillment of all those relations in which man was placed as a being of this world. It was heightened by the consideration, that gods might delight in looking down on such perfection, and that in its ultimate state it might resemble the excellence of divinity. But it did not strike its roots into religion; nor did the zōēs of social life. The accomplished citizen might be taught to contemplate himself in the thoughtful activity of a philosophical leisure, as holding a dignified station among men, analogous to the divine principles which maintained the order of the universe; but there was no connection taught between his social virtues and his religious system. The religious colouring was only the borrowed light of philosophy. All active religion was consigned to the instrumentality of a particular body of men—the priests. The obligatory force of religion was recognized; but being lodged in an external establishment, as its depository and proper sanctuary, reverence was sought for it by outward bonds of respect, by
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1 Polit. vii. cap. 16, ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν ἀνδρὸς σωτηρίας ἢ πόλεως. 2 Ibid. vii. cap. 16, ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν ἀνδρὸς σωτηρίας ἢ πόλεως. 3 Ibid. vii. cap. 14. 4 Eth. Nic. x. cap. 6, 7; Polit. iii. cap. 6, iv. 4. 5 Polit. i. cap. 3, 6. 6 Ibid. vii. cap. 9, 10. 7 Cicero De Fin. ii. cap. 13. Aristotle's account of his theoretic polity leaves off abruptly at the end of the 8th book; and the treatise is thus, as now extant, an imperfect development of his peculiar views. But the theory of the perfect polity is only a part of the very valuable materials of the Politics. The work embraces a wide survey of the social nature of man. Throughout, indeed, it may be studied as elements of the philosophy of history. It lays open the principles of preservation and decay inherent in the different constitutions, and points out the common principles, on which the maintenance of civil order, under any form whatever, must essentially depend.
Nor has the science of political economy been altogether overlooked by Aristotle. Incidental remarks on points belonging to the inquiries of the economist occur in his Politics. The nature of money, and of the wealth to which the introduction of money has given rise, particularly attracted his attention. It may suffice to show how accurately he has philosophized on this subject, to observe, that he has traced the origin of money to its convenience as a medium of exchange; and hence deduced its value as consisting in its power of representing demand.
On the whole, justly to appreciate the labours of Aristotle in political science, we should compare them with the elaborate and eloquent work of Plato on the same subject—the celebrated Republic. Aristotle evidently had this work before him in the composition of his own, and in several places has made express allusions to it. In fact, his two treatises of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, are together a refutation of the erroneous doctrines in moral and political philosophy contained in Plato's political speculations. It is but a small portion of Plato's Republic which strictly belongs to politics; the bulk of it being devoted to moral and metaphysical discussions. Aristotle's more exact philosophy discriminates the subjects heterogeneously blended in that episodic work. Aristotle has taken all that is excellent in the treatises of Plato into his own treatises, but at the same time has shown his own originality of thought in the correction and enlargement, as well as the systematic arrangement, of the principles there diffusely delivered. He candidly acknowledges that every thing that Socrates says, has in it "a vastness, and an exquisiteness, and an originality, and a penetration;" but modestly asserts for himself a right of discussing the doctrines, on the ground that "excellence in all points might well be thought difficult."
Plato's theory was metaphysical throughout. That oneness which he sought to establish in his perfect republic was an abstract unity, the realizing of which constituted in his view the best polity, as in his Ethics the realizing of the abstract one "idea" of good constituted the morality of actions. Thus his governors are philosophers, and his virtue is wisdom. A character, on the other hand, decidedly practical, pervades the moral and political disquisitions of Aristotle. They are immediately adapted to the actual need of man. They have not, on this very account, that peculiar charm which belongs to Plato's writings. The speculative perfection shadowed out by Plato imparts an imaginative air to his disputations, and interests the feelings, whilst we read, amidst the reluctance of our judgment. And thus his works tend to a practical effect, independently of, and in opposition to, their real speculative character. But Aristotle, throughout intent on the business of human life, forbears to seize the imagination with romantic pictures of excellence, either in man individually or in society. He points out such happiness as is attainable by man, in that condition of the world in which man has been placed; or at least to which human endeavours may reasonably be directed. His discussions on moral subjects are accurate observations, and powerful reasonings, applied to things as they are. But this character in them renders them of more general use than Plato's speculations. The man of genius and of sensibility would perhaps feel a stronger stimulant to moral and social energies from the study of the animated pages of the Republic; but the generality of mankind would undoubtedly be more assisted in the work required of them from the constitution of their nature, by the real principles of human conduct delivered in the unambitious philosophy of Aristotle's Ethics and Politics.
CONCLUSION.
Design of Aristotle's Philosophy—Style of his Writings—His Obscurity—Method of Discussion—Originality.
From the review which we have taken of the extant writings of Aristotle, it would appear that the great object of the philosopher was to discipline the mind by a deep and extensive course of literature. The various inquiries embraced in those writings,—the unremitting research into subjects, the most repulsive from their abstruseness, or the most interesting from their connection with the feelings and actions of man,—the richness of illustration from the volumes of ancient genius and observation of mankind with which they abound,—are so many proofs of the noble object proposed in his philosophy. It may be fully concluded, that it was not the mere sophist of former days, or the disputant on any given question, that Aristotle aimed to accomplish; but the really wise man; by cultivating all the moral and intellectual powers of the soul; in order that the great moral of the whole—the good towards which the constitution of nature tends—might be realized in each individual man so instructed and disciplined. Agreeably to this view of his philosophy is the answer attributed to him, when, on being asked what advantage had accrued to him from philosophy, he replied, "To do without constraint what some do through the fear of the laws."
Some of his works are said to have been written in the form of dialogue. These were probably exoteric; that form being peculiarly adapted to the purpose of explanation, and that fuller discussion, which we regard as the characteristic of the exoteric treatises, as contrasted with the conciseness and suggestive form of the esoteric or acroamatic. Among his works are also men- tioned Epistles to Philip, to Alexander, Olympias, Hephaestion, Antipater, Mentor, Ariston, Themistagoras, Philoxenus; besides a collection entitled Epistles of the Selymbrians. We have already noticed a hymn in praise of the virtues of his friend Hermeias, which formed matter of accusation against him on the ground of impiety. This hymn has been preserved by Diogenes Laertius. It consists of twenty-three lyric verses, in the manner and with something of the spirit of Pindar; celebrating Hermeias among the heroes who had sacrificed their lives for the cause of virtue. His biographer has also preserved the four lines inscribed by him on the statue of Hermeias erected at Delphi. His poetical talent was further displayed in verses addressed to Democritus, and in the composition of an elegy; of both of which poems the first lines are given by Laertius. The titles of various other philosophical works occur also in the catalogue of his writings. So laborious and so diversified were the literary pursuits of this great philosopher. These were works, too, written, we must remember, not by a sequestered individual enjoying the privacy of a privileged leisure, like that of the priests of Egypt, but amidst the agitation and troubles of Grecian politics, and in the courts of princes. We may well, therefore, wonder at the abstractedness of mind, the single-hearted zeal of philosophy, which thus steadily pursued its course, creating its own leisure, and keeping the stillness of its own thoughts. Probably, indeed, such writings as those of Aristotle could hardly have been produced, except with a concurrence of the opposite circumstances observed in his case. They imply at once the man of the world and the retired student,—ample opportunities for the contemplation of human nature in all the various relations of life,—familiarity with the thoughts of others by reading and conversation,—as well as intense private meditation—that communing with a man's own heart, which alone can extract the deep secrets of moral and metaphysical truth.
The style of his writings bears the impress of his devotion to the real business of philosophy. The excellence of his style is, we believe, the last thing to attract the notice of his readers; and yet, as a specimen of pure Greek, it is found, when examined, to stand almost unrivalled. The words are all selected from the common idiom of the language, but they are employed with the utmost propriety; and by their collocation are made further subservient to the perspicuity and force of his meaning. There is nothing superfluous, nothing intrusive, in his expressions; but the very ornaments add to the terseness of the style. The metaphors and illustrations employed are apt and striking analogies, availing as arguments, whilst by their simplicity they familiarize the truth conveyed to the mind. That these excellencies should escape the notice of the reader whilst he is engaged in the matter itself of the author, is a proof of the strict adaptation of the style to the matter. We can imagine, that to the Greek reader nothing could have been easier than to comprize the meaning of the philosopher. To the modern reader, of course, the necessity of studying the language gives an apparent hardness to expressions, whose propriety depends on an accurate perception of the genius of the language. Thus, what was a facility to the ancient reader, is a difficulty to the modern, until the modern, by study of the language, has brought himself as much as possible into the situation of the ancient. This observation will be illustrated by a comparison of the style of Plato with that of Aristotle. Plato's style, undulating with copiousness of diction, is more attractive to the modern reader; his meaning is more readily apprehended at the first glance, by the number of expressions which he crowds on a point, and their accumulated force of explanation. But in Aristotle, if we miss the force of a term or a particle, or overlook the collocation of the words, we shall often entirely pervert his meaning.
There are, however, passages in which Aristotle departs from his usual conciseness, and approaches towards the eloquence of Plato. The concluding chapters of his Nicomachean Ethics may here be particularly pointed out; or a part of his ninth book of that treatise, in which, evidently imitating Plato, he compares the tumult of uncontrolled passions to the disturbance of civil sedition. There is a dignity and a pathos in these passages, controlled by the general character of severe precision belonging to his style, and admirably harmonizing with it.
Sometimes, indeed, his style is chargeable with too strict a conciseness, as well as, on the other hand, with too great prolixity. Both these opposite faults are in him the same in principle; resulting from extreme accuracy,—an excess in writing, which he has himself compared to that illiberality remarked in too close an attention to trifles in contracts.
Nor is it meant to be denied that there is a considerable obscurity in the writings of Aristotle; but it is important to distinguish this obscurity from that of mere style. It is an effect of the peculiar design with which he appears to have composed his philosophical works. They are evidently for the most part outlines for the direction of the philosopher himself and his disciples in their disputations—notice of points of inquiry rather than full discussions of them. This is particularly observable in the treaties of the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Rhetoric. Sometimes he contents himself with a reference to his exoteric discussions. It is probable that the most important works of his philosophy were not published in his lifetime, and that they thus constantly remained by him to receive successive improvements which his further observation had suggested. This may account for the abruptness in those treatises. In our progress through them, we come to discussions, which we had not been led to expect by anything previous in the work. The seventh book of the Ethics, for instance, appears to have been an after-thought; and so also the eighth and ninth of the same treatise. The work might have been regarded as complete in itself without them. In the Metaphysics, indeed, we can hardly judge what was the exact plan of the author in the arrangement of the work, since it has descended to us in an imperfect, irregular form. But there are the same marks in it of successive additions from the author. The writings of Aristotle having been left to Theophrastus, and not to his own relatives,—this would further imply that they were intended, chiefly and primarily, for those who had been trained in his school, and by whom his philosophy would be rightly transmitted.
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1 It is surprising that Brucker (Hist. Cr. Phil., vol. i. p. 803) could speak of Aristotle's use of the particles as "singular," and the construction of his sentences as unusual. The perfect idiom of the language seems, on the contrary, strictly and beautifully observed by Aristotle.
2 Metaph. ii. 3.
3 Eth. Nic. i. c. ult., λογισμὸς ἐν τῷ κατὰ μυστικὸν λόγῳ προσευχῆς εἰς τὸν ἀπολύτατον λόγον, ἢν ἂν ἡμῶν ἀνθρώπων λόγοι. De Celo, i. 9, καθὼς ἐν τῷ γράμματι φιλοσοφίας. Eudem. i. 8.
4 Niebuhr (History of Rome, trans. p. 16) remarks this particularly of the Rhetoric. The immediate occasion of this reserved mode of writing may have been the jealousy of rival philosophers or the dread of pagan intolerance.
His method of discussion is conformable with the principles proposed in his Dialectic. It is throughout a sitting of the opinions and questions belonging to the subject of inquiry, by examining each in its several points of view, and showing the consequences involved in it. Accordingly, generally before he states his own immediate doctrine, he considers what may be urged on both sides of the question, stating the objections strongly and fairly, and giving the most candid construction to the views of his predecessors. The difficulties proposed he sometimes briefly removes in passing on, having just glanced at them; at other times he devotes several sentences to their explanation. This, which is his method in parts of his system, is only a specimen of what is the collective result of the whole. His philosophy, dialectically viewed, is an analysis of the theories proposed by the philosophers who had preceded him. It is consistently with this, that he commences sometimes with observations on logical grounds, or those views of a thing implied in the classifications of language; and afterwards inquires into the subject physically or philosophically; when the discussion proceeds on some acknowledged principles of physics or philosophy in general.
With respect to the originality of his writings, there can be no doubt that he derived important aid from the labours of his predecessors, and especially from those of Plato. An accurate examination of his writings will convince the reader, that they are the productions of one who had deeply drunk of the fountain of Plato's inspiration. But they show at the same time such a disciple as we may suppose the spirit of Plato would have delighted in; one who cherished the authority of the preceptor, and yet had the courage to love the truth still more; one who thought it necessary to consult what others had said wisely and truly before him, and yet would examine a question finally with an unbiased discriminative judgment. Estimating his philosophy thus, we may pronounce it to be truly his own; it was the fruit of his own sagacious, penetrating mind. It is sufficient only to mention his disagreement with Plato on the doctrines of the ideas,—the origin of the universe,—and the immortality of the soul. He has been charged, indeed, with invidious opposition to Plato, with corruption and misrepresentation of the tenets of his predecessors in philosophy. Jewish writers have even absurdly accused him of plagiarism from the books of Solomon. But there is no real foundation for these charges; they are at best but surmises; and they are fully contradicted by the internal evidence of the writings themselves.