ARISTOTLE
A Man of Encyclopedic Learning; as Philosopher,
more especially Moralist and Logician.
ARISTOTLE, PUPIL OF PLATO.--Aristotle of Stagira was a pupil of
Plato, and he remembered it, as the best pupils do as a rule, in order to
oppose him. For some years he was tutor to Alexander, son of Philip, the
future Alexander the Great. He taught long at Athens. After the death of
Alexander, being the target in his turn of the eternal accusation of
impiety, he was forced to retire to Chalcis, where he died. Aristotle is,
before all else, a learned man. He desired to embrace the whole of the
knowledge of his time, which was then possible by dint of prodigious
effort, and he succeeded. His works, countless in number, are the record of
his knowledge. They are the _summa_ of all the sciences of his
epoch. Here we have only to occupy ourselves with his more especially
philosophical ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more precisely, man is
composed of soul and body. The body is composed of organs, a well-made
piece of mechanism; the soul is its final purpose; the body, so to speak,
results in the soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on the body, and is in it
not its end but its means of acting upon things, and the whole forms a full
and continuous harmony. The faculties of the soul are its divers aspects,
and its divers methods of acting; for the soul is one and
indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as being able to conceive what
is most general, and in consequence it forms within us an intermediary
between ourselves and God. God is unique; He is eternal; from all eternity
He has given motion to matter. He is purely spiritual, but all is material
save Him, and He has not, as Plato would have it, _ideas_--immaterial
living personifications--residing in His bosom. Here may be perceived, in a
certain sense, progress, from Plato to Aristotle, towards monotheism; the
Olympus of ideas in Plato was still a polytheism, a spiritual polytheism
certainly, yet none the less a polytheism; there is no longer any
polytheism at all in Aristotle.
HIS THEORIES OF MORALS AND POLITICS.--The moral system of Aristotle
sometimes approaches that of Plato, as when he deems that the supreme
happiness is the supreme good, and that the supreme good is the
contemplation of thought by thought--thought being self-sufficing; which is
approximately the imitation of God which Plato recommended. Sometimes, on
the contrary, it is very practical and almost mediocre, as when he makes it
consist of a mean between the extremes, a just measure, a certain tact, art
rather than science, and practical science rather than conscience, which
will know how to distinguish which are the practices suitable for an honest
and a well-born man. It is only just to add that in detail and when after
all deductions he describes the just man, he invites us to contemplate
virtues which if not sublime are none the less remarkably lofty.
His very confused political philosophy (the volume containing it, according
to all appearance, having been composed, after his death, of passages and
fragments and different portions of his lectures) is specially a review of
the divergent political constitutions which existed throughout the Greek
world. The tendencies, for there are no conclusions, are still very
aristocratic, but less radically aristocratic than those of Plato.
THE AUTHORITY OF ARISTOTLE.--Aristotle, by reason of his
universality, also because he is clearer than his master, and again because
he dogmatises--not always, but very frequently--instead of discussing and
collating, had throughout both antiquity and the Middle Ages an authority
greater than that of Plato, an authority which became (except on matters of
faith) despotic and well-nigh sacrosanct. Since the sixteenth century he
has been relegated to his due rank--one which is still very distinguished,
and he has been regarded as among the geniuses of the widest range, if not
of the greatest power, that have appeared among men; even now he is very
far from having lost his importance. For some he is a transition between
the Greek genius--extremely subtle, but always poetic and always somewhat
oriental--and the Roman genius: more positive, more bald, more practical,
more attached to reality and to pure science.