Aristotle was born in 384 B. C. at Stagira, a Greek colony on the Macedonian coast near Mount Athos. His father, Nicomachus, was the physician of Amyntas II, king of Macedonia. In 367 Aristotle went to Athens and studied under Plato till the latter’s death in 347; he then removed to Atarneus in Asia Minor, where he married Pythias, the niece of his fellow-student Hermias, tyrant of Atarneus. In 342 Philip of Macedonia summoned him to Pella as the tutor of his fourteen-year-old son Alexander, who later assisted Aristotle’s researches with funds and zoological specimens. When Alexander set forth to Asik in 335, Aristotle returned to Athens where he founded a school, called the Lyceum because situated on ground sacred to Apollo Lyceius.
In the morning he would treat the more difficult subjects with his pupils; later in the day he gave set lectures to a larger audience on more popular topics. From his habit of walking up and down (peripatein) at the morning discussions, Aristotle’s school and system became known as the Peri-patetic. In 323 he left Athens because of the anti-Macedonian outbreak Which followed Alexander’s death, and menaced the life of that prince’s friend; he died at Chalcis in 322.
Though it would be absurd to omit Aristotle from even the most summary account of Greek literature, we must realize that the extant writings, though of immense importance, possess (strictly as literature) small value. Not only are ‘fine passages’ rare; Aristotle is usually dry and often exceedingly difficult. This is not merely because such themes as psychology and metaphysics are themselves recondite.
Plato’s Timaeus is difficult only in exact proportion to the profundity of its subject. But what are we to make of a writer who says: ‘If there is an Essence of Man, is there a different Essence of White Man? Well, let us call him Shirt Further, the arrangement is often muddled. The reason for all this is largely historical. Aristotle seems often to have based his published work on his own lectures; naturally, therefore, they contain repetitions, curt remarks which need amplification, and statements of doctrine which vary in content or emphasis. Moreover, what he wrote has undergone much editing in antiquity, separate treatises being combined into loosely-knit wholes by later Peripatetics. It is often said that our texts are the lecture-notes taken by pupils; this is probably true of some passages. That Aristotle could write lucidly and well was plain to ancient readers (e. g. Cicero) from his popular dialogues and other works, which have perished.
The greatness of Aristotle has three main elements: philosophic power, immense learning, superb common sense. As for the first, he challenges Plato as an equal, and however strongly one may deny that equality, he offers at least important and convincing criticisms of Platonic doctrine; his own theories formed the basis and much of the structure for philosophy throughout the Middle Ages. As for the second, his vast researches into every sphere of knowledge then available are full of illumination to-day, often as to mere facts, always as to the proper method and spirit of research.
As for the third, he has the priceless ability to see where one topic ends and another begins: he is the legislator of the sciences, refusing to be baffled or disheartened by their inevitable shading-off. He abounds in definitions, statements, enumerations reasoned and careful, but crisp and encouraging. Despite the accidental difficulty of much that has come down to us, he is, of all great thinkers, nearest to the ordinary man. He regularly begins an investigation by collecting current and traditional opinions; he loves to cut out a subject, put it in a frame, and ‘take it in unharassed by poetical half-lights or irrelevant topics; he loves. definitions and the sense of getting on with his task. Above all, he loves knowledge for its own sake, and ‘all men have an instinctive yearning for knowledge’, as he says at the opening of the Metaphysics.
These qualities naturally ‘made him the great secular teacher of Medieval Europe–‘the master of those who know’, as Dante calls him. And the men of those days, in their direct medieval manner, acted upon their faith. ‘ Aristotle’s opinion… that there may be no great distance between Spain and India by the Western Ocean was one of the chief causes which sent Columbus upon his voyage of discovery.’ 1 It is not too much to say that for centuries European thought was influenced as deeply by Aristotle as by Christianity, and Spenser’s great line, ‘For soul is form, and doth the body make,’ Hamlet’s sad gibe to his mother, ‘You must have sense, else would you not have motion,’
Marlowe’s quaint use of ‘the essential form of marble stone’ in Tamburlaine, are but random examples of Aristotelian influence upon an England which was leaving the Middle Ages behind. Nor do his merits end here: he could teach others how to think and how to research. His pupils at the Lyceum were set to the collection of the huge materials which he needed for his biological, historical, and other works. Thus the Constitution of Athens (discovered in 1890) is apparently one of a hundred and fifty-eight treatises prepared with a view to the Politics; and the information found in manuscripts of tragedies and comedies, as to the date, &c., of the several plays, is derived from his lost ‘book’, the Didascaliae. His biological work is based on facilities of money and personal service set at his disposal by Alexander-the first example in history of the endowment of research.
In the Organon (the general name for his works on logic) Aristotle worked unaided: he invents, develops, elaborates, and expounds an entirely new science–how to reason correctly. But in the main his method is, first to define the subject he proposes to treat–in the Third Book of the Metaphysics, indeed, he has to prove that there is such a science at all–then to review previous work and current opinions, next to sift these, next to make a map of the subject–to articulate it by means of definitions built up with immense acuteness and constant testing, as one pulls at a knot to see if it will hold.
It is an austere but deep joy to watch him move over the field of human knowledge, both actual and potential, bringing under cultivation areas that seemed hopeless sand, rock, or morass, meeting and overcoming difficulties that we thought too nebulous to grasp, too complex for manipulation, quietly leaving on one side some great bully of an immemorial problem, subjugating or annihilating lesser bravoes until at last he turns upon the main adversary, now blustering in vacuo, and briefly dispatches him, whereon without any sound of trumpets he utters his characteristic Te Deum: About this, then, let so much be said.’
Each part of the immense Aristotelian corpus demands an expert to appraise it duly. His logical works, in their discussion of the methods of reasoning and of sophistic fallacies, reveal his splendid power of exact, clear, and unremitting mental labour; the medieval schoolmen summarized his teaching on the syllogism in the celebrated mnemonic Barbara, Celarent, and modern logicians have been able to improve but little upon him.
The writings on biology are perhaps the best witness to his prodigious industry; it is likely that this was his favourite science, the predilection being due to his father the physician. Specially notable is his insistence upon teleology–the structure or the functions of a bird or animal are constantly referred to purpose, as opposed to a blind ‘survival of the fittest’ which Empedocles had alleged.
Several times he uses such expressions as ‘Nature does nothing beside the matter (periergon) or at random’, or attributes this purpose to God. Nevertheless, it is not clear to what power the purpose is to be ascribed. Despite these phrases, Aristotle certainly does not recognize in ‘nature’ (physis) any element in the Universe apart from individual men, trees, and the like; and as for his allusions to God, we shall not find in his directly theological doctrine anything which justifies such ascription. The teleology of his biological works must be regarded as a loose end in his system.
The physical writings treat of matter–not ultimate metaphysical matter, but the simplest manifestation of what appeals to our senses, the stuff common to men, stones, trees, and birds–and its conditions, time, space, motion, generation, decay. Here the most important points are his definition of physis (often translated ‘nature’) and his Four Causes.
In Physics, II. i, he gives apparently two descriptions of ‘nature’; ‘inborn impulse towards change’, and ‘the shape and form according to definition’, the latter phrase meaning that the physis of anything is its own complete development–compare his famous saying, ‘Man is by nature a political animal’; that is, man realizes his full nature only in an organized community. This second difinition does not contradict the first, the inborn impulse towards change’.
Each complements the other; as we shall see, process, motion, change are vital to Aristotle’s system, and here he insists on process and realization of process as two sides of the same thing: our ambiguous word ‘development’. then, will suit his idea of physis admirably. The Four Causes are often mentioned, but the best account is in Physics, 194 b 16-195 a 3. These causes are the necessary elements in our knowledge of anything: the Material Cause, e. g. the bronze of a statue; the Formal Cause (‘the definition of the what-made-it-so’) e. g. the ratio 2:1 is the Formal Cause of the octave, the lineaments of Pericles are the Formal Cause of a portrait-bust; the Moving Cause, e. g. the father in relation to his child, or the sculptor to a bust; the Final Cause, e. g. health is the Final Cause of exercise.
The particular object or creature, thus existing by imposition of form upon matter by an agent for a preconceived purpose, may in its turn become ‘matter’ for some more complex development: for instance, the lumps of clay, to which one workman gives the qualities of bricks, are combined by another into a wall; or the man produced by his father becomes, with others, the material upon which the legislator impresses the characteristics of a state. In this way the whole Universe can be considered as a system of ‘forms’ with ultimate matter at the bottom of the scale and God at the summit; but this, as we shall see, would not be the completest way of putting Aristotle’s view of the Universe.
The De Anima, as it is usually called, deals with the soul. Soul’ (psyche) means for Aristotle organic life–‘ the first actuality of a physical body endowed with organs’ (412 b 5)-first actuality, because one has soul when asleep; the second exists when we are fully alive. There are various phases or parts: the power of nutrition and growth, next of sensation, third of movement, fourth of reason. Each of these implies possession of all the preceding phases (that is the point of Hamlet’s words. quoted above); plants have only the first, Man alone has all. We may select two points of special interest. When discussing sensation, Aristotle talks of a central power which co-ordinates the reports of the particular senses of sight, hearing, &c.
This central power, by way of its Latin name (communis sensus), has given us the word–of course with a totally different meaning–‘ common sense’. Secondly, the discussion of Reason (Nous) is deeply impressive. Two sides of it are distinguished, passive reason and active reason. The former apprehends, makes its own, impressions from without. The latter brings this understanding to bear–how? The answer is not certain, but the statement that this part of us, and this alone, survives bodily death, and certain passages implying that it comes to us from without, not from our parents, suggest that this ‘active’ or ‘creative’ reason is a temporary and localized godhead conferred upon each of us at birth.
The Ethics have long been the most popular work of Aristotle. The aim is to determine what is the greatest good for Man, and this (after a lengthy investigation of mental and moral virtues and of friendship) he finds in the contemplative life. This famous and admirable treatise is in some ways disappointing. It seems unaccountable that a man of Aristotle’s immense learning and wide experience should, when studying conduct, give us such an exceedingly small number of pungent illustrations. We do indeed meet the ancestor of the man who ‘didn’t know it was loaded’; and one Xenophantus who tried to restrain his amusement and so at last burst into ‘a thorough-going guffaw’; but such specks are few, and their fewness is all the more deplorable because many passages in the Ethics read like masses of suppressed anecdote.
In compensation, Aristotle’s resourcefulness in argument and skill in selecting the right mode of attack is nowhere more impressive than here. ‘Nor is sagacity nothing but a moral stateplus reason; the proof being that forgetfulness can come upon the latter, but not the former’. ‘It is clear that none of the moral virtues is innate naturally in us, for no natural thing can be trained to change its ways; for example, the stone which naturally moves downwards cannot be trained to move upwards even if one seeks to give it that habit by throwing it up ten thousand times over’. His most celebrated ethical doctrine is that a virtue is a mean between two vices, an idea which through Horace’s phrase, aurea mediocritas, has become proverbial with us as ‘the golden mean’. Thus courage is a mean betwixt foolhardiness and cowardice, liberality between extravagance and stinginess.
It is easy to go wrong here, and the whole theory has been ridiculed by suggesting that truthfulness is a mean between too much and too little lying. But Aristotle confesses that his idea often fails: sometimes one of the faulty extremes is practically non-existent; sometimes the virtue is such that one cannot go to excess in it. The real interest of his Mean is that he is voicing the Greek ideal of ‘nothing too much’, of all-round development, against fantastic exaggerations in ethical theory. such as were later propounded by the Stoics and were already appearing in his own time. So it is that he insists (to the scandal of later enthusiasts) that ‘external goods’, for example friends, are necessary to full happiness.
To his carefully laid-out map of virtues we can make obvious objections; but we should remember that: (i) it is vital for him to oppose blurred thinking; (ii) he does emphasize continually ‘the when, the how much, the how’ and other such conditions; (iii) he clearly understands that ethics are not an exact science: ‘This must be agreed beforehand, that the whole treatment of conduct should be propounded in outline and not rigorously’. It is this absence of scientific austerity which allows him that noble outburst near the close when discussing the contemplative life: ‘We must not obey those who. urge us, because we are human and mortal, to think human and mortal thoughts; in so far as we may, we should practise immortality and omit no effort to live in accordance with the best that is in us.’
Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida (II. ii) makes Hector speak of Young men, whom Aristotle thought Unfit to hear moral philosophy, and has been censured not only for his chronology, but also for a blunder in quotation. The fact is, that although Aristotle does say ‘lectures on politics are not suitable for a youth (1095 a 2), he means by ‘politics’ what we include under ethics, as well as politics; he goes on: ‘for he is without experience of the actions which make up life.’
In the Greek city-state private and public life were far more closely interwoven than among us. Even in the. Politics themselves he has something to say of the family. Nevertheless this magnificent body of work deals mainly with the origin, purpose, and types of state, including Aristotle’s own conception of an ideal body politic; it is a monument of vast learning, insight, and knowledge of humanity. The features which strike one most are: (i) his conception of the state’s growth from the family and the village; (ii) his trenchant criticism of Plato’s ideal community; (iii) his conception of the end in view–the state arises for the sake of securing life, but continues for the sake of securing good life’; (iv) his acceptance of slavery for those who are ‘naturally slaves; (v) his notable remarks on education, the object of which is ‘to enjoy leisure beautifully’; (vi) the absence of our modern idea of indefinite progress: like Plato, he believes that the right course is to find the best constitution and then maintain it unchanged.
In the Rhetoric Aristotle deals first with methods of persuasion, then with style. The earlier part includes study of the audience and so an amusing description of the qualities found in the young, the’ old, and the middle-aged. Under the last heading he tells us with delightful particularity that ‘the soul is at its best about the age of forty-nine’; this may be a serious allusion to ‘the grand climacteric’ or a facetious allusion to Aristotle’s own age. The last book, on style, is full of interesting matter, especially about metaphors; he happens to censure Shakespeare in anticipation when he objects to the phraseology of one who called the Odyssey ‘a beautiful mirror of human life’.
No secular book of its size can be compared in fame and influence with the Poetic. In its present incomplete form it deals mostly with tragic drama, its origin from dithyramb, the history of its development, its elements and purpose. We learn that a tragedy must have a beginning, a middle, and an end–a typical Aristotelian dictum, seeming useless until we consider his explanation; we read too his invaluable account of the peripeteia or ‘reversal of the action’, which is the central fact of tragic construction; but we do not read of the Three Unities–a triad foisted upon Aristotle by later theorists. The most celebrated passage describes the function of tragedy–‘by pity and fear accomplishing the purgation of such emotions’, where ‘purgation’ (catharsis) is now generally held to mean not ‘purification’ but ‘expulsion.
We have left till the last his Metaphysics, probably the most difficult book in existence, and one of the most important. The science of metaphysics deals with the profoundest conceivable subject: What is Being? What do we mean when we say that a thing ‘is’? What is the ultimate reality which causes things to exist? This subject, particularly as a study of causes, forms the topic of this work, but Aristotle never calls it’ metaphysics’–that name means simply ‘the things which come after the Physics but ‘first philosophy’.
We said above that the Universe, according to Aristotle, might be called a system of existences, each being the ‘matter’ of that next above it; but that this description is imperfect. His central idea is ‘movents’. Each thing sets the ‘matter’ next below it in motion by giving it form. The Universe, then, exists by a permeating creative stress. At the bottom of the scale lies primary matter, logically postulated but never found free (it cannot exist at all of itself, since existence means having form) whose first development is the four traditional elements, earth, air, fire, water.
At the summit is the ‘prime unmoved movent the only existence which imparts motion without in any sense receiving it. Whether this ‘prime unmoved movent’ is to be called God we must discuss later. Next below this original Being comes the outer sphere of the Universe, what Milton with obscure exactpeas terms ‘that first moved’. We said sets in motion by giving form’; both these words need explanation. By ‘motion’ Aristotle means not only local, but every kind of, change: thus the acorn brings forth an oak which grows and decays. By ‘form’ he means the total of qualities in virtue of which we apply the word ‘trout’ to one piece of matter, ‘partridge’ to another. It is the infima species ‘trout’, &c., which is the proper object of human knowledge, since the ‘really existent’ is the form, but always (for human study) the form as impressed upon matter.
Returning now to the conception of the Universe as a nexus of creative movents we come to a distinction possessing high importance, that between potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). A child is potentially an adult, a pile of timber potentially a boat or bridge. By this means we can solve the puzzle which Socrates set, in alleging that no one sins knowingly: we see now that a man may know the right but his knowledge may be in abeyance.
And in general, whereas we said that each thing is ‘matter’ to that next above it, so we may now assert it to be potentially that higher thing, and the Universe to be a process of more and more intense realization. Primary matter’ is’ (but the verb is plainly a solecism) potentiality only. On the other hand, God energizes continuously. For in that famous Book Lambda of the Metaphysics he identifies the prime unmoved movent with God. There are difficulties here, but at least he evidently attributes consciousness to the Movent.
That God energizes continuously is the logical outcome of his system: in the highest Being there can reside no mere potentiality, nothing unrealized (otherwise we must postulate something further to give actuality to that undeveloped element). Thus God is happy, since he is ever, throughout his being, completely himself. We human beings experience now and again a flash of illumination in which intellect, emotion, and bodily vigour blend into one rapture: those instants give some hint of God’s continuous ‘state. What is the relation between him and the material Universe? He is not its creator: its time-and-space conditions are without beginning; nor are we to suppose that he rules or guides it by his purpose. We are told only that he is the source of its motion and that the motion is analogous to love.
Some mention should be made of the relations between this system and the Platonic. Emerson wrote: ‘A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.’ Aristotle himself would hardly concur; at any rate he disagrees with, is even annoyed by, the Theory of Ideas, and offers numerous arguments, of very different value, in refutation. It should be first observed that one can, indeed, easily draw up a scheme true for both philosophers: in the Philebus Plato’s unlimited, limit, cause of mingling (i. e. the agent imposing limit upon the unlimited), and the mixture, correspond well to the Aristotelian Four Causes.
Nevertheless, these men look at the field of existence from opposite sides. There are two vital differences between them. First, though the Aristotelian Form does correspond to the Platonic Idea (so much so that their views of science are closely alike), the Form is always immanent in that to which it gives existence, while the Idea (in Plato’s later teaching) exists utterly apart from the particulars; and Plato is primarily interested in this transcendental Idea, Aristotle in the natural kind made by the immanent Form.
Secondly, the main feature in Aristotle’s expressed objections to Plato is that he has not really dealt with’ motion’. The Ideas, even if they account for particulars, do not account for this vital quality in them, that they are constantly in ‘motion’; how, indeed, could the Ideas account for generation, being themselves ever immobile? That which in Aristotle’s system answers to the imitation of Ideas by particulars is the affiliation of particular to particular–‘man begets man’.
Thus, although both systems embrace the whole Universe, Plato’s heart is fixed upon what transcends our world, Aristotle’s upon the men, birds, fish, trees, and waters subject to his senses. Raphael, in his fresco styled the School of Athens, has placed in the midst of the assembled philosophers these two figures side by side, Plato holding the Timaeus and pointing a single finger upwards to the world ‘beyond sense, Aristotle with the Ethics in his left hand, his right pointing with all fingers horizontally to the world around.
Aristotle lived and worked at the end of an age, the strictly classical’ Greek period. The writings which bear his name form a vast report upon Greek civilization, the Greek spirit, Greek learning, so far as these things may be systematically presented at all. The more we study him the better do we understand the desire of Marlowe’s Faustus to ‘live and die in Aristotle’s works’.
This scientist without a microscope was the most many-sided scientific genius of all time. And, immense as are his achievements in that field, he may also claim kinship with the potent seers who passed beyond the boundaries of the sensible world. His doctrine that love is the force impelling all things to higher self-development is in tune with Plato Symposium, is repeated in the culminating song of Goethe chorus mysticus that ‘the eternal feminine leads us upward and on’, and has inspired the words wherewith Dante closes his Divina Commedia–‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’.
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