education meant not for those who are to follow some particular calling,
but for all the full citizens of a state. Aristotle's view is that some
"useful" subjects must, of course, be taught. Reading and writing, for
instance, are useful for the discharge of the business of life, though
their commercial utility is not the highest value which they have for
us. But care must be taken that only those "useful" studies which are
also "liberal" should be taught; "illiberal" or "mechanical" subjects
must not have any place in the curriculum. A "liberal" education means,
as the name shows, one which will tend to make its recipient a "free
man," and not a slave in body and soul. The mechanical crafts were felt
by Aristotle to be illiberal because they leave a man no leisure to make
the best of body and mind; practice of them sets a stamp on the body and
narrows the mind's outlook. In principle then, no study should form a
subject of the universal curriculum if its only value is that it
prepares a man for a profession followed as a means of making a living.
General education, all-round training which aims at the development of
body and mind for its own sake, must be kept free from the intrusion of
everything which has a merely commercial value and tends to contract the
mental vision. It is the same principle which we rightly employ
ourselves when we maintain that a university education ought not to
include specialisation on merely "technical" or "professional" studies.
The useful subjects which have at the same time a higher value as
contributing to the formation of taste and character and serving to
elevate and refine the mind include, besides reading and writing, which
render great literature accessible to us, bodily culture (the true
object of which is not merely to make the body strong and hardy, but to
develop the moral qualities of grace and courage), music, and drawing.
Aristotle holds that the real reason for making children learn music is
(1) that the artistic appreciation of really great music is one of the
ways in which "leisure" may be worthily employed, and to appreciate
music rightly we must have some personal training in musical execution;
(2) that all art, and music in particular, has a direct influence on
character.
Plato and Aristotle, though they differ on certain points of detail, are
agreed that the influence of music on character, for good or bad, is
enormous. Music, they say, is the most imitative of all the arts. The
various rhythms, times, and scales imitate different tempers and
emotional moods, and it is a fundamental law of our nature that we grow
like what we take pleasure in seeing or having imitated or represented
for us. Hence if we are early accustomed to take pleasure in the
imitation of the manly, resolute, and orderly, these qualities will in
time become part of our own nature. This is why right musical education
is so important that Plato declared that the revolutionary spirit always
makes its first appearance in innovations on established musical form.
There is, however, one important difference between the two philosophers
which must be noted, because it concerns Aristotle's chief contribution
to the philosophy of fine art. Plato had in the _Republic_ proposed to
expel florid, languishing, or unduly exciting forms of music not only
from the schoolroom, but from life altogether, on the ground of their
unwholesome tendency to foster an unstable and morbid character in those
who enjoy them. For the same reason he had proposed the entire
suppression of tragic drama. Aristotle has a theory which is directly
aimed against this overstrained Puritanism. He holds that the exciting
and sensational art which would be very bad as daily food may be very
useful as an occasional medicine for the soul. He would retain even the
most sensational forms of music on account of what he calls their
"purgative" value. In the same spirit he asserts that the function of
tragedy, with its sensational representations of the calamities of its
heroes, is "by the vehicle of fear and pity to purge our minds of those
and similar emotions." The explanation of the theory is to be sought in
the literal sense of the medical term "purgative." According to the
medical view which we have already found influencing his ethical
doctrine, health consists in the maintenance of an equality between the
various ingredients of the body. Every now and again it happens that
there arise superfluous accretions of some one ingredient, which are not
carried away in the normal routine of bodily life. These give rise to
serious derangement of function and may permanently injure the working
of the organism, unless they are removed in time by a medicine which
acts as a purge, and clears the body of a superfluous accumulation. The
same thing also happens in the life of the soul. So long as we are in
good spiritual health our various feelings and emotional moods will be
readily discharged in action, in the course of our daily life. But there
is always the possibility of an excessive accumulation of emotional
"moods" for which the routine of daily life does not provide an adequate
discharge in action. Unless this tendency is checked we may contract
dangerously morbid habits of soul. Thus we need some medicine for the
soul against this danger, which may be to it what a purgative is to the
body.
Now it was a well-known fact, observed in connection with some of the
more extravagant religious cults, that persons suffering from an excess
of religious frenzy might be cured homoeopathically, so to say, by
artificially arousing the very emotion in question by the use of
exciting music. Aristotle extends the principle by suggesting that in
the artificial excitement aroused by violently stimulating music or in
the transports of sympathetic apprehension and pity with which we follow
the disasters of the stage-hero, we have a safe and ready means of
ridding ourselves of morbid emotional strain which might otherwise have
worked havoc with the efficient conduct of real life.
The great value of this defence of the occasional employment of
sensation as a medicine for the soul is obvious. Unhappily it would
seem to have so dominated Aristotle's thought on the functions of
dramatic art as to blind him to what we are accustomed to think the
nobler functions of tragedy. No book has had a more curious fate than
the little manual for intending composers of tragedies which is all that
remains to us of Aristotle's lectures on Poetry. This is not the place
to tell the story of the way in which the great classical French
playwrights, who hopelessly misunderstood the meaning of Aristotle's
chief special directions, but quite correctly divined that his lectures
were meant to be an actual _Vade Mecum_ for the dramatist, deliberately
constructed their masterpieces in absolute submission to regulations for
which they had no better reasons than that they had once been given
magisterially by an ancient Greek philosopher. But it may be worth
while to remark that the worth of Aristotle's account of tragedy as
art-criticism has probably been vastly overrated. From first to last
the standpoint he assumes, in his verdicts on the great tragic poets, is
that of the gallery. What he insists on all through, probably because
he has the purgative effect of the play always in his mind, is a
well-woven plot with plenty of melodramatic surprise in the incidents
and a thoroughly sensational culmination in a sense of unrelieved
catastrophe over which the spectator can have a good cry, and so get
well "purged" of his superfluous emotion. It is clear from his repeated
allusions that the play he admired above all others was the _King
Oedipus_ of Sophocles, but it is equally clear that he admired it not
for the profound insight into human life and destiny or the deep sense
of the mystery of things which some modern critics have found in it, but
because its plot is the best and most startling detective story ever
devised, and its finale a triumph of melodramatic horror.
*BIBLIOGRAPHY*
The English reader who wishes for further information about Aristotle
and his philosophy may be referred to any or all of the following
works:--
E. Zeller.--_Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics_. English
translation in 2 vols. by B. F. C. Costelloe and J. H. Muirhead. London.
Longmans & Co.
*E. Wallace.--_Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle_. Cambridge
University Press.
G. Grote.--_Aristotle_. London. John Murray.
*W. D. Ross.--_The Works of Aristotle translated into English_, vol.
viii., _Metaphysics_. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
*A. E. Taylor.--_Aristotle on his Predecessor_. (_Metaphysics_, Bk. I.,
translated with notes, &c.) Chicago. Open Court Publishing Co.
G. D. Hicks.--_Aristotle de Anima_ (Greek text, English translation,
Commentary). Cambridge University Press.
*D. P. Chase.--_The Ethics of Aristotle_. Walter Scott Co.
*J. Burnet.--_Aristotle on Education_. (English translation of
_Ethics_, Bks. I.-III. 5, X. 6 to end; _Politics_, VIII. 17, VIII.)
Cambridge University Press.
*B. Jowett.--_The Politics of Aristotle_. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
*I. Bywater.--_Aristotle on the Art of Poetry_. (Greek Text, English
Translation, Commentary.) Oxford. Clarendon Press.
J. I. Beare and W. D. Ross.--_The Works of Aristotle translated into
English_, Pt. I. (_Parvu Naturalia_, the minor psychological works.)
Oxford. Clarendon Press.
J. I. Beare.--_Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition from Alemacon to
Aristotle_. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
The works marked by an asterisk will probably be found most useful for
the beginner. No works in foreign languages and no editions not
accompanied by an English translation have been mentioned.
There is at present no satisfactory complete translation of Aristotle
into English. One, of which two volumes have been mentioned above, is
in course of production at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, under the
editorship of J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross.
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