ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY
Platon rêvait; Aristote pensait.--Alfred de Musset.
Are God and Nature then at strife
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
--Tennyson.
There are three Essences. Two of these are sensible; one being
eternal, and the other perishable. The latter is admitted by all, in
the form, for example, of plants and animals; in regard to the
former, or eternal one, we shall have to consider its elements, and
see whether they be one or many. The third is immutable [and,
therefore, inaccessible to sense], and this some thinkers hold to be
transcendent.--Aristotle.
The vision of the divine is what is sweetest and best; and if God
always enjoys that vision as we sometimes do, it is wonderful, and
if he does so in a yet higher degree, it is more wonderful still.
And so even it is. And life belongs to him; for the
self-determination of thought is life, and he is self-determination.
And his absolute self-determination is the supreme and eternal life.
And we call God a living being, eternal, best; so that life and
duration, uniform and eternal, belong to God; for this is
God.--_Id._
We must consider in what way the system of the universe contains the
good and the best, whether as something transcendent and
self-determined, or as order. Surely in both ways at once, as in any
army, for which the good is in order, and is the general, and the
latter more than the former. For the general is not due to the
order, but the order to the general.--_Id._
The thought of Aristotle differs from that of Plato both in its method
and in its results. Plato, reared in the school of Pythagoras,
Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Socrates, had, naturally enough, come to
look for truth in the supersensual region of mind, and thought he found
it in ideas attainable by a process of dialectic within the individual
consciousness. He thus came to put forward a doctrine which, despite its
ostensible purpose to cement the bonds of society, in reality tended to
withdraw men from society altogether and increase the very individualism
it was intended to cure. Aristotle, while still in Plato's school, had
turned away from this doctrine, and in after-life he never lost an
opportunity of combating it. He could point to Plato's _Republic_ as a
warning example of its logical consequences. But, in doing this, he was
prepared to put another doctrine in its place, and he did so on the
basis of a profound study of the whole course of Greek thought,
mythological and philosophical.
Instead of appealing, like Plato, to the individual consciousness, and
trying to discover ultimate truth by bringing its data into harmony
among themselves, Aristotle appeals to the historic consciousness, and
endeavors to find truth by harmonizing and complementing its data
through a further appeal to the outer world, in which these data are
realized. He maintains that the truths reached by the dialectic process
are merely formal, and therefore empty,--useless in practice, until they
have been filled by experience from the storehouse of nature. In
consequence of this changed attitude, he sets aside the dialectic
process, and substitutes for it the _Method of Induction_, which he was
the first man in the world to comprehend, expound, and apply, becoming
thus the father of all true science. And he makes a more extensive use
of induction than any other man since his time, applying it in a field
in which even now it is hardly supposed to yield any results, the field
of the common consciousness. Indeed, he everywhere begins his search for
concrete truth by examining the historic consciousness, and, having, by
a process of induction, discovered and generalized its contents, he
turns with these to nature and, by a second induction, corrects,
completes, and harmonizes them. We might express this in modern
language, by saying that his whole endeavor is to correct and supplement
the imperfect human consciousness by a continual appeal to the divine
consciousness, _as manifested in the world_. It is the error of modern
investigators that they employ only one-half of the inductive method,
the objective, and either omit altogether the subjective, or else, like
Plato, apply it only to the individual consciousness. Hence come the
widely divergent results which still meet us in so many of the sciences,
in Politics, Psychology, etc., hence the fact that a great deal of
science, instead of correcting, widening, and harmonizing the common
consciousness, stands altogether apart from it, or even in direct
opposition to it. The man who writes a treatise on Psychology, or on the
Soul, without troubling himself to discover what "Soul" means in the
general consciousness of mankind, and perhaps setting out with an
altogether individual notion of it, can hardly look for any other
result. Aristotle, true to his method of induction, devotes one entire
book of his _Psychology_ to finding out what "Soul" means in the
historic consciousness, unreflective as well as reflective. Then, with
this meaning, he goes to nature, seeks by induction to discover what
she has to say about it, and abides by her reply. Hence it is that his
thought has laid hold upon the world, and influenced it in practical
ways, as no other man's thought has ever done. Hence it is that, of all
ancient men, he is the one before whom the modern scientist bows with
respect.
If we now ask ourselves what was the underlying thought that shaped
Aristotle's theory of induction, what was his _Weltanschauung_, we shall
find it to be this: The divine intelligence reveals itself subjectively
in an historic process in the human consciousness, and objectively[4] in
a natural process in the outer world. Truth for man is the harmony of
the two revelations. It follows directly from this that the scientist
must take impartial account of both. So, for example, if he finds gods
in the historical consciousness, and laws or forces in nature, he has no
right, like the theologian, to merge the latter in the former, or, like
the physicist, to replace the former by the latter. He must retain both
till he can bring them into harmony. Only then does he know either.
Such a philosophy as this, instead of drawing men away from the world of
nature and history, and confining them to the narrow circle of their own
consciousness, of necessity sent them back to that world, as the only
means by which any human well-being could be reached. It is for this
reason that it has so powerfully affected both social life and science.
Nevertheless, we should err greatly, if we supposed that, in
Aristotle's view, the divine is nothing more than an immanent idea,
working as a force-form in nature, and as a thought-form in mind. He
does, indeed, believe that the divine is all this, but not that this is
all the divine there is. Over and above the divine which is determined
in nature and in man, there is the transcendent Mind, or God,
determining himself through himself, and bearing the same relation to
the divine that the sun bears to light, the human mind to human thought,
the general to the order of his army. Here we are far away from
Pantheism, and, though we have not yet risen to a clear conception of
personality, we have at the "helm of the universe" a conscious being,
the source of law and order. And man, rising above the thought whereby
he knows himself through nature, and nature through himself, may enter
into the consciousness of God and become a partaker in that life which
is "sweetest and best." These are the features of Aristotle's thought
which in the thirteenth century made it acceptable to the Christian
Church in her struggle against Pantheism, and which paved the way for
that higher mysticism of which Thomas Aquinas is the most distinguished
exponent--a mysticism which does not, like that of the Neoplatonists and
Buddhists, dispense with thought to lose itself in vacancy, but which,
rising upon a broad basis of knowledge, pierces the clouds of sense, to
find itself in the presence of the most concrete Reality, the
inexhaustible source of all thought and all things.