of physics, the scale of being. We should notice, in the first place,
that it is also a scale of values. What is higher in the scale of
being is of more worth, because the principle of form is more advanced
in it. It constitutes also a theory of development, a philosophy of
evolution. The lower develops into the higher. It does not, however,
so develop in time. That the lower form passes in due time into a
higher form is a discovery of modern times. Such a conception was
impossible for Aristotle. For him, genus and species are eternal. They
have neither beginning nor end. Individual men are born and die, but
the species man never dies, and has always existed upon the earth. The
same is true of plants and animals. And since man has always existed,
he cannot have evolved in time from a lower being. There is no room
here for Darwinism. In what sense, then, is this a theory of
development or evolution? The process involved is not a time-process,
it is a logical process, and the development is a logical development.
The lower always contains the higher potentially. The man is in the
ape ideally. The higher, again, contains the lower actually. The man
is all that the ape is, and more also. What is merely implicit in the
lower form is explicit in the higher. The form which is dimly seen
struggling to light in the lower, has realized itself in the higher.
The higher is the same thing as the lower, but it is the same thing in
a more {294} evolved state. The higher presupposes the lower and rests
upon it as foundation. The higher is the form of which the lower is
the matter. It actually is what the lower is struggling to become.
Hence the entire universe is one continuous chain. It is a process;
not a time-process, but an eternal process. The one ultimate reality,
God, reason, absolute form, eternally exhibits itself in every stage
of its development. All the stages, therefore, must exist for ever
side by side.
Now the form of a thing is its organization. Hence to be higher in the
scale means to be more organized. The first distinction, therefore,
with which nature presents us is between the organic and the
inorganic. Aristotle was the discoverer of the idea of organism, as he
was also the inventor of the word. At the bottom of the scale of
being, therefore, is inorganic matter. Inorganic matter is the nearest
existent thing to absolutely formless matter, which, of course, does
not exist. In the inorganic world matter preponderates to such an
extent as almost to overwhelm form, and we can only expect to see the
universal exhibiting itself in it in a vague and dim way. What, then,
is its form? And this is the same as asking what its function, end, or
essential activity is. The end of inorganic matter is merely external
to it. Form has not truly entered into it at all, and remains outside
it. Hence the activity of inorganic matter can only be to move in
space towards its external end. This is the explanation of what we, in
modern times, call gravitation. But, according to Aristotle, every
element has its peculiar and natural motion; its end is conceived
merely spatially, and its activity is to move towards its "proper
place," and, having thus reached its end, it rests. The natural {295}
movement of fire is up. We may call this a principle of levitation, as
opposed to gravitation. Aristotle has been the subject of cheap
criticism on account of his frequent use of the words "natural" and
"unnatural." [Footnote 15] It is said that he was satisfied to explain
the operations of nature by simply labelling them "natural." If you
ask a quite uneducated person why heavy bodies fall, he may quite
possibly reply, "Oh! _naturally_ they fall." This simply means that
the man has never thought about the matter at all, and thinks whatever
is absolutely familiar to him is "natural" and needs no explanation.
It is like the feminine argument that a thing is so, "because it is."
It is assumed that Aristotle was guilty of a like futility. This is
not the case. His use of the word "natural" does not indicate lack of
thought. There is a thought, an idea, here. No doubt he was quite
wrong in many of his facts. Thus there is no such principle as
levitation in the universe. But there is a principle of gravitation,
and when he explains this by saying it is "natural" for earth to move
downwards, he means, not that the fact is familiar, but that the
principle of form, or the world-reason, can only exhibit itself here
so dimly as to give rise to a comparatively aimless and purposeless
movement in a straight line. Not absolutely purposeless, however,
because nothing in the world is such, and the purpose here is simply
the movement of matter towards its end. This may or may not be a true
explanation of gravity. But has anybody since ever explained it
better?
[Footnote 15: See, _e.g._ Sir Alexander Grant's _Aristotle_ in the
Ancient Classics for English Readers Series (Blackwood), pages
119-121.]
This gives us, too, the clue to the distinction between {296} the
inorganic and the organic. If inorganic matter is what has its end
outside itself, organic matter will be what has its end within itself.
This is the essential character of an organism, that its end is
internal to it. It is an inward self-developing principle. Its
function, therefore, can only be the actualisation, the
self-realization of this inward end. Whereas, therefore, inorganic
matter has no activity except spatial movement, organic matter has for
its activity growth, and this growth is not the mere mechanical
addition of extraneous matter, as we add a pound of tea to a pound of
tea. It is true growth from within. It is the making outward of what
is inward. It is the making explicit of what is implicit. It is the
making actual of what is potential in the embryo organism.
The lowest in the scale of being is thus inorganic matter, and above
it comes organic matter, in which the principle of form becomes real
and definite as the inward organization of the thing. This inward
organization is the life, or what we call the soul, of the organism.
Even the human soul is nothing but the organization of the body. It
stands to the body in the relation of form to matter. With organism,
then, we reach the idea of living soul. But this living soul will
itself have lower and higher grades of being, the higher being a
higher realization of the principle of form. As the essential of
organism is self-realization, this will express itself first as
self-preservation. Self-preservation means first the preservation of
the individual, and this gives the function of nutrition. Secondly, it
means preservation of the species, and this gives the function of
propagation. The lowest grade in the organic kingdom will, therefore,
be {297} those organisms whose sole functions are to nourish
themselves, grow, and propagate their kind. These are plants. And we
may sum up this by saying that plants possess the nutritive soul.
Aristotle intended to write a treatise upon plants, which intention,
however, he never carried out. All that we have from him on plants is
scattered references in his other books. Had the promised treatise
been forthcoming, we cannot doubt what its plan would have been.
Aristotle would have shown, as he did in the case of animals, that
there are higher and lower grades of organism within the plant
kingdom, and he would have attempted to trace the development in
detail through all the then known species of plants.
Next above plants in the scale of being come animals. Since the higher
always contains the lower, but exhibits a further realization of form
peculiar to itself, animals share with plants the functions of
nutrition and propagation. What is peculiar to them, the point in
which they rise above plants, is the possession of sensation.
Sense-perception is therefore the special function of animals, and
they possess, therefore, the nutritive and the sensitive souls. With
sensation come pleasure and pain, for pleasure is a pleasant
sensation, and pain the opposite. Hence arises the impulse to seek the
pleasant and avoid the painful. This can only be achieved by the power
of movement. Most animals, accordingly, have the power of locomotion,
which is not possessed by plants, because they do not require it,
since they are not sensitive to pleasure and pain. In his books upon
animals Aristotle attempts to carry out the principle of development
in detail, showing what are the higher, and what the lower, animal
organisms. This he connects with the {298} methods of propagation
employed by different animals. Sex-generation is the mark of a higher
organism than parthenogenesis.
The scale of being proceeds from animals to man. The human organism,
of course, contains the principles of all lower organisms. Man
nourishes himself, grows, propagates his kind, moves about, and is
endowed with sense-perception. But he must have in addition his own
special function, which constitutes his advance beyond the animals.
This is reason. Reason is the essential, the proper end and activity
of man. His soul is nutritive, sensitive, and rational. In man,
therefore, the world-reason which could only appear in inorganic
matter as gravitation and levitation, in plants as nutrition, in
animals as sensation, appears at last in its own proper form, as what
it essentially is, reason. The world-reason, so long struggling
towards the light, has reached it, has become actual, has become
existent, in man. The world-process has attained its proximate end.
Within human consciousness there are lower and higher grades, and
Aristotle has taken great pains to trace these from the bottom to the
top. These stages of consciousness are what are ordinarily called
"faculties." But Aristotle notes that it is nonsense to talk, as Plato
did, of the "parts" of the soul. The soul, being a single indivisible
being, has no parts. They are different aspects of the activity of one
and the same being; different stages of its development. They can no
more be separated than the convex and concave aspects of a curve. The
lowest faculty, if we must use that word, is sense-perception. Now
what we perceive in a thing is its qualities. Perception tells us that
a piece of gold is {299} heavy, yellow, etc. The underlying substratum
which supports the qualities cannot be perceived. This means that the
matter is unknowable, the form knowable, for the qualities are part of
the form. Sense-perception, therefore, takes place when the object
stamps its form upon the soul. This is important for what it implies
rather than what it states. It shows the thoroughly idealistic trend
of Aristotle's thought. For if the form is what is knowable in a
thing, the more form there is, the more knowable it will be. Absolute
form, God, will be the absolutely knowable. That the Absolute is what
alone is completely knowable, intelligible, and comprehensible, and
the finite and material comparatively unknowable, is a point of view
essential to idealism, and stands in marked contrast to the popular
idea of rationalism that the Absolute is unknowable, and matter
knowable. For idealism, the Absolute is reason, thought. What can be
more thoroughly intelligible than reason? What can thought
understand, if not thought? This, of course, is not stated by
Aristotle. But it is implied in his theory of sense-perception.
Next in the scale above the senses comes the common sense. This has
nothing to do with what we understand by that phrase in every-day
language. It means the central sensation-ganglion in which isolated
sensations meet, are combined, and form a unity of experience. We saw,
in considering Plato, that the simplest kind of knowledge, such as,
"this paper is white," involves, not only isolated sensations, but
their comparison and contrast. Bare sensations would not even make
objects. For every object is a combined bundle of sensations. What
thus combines the various sensations, and in {300} particular those
received from different sense-organs, what compares and contrasts
them, and turns them from a blind medley of phantasms into a definite
experience, a single cosmos, is the common sense. Its organ is the
heart.
Above the common sense is the faculty of imagination. By this
Aristotle means, not the creative imagination of the artist, but the
power, which everyone possesses, of forming mental images and
pictures. This is due to the excitation in the sense-organ continuing
after the object has ceased to affect it.
The next faculty is memory. This is the same as imagination, except
that there is combined with the image a recognition of it as a copy of
a past sense-impression.
Recollection, again, is higher than memory. Memory images drift
purposelessly through the mind. Recollection is the deliberate evoking
of memory-images.
From recollection we pass to the specifically human faculty of reason.
But reason itself has two grades. The lower is called passive reason,
the higher active reason. The mind has the power of thought before it
actually thinks. This latent capacity is passive reason. The mind is
here like a smooth piece of wax which has the power to receive
writing, but has not received it. The positive activity of thought
itself is active reason. The comparison with wax must not mislead us
into supposing that the soul only receives its impressions from
sensation. It is pure thought which writes upon the wax.
Now the sum of the faculties in general we call the soul. And the
soul, we saw, is simply the organization {301} or form, of the body.
As form is inseparable from matter, the soul cannot exist without the
body. It is the function of the body. It is to the body what sight is
to the eye. And in the same sense Aristotle denies the doctrine of
Pythagoras and Plato that the soul reincarnates itself in new bodies,
particularly in the bodies of animals. What is the function of one
thing cannot become the function of another. Exactly what the soul is
to the body the music of the flute is to the flute itself. It is the
form of which the flute is the matter. It is, to speak metaphorically,
the soul of the flute. And you might as well talk, says Aristotle, of
the art of flute-playing becoming reincarnate in the blacksmith's
anvil, as of the soul passing into another body. This would seem also
to preclude any doctrine of immortality. For the function perishes
with the thing. We shall return to that point in a moment. But we may
note, meanwhile, that Aristotle's theory of the soul is not only a
great advance upon Plato's, but is a great advance upon popular
thinking of the present day. The ordinary view of the soul, which was
Plato's view, is that the soul is a sort of thing. No doubt it is
non-material and supersensuous. But still it is a thing; it can be put
into a body and taken out of it, as wine can be put into or taken out
of a bottle. The connection between body and soul is thus purely
mechanical. They are attached to each other by no necessary bond, but
rather by force. They have, in their own natures, no connexion with
each other, and it is difficult to see why the soul ever entered a
body, if it is in its nature something quite separate. But Aristotle's
view is that the soul, as form of the body, is not separable from it.
You cannot have {302} a soul without a body. The connection between
them is not mechanical, but organic. The soul is not a thing which
comes into the body and goes out of it. It is not a thing at all. It
is a function.
But to this doctrine Aristotle makes an exception in favour of the
active reason. All the lower faculties perish with the body, including
the passive reason. Active reason is imperishable and eternal. It has
neither beginning nor end. It comes into the body from without, and
departs from it at death. God being absolute reason, man's reason
comes from God, and returns to him, after the body ceases to function.
But before we hail this as a doctrine of personal immortality, we had
best reflect. All the lower faculties perish at death, and this
includes memory. Now memory is an essential of personality. Without
memory our experiences would be a succession of isolated sensations,
with no connecting link. What connects my last with my present
experience is that my last experience was "mine." To be mine it must
be remembered. Memory is the string upon which isolated experiences
are strung together, and which makes them into that unity I call
myself, my personality. If memory perishes, there can be no personal
life. And it must be remembered that Aristotle does not mean merely
that, in that future life--if we persist in calling it such--the
memory of this life is obliterated. He means that in the future life
itself reason has no memory of itself from moment to moment. We cannot
be dogmatic about what Aristotle himself thought. He seems to avoid
the question. He probably shrank from disturbing popular beliefs on
the subject. We have, at any rate, no definite pronouncement from
{303} him. All we can say is that his doctrine does not provide the
material for belief in personal immortality. It expressly removes the
material in that it denies the persistence of memory. Moreover, if
Aristotle really thought that reason is a thing, which goes in and out
of the body, an exception, in the literal sense, to his general
doctrine of soul, all we can say is that he undergoes a sudden drop in
the philosophic scale. Having propounded so advanced a theory, he
sinks back to the crude view of Plato. And as this is not likely, the
most probable explanation is that he is here speaking figuratively,
perhaps with the intention of propitiating the religious and avoiding
any rude disturbance of popular belief. If so, the statements that
active reason is immortal, comes from God, and returns to God, mean
simply that the world-reason is eternal, and that man's reason is the
actualization of this eternal reason, and in that sense "comes from
God" and returns to Him. We may add, too, that since God, though real,
is not to be regarded as an existent individual, our return to Him
cannot be thought as a continuation of individual existence. Personal
immortality is inconsistent with the fundamentals of Aristotle's
system. We ought not to suppose that he contradicted himself in this
way. Yet if Aristotle used language which seems to imply personal
immortality, this is neither meaningless nor dishonest. It is as true
for him as for others that the soul is eternal. But eternal does not
mean everlasting in time. It means timeless. And reason, even our
reason, is timeless. The soul has eternity in it. It is "eternity in
an hour." And it is this which puts the difference between man and the
brutes.
{304}
We have traced the scale of being from inorganic matter, through
plants and animals, to man. What then? What is the next step? Or does
the scale stop there? Now there is a sort of break in Aristotle's
system at this point, which has led many to say that man is the top of
the scale. The rest of Aristotle's physics deal with what is outside
our earth, such as the stars and planets. And they deal with them
quite as if they were a different subject, having little or nothing to
do with the terrestrial scale of being which we have been considering.
But here we must not forget two facts. The first is that Aristotle's
writings have come down to us mutilated, and in many cases unfinished.
The second is that Aristotle had a curious habit of writing separate
monographs on different parts of his system, and omitting to point out
any connexion between them, although such a connexion undoubtedly
exists.
Now although Aristotle himself does not say it, there are several good
reasons for thinking that the true interpretation of his meaning is
that the scale of being does not stop at man, that there is no gap in
the chain here, but that it proceeds from man through planets and
stars--which Aristotle, like Plato, regarded as divine beings--right
up to God himself. In the first place, this is required by the logic
of his system. The scale has formless matter at the bottom and
matterless form at the top. It should proceed direct from one to the
other. It is essential to his philosophy that the universe is a single
continuous chain. There is no place for such a hiatus between man and
the higher beings. Secondly, it is not as if terrestrial life formed a
scale, and celestial beings were all on a par, having among themselves
no {305} scale of higher and lower. This is not the case. The heavenly
bodies have grades among themselves. The higher are related to the
lower as form to matter. Thus stars are higher than planets. So that
if we suppose that evolution stops at man, what we have is a gap in
the middle, a scale below it, and a scale above it. It is like a
bridge over a sheet of water, the two ends of which are intact, but
which is broken down in the middle. The natural completion of this
scheme involves the filling up of the gap. Thirdly, we have another
very important piece of evidence. With his valuable idea of evolution
Aristotle combined another very curious, and no doubt, absurd, theory.
This was that in the scale of the universe the lowest existence is to
be found in the middle, the highest at the periphery, and that in
general the higher is always outside the lower, so that the spatial
universe is a system of concentric spheres, the outer sphere being
related to the inner sphere as higher to lower, as form to matter. At
the centre of the spherical universe is our earth. Earth, as the
lowest element, is in the middle. Then comes a layer of water, then of
air, then of fire. Among the heavenly bodies there are fifty-six
spheres. The stars are outside the planets and are therefore higher
beings. And in conformity with this scheme, the supreme being, God, is
outside the outermost sphere. Now it is obvious that, in this scheme,
the passage from the centre of the earth to the stars forms a spatial
continuity, and it is impossible to resist the conclusion that it also
forms a logical continuity, that is, that there is no break in the
chain of evolution.
Noting that this is not what Aristotle in so many words says, but that
it is our interpretation of his {306} intention, which is almost
certainly correct, we conclude that man is not the top of the scale.
Next to him come the heavenly bodies. The planets include the sun and
the moon, which, revolve round the earth in a direction opposite to
that of the stars. Next in the scale come the stars. We need not go
into details of the fifty-six spheres. The stars and planets are
divine beings. But this is only a comparative term. Man, as the
possessor of reason, is also divine, but the heavenly bodies
infinitely more so. And this means that they are more rational than
man, and so higher in the scale. They live an absolutely blessed and
perfect life. They are immortal and eternal, because they are the
supreme self-realization of the eternal reason. It is only upon this
earth that death and corruption occur, a circumstance which has no
doubt emphasized that view of Aristotle's philosophy which holds the
gap between man and the stars to be a real one. The heavenly bodies
are not composed of the four elements, but of a fifth, a quintessence,
which is called ether. Like all elements it must have its natural
motion. And as it is the finest and most perfect, its motion must be
perfect. And it must be an eternal motion, because the stars are
eternal beings. It cannot be motion in a straight line, because that
never comes to an end, and so is never perfect. Circular motion alone
is perfect. And it is eternal because its end and its beginning are
one. Hence the natural motion of ether is circular, and the stars move
in perfect circles.
Leaving the stars behind, we reach the summit of the long ladder from
matter to form. This is the absolute form, God. As formless matter is
not an existent thing, nor is matterless form. God, therefore, is not
in the {307} world of space and time at all. But it is one of the
curiosities of thought that Aristotle nevertheless gives him a place
outside the outermost sphere. What is outside the sphere is,
therefore, not space. All space and time are inside this globular
universe. Space is therefore finite. And God must be outside the
outermost sphere because he is the highest being, and the higher
always comes outside the lower.
We have now described the entire scale of evolution. Looking back upon
it, we can see its inner significance. The Absolute is reason,
matterless form. Everything in the world, therefore, is, in its
essence, reason. If we wish to know the essential nature even of this
clod of earth, the answer is that it is reason, although this view is
not consistently developed by Aristotle, since he allows that matter
is a separate principle which cannot be reduced to form. The whole
universal process of things is nothing but the struggle of reason to
express itself, to actualize itself, to become existent in the world.
This it definitely does, for the first time proximately in man, and
completely in the stars. It can only express itself in lower beings as
sensation (animals), as nutrition (plants), or as gravitation and its
opposite (inorganic matter).
The value of Aristotle's theory of evolution is immense. It is not the
details that signify. The application of the principle in the world of
matter and life could not be carried out satisfactorily in the then
state of physical science. It could not be carried out with perfection
even now. Omniscience alone could give finality to such a scheme. But
it is the principle itself which matters. And that it is one of the
most valuable conceptions in {308} philosophy will perhaps be more
evident if we compare it, firstly, with modern scientific theories of
evolution and secondly, with certain aspects of Hindu pantheism.
What has Aristotle in common with such a writer a Herbert Spencer?
According to Spencer, evolution is a movement from the indefinite,
incoherent, and homogeneous, to the definite, coherent, and
heterogeneous. Aristotle has all this, though his words are different.
He calls it a movement from matter to form. Form he describes as
whatever gives definiteness to a thing. Matter is the indefinite
substrate, form gives it definiteness. Hence for him too the higher
being is more definite because it has more form. That matter is the
homogeneous, form the heterogeneous, follows from this. We saw that
there are in matter itself no differences, because there are no
qualities. And this is the same as saying it is homogeneous.
Heterogeneity, that is, differentiation, is introduced by form.
Coherence is the same thing as organization. Aristotle has himself
defined the form of a thing as its organization. For him, as for
Spencer, the higher being is simply that which is more organized.
Every theory of evolution depends fundamentally upon the idea of
organism. Aristotle invented the idea and the word. Spencer carried it
no further, though the more advanced physical knowledge of his day
enabled him to illustrate it more copiously.
But of course the great difference between Aristotle and the moderns,
is that the former did not guess, what the latter have discovered,
namely that evolution is not only a logical development, but is a fact
in time. Aristotle knew what was meant by the higher and lower
organism as well as Darwin, but he did not know, that the latter {309}
actually turns into the former in the course of years. But this,
though the most obvious, is not really the most important difference
between Spencer and Aristotle. The real difference is that Aristotle
penetrated far more deeply into the philosophy of evolution than
modern science does; that, in fact, modern science has no philosophy
of evolution at all. For the fundamental problem here is, if we speak
of higher and lower beings, what rational ground have we for calling
them higher and lower? That the lower passes in time into the higher
is no doubt a very interesting fact to discover, but it dwindles into
insignificance beside the problem just indicated, because, on the
solution of that problem it depends whether the universe is to be
regarded as futile, meaningless, and irrational, or whether we are to
see in it order, plan, and purpose. Is Spencer's doctrine a theory of
development at all? Or is it not rather simply a theory of change?
Something resembling an ape becomes a man. Is there development here,
that is, is it a movement from something really lower to something
really higher? Or is it merely change from one indifferent thing to
another? Is there improvement, or only difference? In the latter case,
it makes not the slightest difference whether the ape becomes man, or
man becomes an ape. The one is as good as the other. In either case,
it is merely a change from Tweedledum to Tweedledee. The change is
meaningless, and has no significance.
The modern doctrine of evolution can only render the world more
intelligible, can only develop into a philosophy of evolution, by
showing that there is evolution and not merely change, and this it can
only do by {310} giving a rational basis for the belief that some
forms of existence are higher than others. To put the matter bluntly,
why is a man higher than a horse, or a horse than a sponge? Answer
that, and you have a philosophy of evolution. Fail to answer it, and
you have none. Now the man in the street will say that man is higher
than the horse, because he not merely eats grass, but thinks,
deliberates, possesses art, science, religion, morality. Ask him why
these things are higher than eating grass, and he has no answer. From
him, then, we turn to Spencer, and there we find a sort of answer. Man
is higher because he is more organized. But why is it better to be
more organized? Science, as such, has no answer. If pressed in this
way, science may of course turn round and say: "there is in the
reality of things no higher and no lower; what I mean by higher and
lower is simply more and less organized; higher and lower are mere
metaphors; they are the human way of looking at things; we naturally
call higher what is nearest ourselves; but from the absolute point of
view there is no higher and lower." But this is to reduce the universe
to a madhouse. It means that there is no purpose, no reason, in
anything that happens. The universe, in this case, is irrational. No
explanation of it is possible. Philosophy is futile, and not only
philosophy, but morality and everything else. If there is really no
higher and lower, there is no better and no worse. It is just as good
to be a murderer as to be a saint. Evil is the same as good. Instead
of striving to be saints, statesmen, philosophers, we may as well go
and play marbles, because all these values of higher and lower are
mere delusions, "the human way of looking at things."
{311}
Spencer then has no answer to the question why it is better to be more
organized. So we turn at last to Aristotle. He has an answer. He sees
that it is meaningless to talk of development, advance, higher and
lower, except in relation to an end. There is no such thing as advance
unless it is an advance towards something. A body moving purposelessly
in a straight line through infinite space does not advance. It might
as well be here as a mile hence. In either case it is no nearer to
anything. But if it is moving towards a definite point, we can call
this advance. Every mile it moves it gets nearer to its end. So, if we
are to have a philosophy of evolution, it must be teleological. If
nature is not advancing towards an end, there is no nearer and
further, no higher and lower, no development. What then is the end? It
is the actualization of reason, says Aristotle. The primal being is
eternal reason, but this is not existent. It must come to exist. It
first enunciates itself vaguely as gravitation. But this is far off
from its end, which is the existence of reason, as such, in the world.
It comes nearer in plants and animals. It is proximately reached in
man, for man is the existent reason. But there is no question of the
universe coming to a stop, when it reaches its end--(the usual
objection to teleology). For the absolute end, absolute form, can
never be reached. The higher is thus the more rational, the lower the
less rational. Now if we try to go on asking, "why is it better to be
more rational?" we find we cannot ask such a question. The word "why"
means that we want a reason. And our question is absurd because we are
asking a reason for reason. Why is it better to be rational means
simply, "how is reason rational." To {312} doubt it is a
self-contradiction. Or, to put the same thing in another way, reason
is the Absolute. And to ask why it is better to be rational is to
demand that the ultimate should be expressed in terms of something
beyond it. Hence modern science has no philosophy of evolution,
whereas Aristotle has. [Footnote 16]
[Footnote 16: See H. S. Macran's _Hegel's Doctrine of Formal Logic_
(Clarendon Press), Introduction, section on the Conception of
Evolution, to which I am much indebted in the above paragraphs.]
The main idea of pantheism is that everything is God. The clod of
earth is divine because it is a manifestation of Deity. Now this idea
is all very well, and is in fact essential to philosophy. We find it
in Aristotle himself, since the entire world is, for him, the
actualization of reason, and reason is God. But this is also a very
dangerous idea, if not supplemented by a rationally grounded scale of
values. No doubt everything is, in a sense, God. But if we leave it at
this, it would follow that, since everything is equally divine, there
is no higher and lower. If the clod of earth, like the saintliest man,
is God, and there is no more to say of the matter, then how is the
saint higher than the clod of earth? Why should one ever struggle
towards higher things, when in reality all are equally high? Why avoid
evil, when evil is as much a manifestation of God as good? Mere
pantheism must necessarily end in this calamitous view. And these
deplorable effects explain the fact that Hinduism, with all its high
thinking, finds room for the worship of cows and snakes, and, with all
its undoubted moral elevation, yet allows into its fold the grossest
abominations. Both these features are due to the pantheistic placing
of all things on a par as equally {313} divine. Not of course that
Hinduism has not a sort of doctrine of evolution, a belief in a higher
and lower. As everyone knows, it admits the belief that in successive
incarnations the soul may mount higher and higher till it perhaps
rejoins the common source of all things. There is probably no race of
man so savage that it does not instinctively feel that there is a
higher and lower, a better and worse, in things. But the point is
that, although Hinduism has its scale of values, and its doctrine of
development, it has no rational foundation for these, and though it
has the idea of higher and lower, yet, because this is without
foundation, it lets it slip, it never grips the idea, and so easily
slides into the view that all is equally divine. The thought that all
is God, and the thought that there are higher and lower beings, are,
on the surface, opposed and inconsistent theories. Yet both are
necessary, and it is the business of philosophy to find a
reconciliation. This Aristotle does, but Hinduism fails to do. It
asserts both, but fails to bring them to unity. Now it asserts one
view, and again at another time it asserts the other. And this, of
course, is connected with the general defect of oriental thinking, its
vagueness. Everything is seen, but seen in a haze, in which all things
appear one, in which shapes flow into another, in which nothing has an
outline, in which even vital distinctions are obliterated. Hence it is
that, though oriental thought contains, in one way or another,
practically all philosophical ideas, it grips none, and can hold
nothing fast. It seizes its object, but its flabby grasp relaxes and
slips off. Hinduism, like modern science, has its doctrine of
evolution. But it has no philosophy of evolution.
{314}
5. Ethics.
_(a) The Individual_.
A strong note of practical moderation pervades the ethics of
Aristotle. While Plato's ethical teaching transcended the ordinary
limits of human life, and so lost itself in ideal Utopias, Aristotle,
on the other hand, sits down to make practical suggestions: He wishes
to enquire what the good is, but by this he means, not some ideal good
impossible of attainment upon this earth, but rather that good which,
in all the circumstances in which men find themselves, ought to be
realizable. The ethical theories of Plato and Aristotle are thus
characteristic of the two men. Plato despised the world of sense, and
sought to soar altogether beyond the common life of the senses.
Aristotle, with his love of facts and of the concrete, keeps close
within the bounds of actual human experience.
The first question for ethics is the nature of the _summum bonum_. We
desire one thing for the sake of a second, we desire that for the sake
of a third. But if this series of means and ends goes on _ad
infinitum_, then all desire and all action are futile and purposeless.
There must be some one thing which we desire, not for the sake of
anything else, but on its own account. What is this end in itself,
this _summum bonum_, at which all human activity ultimately aims.
Everybody, says Aristotle, is agreed about the name of this end. It is
happiness. What all men seek, what is the motive of all their actions,
that which they desire for the sake of itself and nothing beyond, is
happiness. But though all agree as to the name, beyond that there is
no agreement. Philosophers, {315} no less than the vulgar, differ as
to what this word happiness means. Some say it is a life of pleasure.
Others say it consists in the renunciation of pleasures. Some
recommend one life, some another.
We must repeat here the warning which was found necessary in the case
of Plato, who also called the _summum bonum_ happiness. Aristotle's
doctrine is no more to be confused with modern utilitarianism than is
Plato's. Moral activity is usually accompanied by a subjective feeling
of enjoyment. In modern times the word happiness connotes the feeling
of enjoyment. But for the Greeks it was the moral activity which the
word signified. For Aristotle an action is not good because it yields
enjoyment. On the contrary, it yields enjoyment because it is good.
The utilitarian doctrine is that the enjoyment is the ground of the
moral value. But, for Aristotle, the enjoyment is the consequence of
the moral value. Hence when he tells us that the highest good is
happiness, he is giving us no information regarding its nature, but
merely applying a new name to it. We have still to enquire what the
nature of the good is. As he himself says, everyone agrees upon the
name, but the real question is what this name connotes.
Aristotle's solution of this problem follows from the general
principles of his philosophy. We have seen that, throughout nature,
every being has its proper end, and the attainment of this end is its
special function. Hence the good for each being must be the adequate
performance of its special function. The good for man will not consist
in the pleasure of the senses. Sensation is the special function of
animals, but not of man. Man's special function is reason. Hence the
proper {316} activity of reason is the _summum bonum_, the good for
man. Morality consists in the life of reason. But what precisely that
means we have still to see.
Man is not only a reasoning animal. As the higher being, he contains
within himself the faculties of the lower beings also. Like plants he
is appetitive, like animals, sensitive. The passions and appetites are
an organic part of his nature. Hence virtue will be of two kinds. The
highest virtues will be found in the life of reason, and the life of
thought, philosophy. These intellectual virtues are called by
Aristotle dianoetic. Secondly, the ethical virtues proper will consist
in the submission of the passions and appetites to the control of
reason. The dianoetic virtues are the higher, because in them man's
special function alone is in operation, and also because the thinking
man most resembles God, whose life is a life of pure thought.
Happiness, therefore, consists in the combination of dianoetic and
ethical virtues. They alone are of absolute value to man. Yet, though
he places happiness in virtue, Aristotle, in his broad and practical
way, does not overlook the fact that external goods and circumstances
have a profound influence upon happiness, and cannot be ignored, as
the Cynics attempted to ignore them. Not that Aristotle regards
externals as having any value in themselves. What alone is good in
itself, is an end in itself, is virtue. But external goods help a man
in his quest of virtue. Poverty, sickness, and misfortune, on the
other hand, hinder his efforts. Therefore, though externals are not
goods in themselves, they may be a means towards the good. Hence they
are not to be despised and rejected. Riches, friends, health, {317}
good fortune, are not happiness. But they are negative conditions of
it. With them happiness is within our grasp. Without them its
attainment is difficult. They will be valued accordingly.
Aristotle says little in detail of the dianoetic virtues. And we may
turn at once to the main subject of his moral system, the ethical
virtues. These consist in the governance of the passions by reason.
Socrates was wrong in supposing that virtue is purely intellectual,
that nothing save knowledge is needed for it, and that if a man thinks
right he must needs do right. He forgot the existence of the passions,
which are not easily controlled. A man may reason perfectly, his
reason may point him to the right path, but his passions may get the
upper hand and lead him out of it. How then is reason to gain control
over the appetites? Only by practice. It is only by continual effort,
by the constant exercise of self-control, that the unruly passions can
be tamed. Once brought under the yoke, their control becomes habit.
Aristotle lays the utmost emphasis on the importance of habit in
morality. It is only by cultivating good habits that a man becomes
good.
Now if virtue consists in the control of the appetites by reason, it
thus contains two constituents, reason and appetite. Both must be
present. There must be passions, if they are to be controlled. Hence
the ascetic ideal of rooting out the passions altogether is
fundamentally wrong. It overlooks the fact that the higher form does
not exclude the lower--that were contrary to the conception of
evolution--it includes and transcends it. It forgets that the passions
are an organic part of man, and that to destroy them is to do injury
to his {318} nature by destroying one of its essential members. The
passions and appetites are, in fact, the matter of virtue, reason its
form, and the mistake of asceticism is that it destroys the matter of
virtue, and supposes that the form can subsist by itself. Virtue means
that the appetites must be brought under control, not that they must
be eradicated. Hence there are two extremes to be avoided. It is
extreme, on the one hand, to attempt to uproot the passions; and it is
extreme, on the other, to allow them to run riot. Virtue means
moderation. It consists in hitting the happy mean as regards the
passions, in not allowing them to get the upper hand of reason, and
yet in not being quite passionless and apathetic. From this follows
the famous Aristotelian doctrine of virtue as the mean between two
extremes. Every virtue lies between two vices, which are the excess
and defect of appetite respectively.
What is the criterion here? Who is to judge? How are we to know what
is the proper mean in any matter? Mathematical analogies will not help
us. It is not a case of drawing a straight line from one extreme to
the other, and finding the middle point by bisection. And Aristotle
refuses to lay down any rule of thumb in the matter. There is no
golden rule by virtue of which we can tell where the proper mean is.
It all depends on circumstances, and on the person involved. What is
the proper mean in one case is not the proper mean in another. What is
moderate for one man is immoderate for his neighbour. Hence the matter
must be left to the good judgment of the individual. A sort of fine
tact, good sense, is required to know the mean, which Aristotle calls
"insight." This insight is both the cause and the {319} effect of
virtue. It is the cause, because he who has it knows what he ought to
do. It is the effect, because it is only developed by practice. Virtue
renders virtue easy. Each time a man, by use of his insight, rightly
decides upon the mean, it becomes easier for him to discriminate next
time.
Aristotle attempts no systematic classification of the virtues, as
Plato had done. This sort of schematism is contrary to the practical
character of his thought. He sees that life is far too complex to be
treated in this way. The proper mean is different in every different
case, and therefore there are as many virtues as there are
circumstances in life. His list of virtues, therefore, is not intended
to be exhaustive. It is merely illustrative. Though the number of
virtues is infinite, there are certain well-recognized kinds of good
action, which are of such constant importance in life that they have
received names. By the example of some of these virtues Aristotle
illustrates his doctrine of the mean. For instance, courage is the
mean between cowardice and rashness. That is to say, cowardice is the
defect of boldness, rashness the excess, courage the reasonable
medium. Munificence is the mean between pettiness and vulgar
profusion, good temper between spiritlessness and irascibility,
politeness between rudeness and obsequiousness, modesty between
shamelessness and bashfulness, temperance between insensibility and
intemperance.
Justice hardly comes into the scheme; it is rather a virtue of the
State than of the individual, and it has been thought by some that the
book devoted to it in the "Ethics" has been misplaced. Justice is of
two kinds, distributive and corrective. Its fundamental idea {320} is
the assignment of advantages and disadvantages according to merit.
Distributive justice assigns honours and rewards according to the
worth of the individuals involved. Corrective justice has to do with
punishment. If a man improperly obtains an advantage, things must be
equalized by the imposition on him of a corresponding disadvantage.
Justice, however, is a general principle, and no general principle is
equal to the complexity of life. Special cases cannot be foreseen, The
necessary adjustment of human relations arising from this cause is
equity.
Aristotle is a pronounced supporter of the freedom of the will. He
censures Socrates because the latter's theory of virtue practically
amounts to a denial of freedom. According to Socrates, whoever thinks
right must necessarily do right. But this is equivalent to denying a
man's power to choose evil. And if he cannot choose evil, he cannot
choose good. For the right-thinking man does not do right voluntarily,
but necessarily. Aristotle believed, on the contrary, that man has the
choice of good and evil. The doctrine of Socrates makes all actions
involuntary. But in Aristotle's opinion only actions performed under
forcible compulsion are involuntary. Aristotle did not, however,
consider the special difficulties in the theory of free will which in
modern times have made it one of the most thorny of all philosophical
problems. Hence his treatment of the subject is not of great value to
us.
_(b) The State_.
Politics is not a separate subject from Ethics. It is merely another
division of the same subject. And {321} this, not merely because
politics is the ethics of the State as against the individual, but
because the morality of the individual really finds its end in the
State, and is impossible without it. Aristotle agrees with Plato that
the object of the State is the virtue and happiness of the citizens,
which are impossible except in the State. For man is a political
animal by nature, as is proved by his possession of speech, which
would be useless to any save a social being. And the phrase "by
nature" means the same here as elsewhere in Aristotle. It means that
the State is the end of the individual, and that activity in the State
is part of man's essential function. The State, in fact, is the form,
the individual, the matter. The State provides both an education in
virtue and the necessary opportunities for its exercise. Without it
man would not be man at all. He would be a savage animal.
The historical origin of the State Aristotle finds in the family. At
first there is the individual. The individual gets himself a mate, and
the family arises. The family, in Aristotle's opinion, includes the
slaves: for, like Plato, he sees no wrong in the institution of
slavery. A number of families, joining together, develop into a
village community, and a number of village communities into a _polis_
(city), or State. Beyond the city, of course, the Greek idea of the
State did not extend.
Such then is the historical origin of the State. But it is of capital
importance to understand that, in Aristotle's opinion, this question
of historical origin has nothing on earth to do with the far more
important question what the State essentially is. It is no mere
mechanical aggregate of families and village communities, {322} The
_nature_ of the State is not explained in this way. For though the
family is prior to the State in order of time, the State is prior to
the family and to the individual in order of thought, and in reality.
For the State is the end, and the end is always prior to that of which
it is the end. The state as form is prior to the family as matter, and
in the same way the family is prior to the individual. And as the
explanation of things is only possible by teleology, it is the end
which explains the beginning, it is the State which explains the
family, and not vice versa.
The true nature of the State, therefore, is not that it is a
mechanical sum of individuals, as a heap of sand is the sum of its
grains. The State is a real organism, and the connexion of part to
part is not mechanical, but organic. The State has a life of its own.
And its members also have their own lives, which are included in the
higher life of the State. All the parts of an organism are themselves
organisms. And as the distinction between organic and inorganic is
that the former has its end in itself, while the latter has its end
external to it, this means that the State is an end in itself, that
the individual is an end in himself, and that the former end includes
the latter. Or we may express the same thought otherwise by saying
that, in the State, both the whole and the parts are to be regarded as
real, both having their own lives and, in their character as ends,
their own rights. Consequently, there are two kinds of views of the
nature of the State, which are, according to Aristotle, fundamentally
erroneous. The first is the kind of view which depends upon asserting
the reality of the parts, but denying the reality of the whole, or,
what is the same {323} thing, allowing that the individual is an end
in himself, but denying that the State as a whole is such an end or
has a separate life of its own. The second kind of false view is of
the opposite kind, and consists in allowing reality only to the whole
State, and denying the reality of its parts, the individuals. The
opinions that the State is merely a mechanical aggregate of
individuals, that it is formed by the combination of individuals or
families for the sake of mutual protection and benefit, and that it
exists only for these purposes, are examples of the first kind. Such
views subordinate the State to the individual. The State is treated as
an external contrivance for securing the life, the property, or the
convenience of the individual. The State exists solely for the sake of
the individual, and is not in itself an end. The individual alone is
real, the State unreal, because it is only a collection of
individuals. These views forget that the State is an organism, and
they forget all that this implies. Aristotle would have condemned, on
these grounds, the social contract theory so popular in the eighteenth
century, and likewise the view of modern individualism that the State
exists solely to ensure that the liberty of the individual is
curtailed only by the right of other individuals to the same liberty.
The opposite kind of false view is illustrated by the ideal State of
Plato. As the views we have just discussed deny the reality of the
whole, Plato's view, on the contrary, denies the reality of the parts.
For him the individual is nothing, the State everything. The
individual is absolutely sacrificed to the State. He exists only _for_
the State, and thus Plato makes the mistake of setting up the State as
sole end and denying that the {324} individual is an end in himself.
Plato imagined that the State is a homogeneous unity, in which its
parts totally disappear. But the true view is that the State, as an
organism, is a unity which contains heterogeneity. It is coherent, yet
heterogeneous. And Plato makes the same mistake in his view of the
family as in his view of the individual. The family, Aristotle thinks,
is, like the individual, a real part of the social whole. It is an
organism within an organism. As such, it is an end in itself, has
absolute rights, and cannot be obliterated. But Plato expressly
proposed to abolish the family in favour of the State, and by
suggesting community of wives and the education of children in State
nurseries from the year of their birth, struck a deadly blow at an
essential part of the State organization. Aristotle thus supports the
institution of family, not on sentimental, but upon philosophic
grounds.
Aristotle gives no exhaustive classification of different kinds of
State, because forms of government may be as various as the
circumstances which give rise to them. His classification is intended
to include only outstanding types. He finds that there are six such
types, of which three are good. The other three are bad, because they
are corruptions of the good types. These are (1) Monarchy, the rule of
one man by virtue of his being so superior in wisdom to all his
fellows that he naturally rules them. The corruption of Monarchy is
(2) Tyranny, the rule of one man founded not on wisdom and capacity,
but upon force. The second good form is (3) Aristocracy, the rule of
the wiser and better few, of which the corrupt form is (4) Oligarchy,
the rule of the rich and powerful few. (5) Constitutional Republic or
Timocracy arises {325} where all the citizens are of fairly equal
capacity, i.e., where no stand-out individual or class exists, so that
all or most take a share in the government. The corresponding corrupt
form is (6) Democracy, which, though it is the rule of the many, is
more especially characterized as being the rule of the poor.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle depicts no ideal State. No single State, he
thinks, is in itself the best. Everything must depend upon the
circumstances. What is the best State in one age and county will not
be the best in another. Moreover, it is useless to discuss Utopian
constitutions. What alone interests the sane and balanced mind of
Aristotle is the kind of constitution which we may hope actually to
realize. Of the three good forms of government he considers that
monarchy is theoretically the best. The rule of a single perfectly
wise and just man would be better than any other. But it has to be
given up as impracticable, because such perfect individuals do not
exist. And it is only among primitive peoples that we find the hero,
the man whose moral stature so completely exalts him above his fellows
that he rules as a matter of course. The next best State is
aristocracy. And last, in Aristotle's opinion, comes constitutional
republic, which is, however, perhaps the State best suited to the
special needs and level of development of the Greek city-states.
6. Aesthetics, or the Theory of Art.
Plato had no systematic philosophy of Art, and his views had to be
collected from scattered references. Aristotle likewise has scarcely a
system, though his opinions are more connected, and though he devoted
a special tretise, the "Poetics", to the subject. And this {326} book,
which has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, deals exclusively
with poetry, and even in poetry only the drama is considered in detail.
What we have from Aristotle on the subject of aesthetics may be divided
roughly into two classes, firstly, reflections on the nature and
significance of art in general, and, secondly, a more detailed
application of these principles to the art of poetry. We shall deal
with these two classes of opinions in that order.
In order to know what art is, we must first know what it is not. It
must be distinguished from kindred activities. And firstly, it is
distinguished from morality in that morality is concerned with action,
art with production. Morality consists in the activity itself, art in
that which the activity produces. Hence the state of mind of the
actor, his motives, feelings, etc., are important in morality, for
they are part of the act itself. But they are not important in art,
the only essential being that the work of art should turn out well,
however it has been produced. Secondly, art is distinguished from the
activity of nature, which it in many respects resembles. Organic
beings reproduce their own kind, and, in the fact that it is concerned
with production, generation resembles art. But in generation, the
living being produces only itself. The plant produces a plant, man
begets man. But the artist produces something quite other than
himself, a poem, a picture, a statue.
Art is of two kinds, according as it aims at completing the work of
nature, or at creating something new, an imaginary world of its own
which is a copy of the real world. In the former case, we get such
arts as that of {327} medicine. Where nature has failed to produce a
healthy body, the physician helps nature out, and completes the work
that she has begun. In the latter case, we get what are, in modern
times, called the fine arts. These Aristotle calls the imitative arts.
We saw that Plato regarded all art as imitative, and that such a view
is essentially unsatisfactory. Now Aristotle uses the same word, which
he perhaps borrowed from Plato, but his meaning is not the same as
Plato's, nor does he fall into the same mistakes. That in calling art
imitative he has not in mind the thought that it has for its aim
merely the faithful copying of natural objects is proved by the fact
that he mentions music as the most imitative of the arts, whereas
music is, in fact, in this sense, the least imitative of all. The
painter may conceivably be regarded as imitating trees, rivers, or
men, but the musician for the most part produces what is unlike
anything in nature. What Aristotle means is that the artist copies,
not the sensuous object, but what Plato would call the Idea. Art is
thus not, in Plato's contemptuous phrase, a copy of a copy. It is a
copy of the original. Its object is not this or that particular thing,
but the universal which manifests itself in the particular. Art
idealizes nature, that is, sees the Idea in it. It regards the
individual thing, not as an individual, but in its universal aspects,
as the fleeting embodiment of an eternal thought. Hence it is that the
sculptor depicts not the individual man, but rather the type-man, the
perfection of his kind. Hence too, in modern times, the portrait
painter is not concerned to paint a faithful image of his model, but
takes the model merely as a suggestion, and seizes upon that essential
and eternal {328} essence, that ideal thought, or universal, which he
sees shining through the sensuous materials in which it is imprisoned.
His task is to free it from this imprisonment. The common man sees
only the particular object. The artist sees the universal in the
particular. Every individual thing is a compound of matter and form,
of particular and universal. The function of art is to exhibit the
universal in it.
Hence poetry is truer, more philosophical, than history. For history
deals only with the particular as the particular. It tells us only of
the _fact_, of what has happened. Its truth is mere correctness,
accuracy. It has not in it, as art has, the living and eternal truth.
It does not deal with the Idea. It yields us only the knowledge of
something that, having happened, having gone by, is finished. Its
object is transient and perishable. It concerns only the endless
iteration of meaningless events. But the object of art is that inner
essence of objects and events, which perishes not, and of which the
objects and events are the mere external drapery. If therefore we
would arrange philosophy, art, and history, in order of their
essential nobility and truth, we should place philosophy first,
because its object is the universal as it is in itself, the pure
universal. We should place art second, because its object is the
universal in the particular, and history last, because it deals only
with the particular as such. Yet because each thing in the world has
its own proper function, and errs if it seeks to perform the functions
of something else, hence, in Aristotle's opinion, art must not attempt
to emulate philosophy. It must not deal with the abstract universal.
The poet must not use his verses as a vehicle of abstract thought. His
proper {329} sphere is the universal as it manifests itself in the
particular, not the universal as it is in itself. Aristotle, for this
reason, censures didactic poetry. Such a poem as that of Empedocles,
who unfolded his philosophical system in metre, is not, in fact,
poetry at all. It is versified philosophy. Art is thus lower than
philosophy. The absolute reality, the inner essence of the world, is
thought, reason, the universal. To contemplate this reality is the
object alike of philosophy and of art. But art sees the Absolute not
in its final truth, but wrapped up in a sensuous drapery. Philosophy
sees the Absolute as it is in itself, in its own nature, in its full
truth; it sees it as what it essentially is, thought. Philosophy,
therefore, is the perfect truth. But this does not mean that art is to
be superseded and done away with. Because philosophy is higher than
art, it does not follow that a man should suppress the artist in
himself in order to rise to philosophy. For an essential thought of
the Aristotelian philosophy is that, in the scale of beings, even the
lower form is an end in itself, and has absolute rights. The higher
activities presuppose the lower, and rest upon them. The higher
includes the lower, and the lower, as an organic part of its being,
cannot be eradicated without injury to the whole. To suppress art in
favour of philosophy would be a mistake precisely parallel to the
moral error of asceticism. In treating of Aristotle's ethics we saw
that, although the activity of reason is held in highest esteem, the
attempt to uproot the passions was censured as erroneous. So here,
though philosophy is the crown of man's spiritual activity, art has
its rights, and is an absolute end in itself, a point which Plato
failed to see. In the human organism, the head is the {330} chief of
the members. But one does not cut off the hand because it is not the
head.
Coming now to Aristotle's special treatment of the art of poetry, we
may note that he concentrates his attention almost exclusively upon
the drama. It does not matter whether the plot of a drama is
historical or fictitious. For the object of art, the exhibition of the
universal, is just as well attained in an imaginary as in a real
series of events. Its aim is not correctness, but truth, not facts,
but the Idea. Drama is of two kinds, tragedy and comedy. Tragedy
exhibits the nobler specimens of humanity, comedy the worse. This
remark should be carefully understood. It does not mean that the hero
of a tragedy is necessarily a good man in the ordinary sense. He may
even be a wicked man. But the point is that, in some sense, he must be
a great personality. He cannot be an insignificant person. He cannot
be a nonentity. Be he good or bad, he must be conceived in the grand
manner. Milton's Satan is not good, but he is great, and would be a
fit subject for a tragedy. The soundness of Aristotle's thought here
is very noteworthy. What is mean and sordid can never form the basis
of tragedy. Modern newspapers have done their best to debauch this
word tragedy. Some wretched noteless human being is crushed to death
by a train, and the newspapers head their paragraph "Fearful Tragedy
at Peckham Rye." Now such an incident may be sad, it may be dreadful,
it may be horrible, but it is not tragic. Tragedy no doubt deals with
suffering. But there is nothing great and ennobling about this
suffering, and tragedy is concerned with the sufferings of greatness.
In the same way, Aristotle does not mean that the comic {331} hero is
necessarily a wicked man, but that he is, on the whole, a poor
creature, an insignificant being. He may be very worthy, but there is
something low and ignoble about him which makes us laugh.
Tragedy brings about a purification of the soul through pity and
terror. Mean, sordid, or dreadful things do not ennoble us. But the
representation of truly great and tragic sufferings arouses in the
beholder pity and terror which purge his spirit, and render it serene
and pure. This is the thought of a great and penetrating critic. The
theory of certain scholars, based upon etymological grounds, that it
means that the soul is purged, not _through_, but _of_ pity and
terror, that by means of a diarrhoea of these unpleasant emotions we
get rid of them and are left happy, is the thought of men whose
scholarship may be great, but whose understanding of art is limited.
Such a theory would reduce Aristotle's great and illuminating
criticism to the meaningless babble of a philistine.
7. Critical Estimate of Aristotle's Philosophy.
It is not necessary to spend so much time upon criticising Aristotle
as we spent upon doing the same for Plato, and that for two reasons.
In the first place, Plato with his obvious greatness abounded in
defects which had to be pointed out, whereas we have but little
adverse criticism for Aristotle. Secondly, Aristotle's main defect is
a dualism almost identical with that of Plato, and what has been said
of the one need only be shortly applied to the other.
At bottom Aristotle's philosophy is the same as Plato's, with some of
the main defects and crudities removed. Plato was the founder of the
philosophy of the Idea. {332} But in his hands, idealism was clogged
with unessentials, and overgrown with excrescences. His crude theory
of the soul as a thing mechanically forced in and out of the body, his
doctrines of reincarnation and recollection, the belief that this
_thing_ the soul can travel to some place far away where it will see
those _things_ the Ideas, and above all, what is the root of all
these, the confusion between reality and existence, with its
consequent degradation of the universal to a mere particular--these
were the unessentials with which Plato connected his essential
idealism. To take the pure theory of Ideas--albeit not under that
name--to purge it of these encumbrances and to cast them upon the
rubbish heap, to cleanse Plato's gold of its dross, this was the task
of Aristotle. Thought, the universal, the Idea, form--call it what
you will--this is the ultimate reality, the foundation of the world,
the absolute prius of all things. So thought both Plato and Aristotle.
But whereas Plato began to draw mental pictures of the universal, to
imagine that it existed apart in a world of its own, and so might be
experienced by the vision of the wandering soul, Aristotle saw that
this was to treat thought as if it were a thing, to turn it into a
mere particular again. He saw that the universal, though it is the
real, has no existence in a world of its own, but only in this world,
only as a formative principle of particular things. This is the
key-note of his philosophy. Aristotle registers, therefore, an
enormous advance upon Plato. His system is the perfected and completed
Greek idealism. It is the highest point reached in the philosophy of
Greece. The flower of all previous thought, the essence and pure
distillation of the Greek philosophic spirit, the gathering {333} up
of all that is good in his predecessors and the rejection of all that
is faulty and worthless--such is the philosophy of Aristotle. It was
not possible for the Greek spirit to advance further. Further
development could be only decay. And so, in fact, it turned out to be.
Aristotle deserves, too, the credit of having produced the only
philosophy of evolution which the world has ever seen, with the
exception of that of Hegel; and Hegel was enabled to found a newer
theory of evolution only by following largely in the footsteps of
Aristotle. This was perhaps Aristotle's most original contribution to
thought. Yet the factors of the problem, though not its solution, he
took from his predecessors. The problem of becoming had tortured Greek
thought from the earliest ages. The philosophy of Heracleitus, in
which it was most prominent, had failed to solve it. Heracleitus and
his successors racked their brains to discover how becoming could be
possible. But even if they had solved this minor problem, the greater
question still remained in the background, what does this becoming
mean? Becoming for them was only meaningless change. It was not
development. The world-process was an endless stream of futile and
purposeless events, "a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing." Aristotle not merely asked himself how becoming
is possible. He showed that becoming has a meaning, that it signifies
something, that the world-process is a rationally ordered development
towards a rational end.
But, though Aristotle's philosophy is the highest presentation of the
truth in ancient times, it cannot be accepted as anything final and
faultless. Doubtless no philosophy can ever attain to finality. Let us
apply our {334} two-fold test. Does his principle explain the world,
and does it explain itself? First, does it explain the world? The
cause of Plato's failure here was the dualism in his system between
sense and thought, between matter and the Ideas. It was impossible to
derive the world from the Ideas, because they were absolutely
separated from the world. The gulf was so great that it could never be
bridged. Matter and Idea lay apart, and could never be brought
together. Now Aristotle saw this dualism in Plato, and attempted to
surmount it. The universal and the particular, he said, do not thus
lie apart, in different worlds. The Idea is not a thing here, and
matter a thing there, so that these two incommensurables have to be
somehow mechanically and violently forced together to form a world.
Universal and particular, matter and form, are inseparable. The
connexion between them is not mechanical, but organic. The dualism of
Plato is thus admitted and refuted. But is it really surmounted? The
answer must be in the negative. It is not enough by a _tour de force_ to
bring matter and form together, to assert that they are inseparable,
while they remain all the time, in principle, separate entities. If
the Absolute is form, matter ought to be deduced from form, shown to
be merely a projection and manifestation of it. It must be shown that
form not only moulds matter but produces it. If we assert that the one
primal reality is form, then clearly we must prove that all else in
the world, including matter, arises out of that prime being. Either
matter arises out of form or it does not. If it does, this arising
must be exhibited. If it does not, then form is not the sole ultimate
reality, for matter is equally an ultimate, underivative, {335}
primordial substance. In that case, we thus have two equally real
ultimate beings, each underived from the other, existing side by side
from all eternity. This is dualism, and this is the defect of
Aristotle. Not only does he not derive matter from form, but he
obviously sees no necessity for doing so. He would probably have
protested against any attempt to do so, for, when he identifies the
formal, final, and efficient causes with each other, leaving out the
material cause, this is equivalent to an assertion that matter cannot
be reduced to form. Thus his dualism is deliberate and persistent. The
world, says Aristotle, is composed of matter and form. Where does this
matter come from? As it does not, in his system, arise out of form, we
can only conclude that its being is wholly in itself, i.e., that it is
a substance, an absolute reality. And this is utterly inconsistent
with Aristotle's assertion that it is in itself nothing but a mere
potentiality. Thus, in the last resort, this dualism of sense and
thought, of matter and Idea, of unlimited and limiting, which runs,
"the little rift within the lute," through all Greek philosophy, is
not resolved. The world is not explained, because it is not derived
from a single principle. If form be the Absolute, the whole world must
flow out of it. In Aristotle's system, it does not.
Secondly, is the principle of form self-explanatory? Here, again, we
must answer negatively. Most of what was said of Plato under this head
applies equally to Aristotle. Plato asserted that the Absolute is
reason, and it was therefore incumbent on him to show that his account
of reason was truly rational. He failed to do so. Aristotle asserts
the same thing, for form is only {336} another word for reason. Hence
he must show us that this form is a rational principle, and this means
that he must show us that it is necessary. But he fails to do so. How
is form a necessary and self-determining principle? Why should there
be such a principle as form? We cannot see any necessity. It is a mere
fact. It is nothing but an ultimate mystery. It is so, and that is an
end of it. But why it should be so, we cannot see. Nor can we see why
there should be any of the particular kinds of form that there are. To
explain this, Aristotle ought to have shown that the forms constitute
a systematic unity, that they can be deduced one from another, just as
we saw that Plato ought to have deduced all the Ideas from one
another. Thus Aristotle asserts that the form of plants is nutrition,
of animals sensation, and that the one passes into the other. But even
if this assertion be true, it is a mere fact. He ought not merely to
have asserted this, but to have deduced sensation from nutrition.
Instead of being content to allege that, as a fact, nutrition passes
into sensation, he ought to have shown that it must pass into
sensation, that the passage from one to the other is a logical
necessity. Otherwise, we cannot see the reason why this change occurs.
That is to say, the change is not _explained_.
Consider the effects of this omission upon the theory of evolution. We
are told that the world-process moves towards an end, and that this
end is the self-realization of reason, and that it is proximately
attained in man, because man is a reasoning being. So far this is
quite intelligible. But this implies that each step in evolution is
higher than the last because it approaches nearer to {337} the end of
the world-process. And as that end is the realization of reason, this
is equivalent to saying that each step is higher than the last because
it is more rational. But how is sensation more rational than
nutrition? Why should it not be the other way about? Nutrition passes
through sensation into human reason. But why should not sensation pass
through nutrition into human reason? Why should not the order be
reversed? We cannot explain. And such an admission is absolutely fatal
to any philosophy of evolution. The whole object of such a philosophy
is to make it clear to us why the higher form is higher, and why the
lower is lower: why, for example, nutrition must, as lower, come
first, and sensation second, and not _vice versa_. If we can see no
reason why the order should not be reversed, this simply means that
our philosophy of evolution has failed in its main point. It means
that we cannot see any real difference between lower and higher, and
that therefore we have merely change without development, since it is
indifferent whether A passes into B, or B into A. The only way in
which Aristotle could have surmounted these difficulties would have
been to prove that sensation is a development of reason which goes
beyond nutrition. And he could only do this by showing that sensation
logically arises out of nutrition. For a logical development is the
same as a rational development. He ought to have logically deduced
sensation from nutrition, and so with all the other forms. As it is,
all that can be said is that Aristotle was the founder of a philosophy
of evolution because he saw that evolution implies movement towards an
end, and because he attempted to point out the different stages in the
attainment of that end, {338} but that he failed rationally to develop
the doctrine stage by stage.
As neither the principle of form in general was shown to be necessary,
nor were the particular forms deduced from each other, we have to
conclude that Aristotle like Plato, _named_ a self-explanatory
principle, reason or form, as ultimate principle of things, but failed
to show in detail that it is self-explanatory. Yet, in spite these
defects, the philosophy of Aristotle is one of the greatest
philosophies that the world has ever seen, or is ever likely to see.
If it does not solve all problems, it does render the world more
intelligible to us than it was before.
{339}