Happiness itself is sufficient excuse. Beautiful things are right
and true; so beautiful actions are those pleasing to the gods. Wise
men have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest
wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. The answer
to the last appeal of what is right lies within a man's own breast.
Trust thyself.
--_Ethics of Aristotle_
[Illustration: ARISTOTLE]
The Sublime Porte recently issued a request to the American Bible
Society, asking that references to Macedonia be omitted from all Bibles
circulated in Turkey or Turkish provinces. The argument of His Sublimity
is that the Macedonian cry, "Come over and help us!" puts him and his
people in a bad light. He ends his most courteous petition by saying,
"The land that produced a Philip, an Alexander the Great and an
Aristotle, and that today has citizens who are the equal of these, needs
nothing from our dear brothers, the Americans, but to be let alone."
As to the statement that Macedonia today has citizens who are the equals
of Philip, Alexander and Aristotle, the proposition, probably, is based
on the confession of the citizens themselves, and therefore may be
truth. Great men are only great comparatively. It is the stupidity of
the many that allows one man to bestride the narrow world like a
Colossus. In the time of Alexander and Aristotle there wasn't so much
competition as now, so perhaps what we take to be lack of humor on the
part of the Sublime Porte may have a basis in fact.
Aristotle was born Three Hundred Eighty-four B.C., at the village of
Stagira in the mountains of Macedonia. King Amyntas used to live at
Stagira several months in the year and hunt the wild hogs that fed on
the acorns which grew in the gorges and valleys. Mountain climbing and
hunting was dangerous sport, and it was well to have a surgeon attached
to the royal party, so the father of Aristotle served in that capacity.
No doubt, though, but the whole outfit was decidedly barbaric, even
including the doctor's little son "Aristo," who refused to be left
behind. The child's mother had died years before, and boys without
mothers are apt to manage their fathers. And so Aristo was allowed to
trot along by his father's side, carrying a formidable bow, which he
himself had made, with a quiver of arrows at his back.
Those were great times when the King came to Stagira!
When the King went back to the capital everybody received presents, and
the good doctor, by some chance, was treated best of all, and little
Aristo came in for the finest bow that ever was, all tipped with silver
and eagle-feathers. But the bow did not bring good luck, for soon after,
the boy's father was caught in an avalanche of sliding stone and crushed
to death.
Aristo was taken in charge by Proxenus, a near kinsman. The lad was so
active at climbing, so full of life and energy and good spirits, that
when the King came the next year to Stagira, he asked for Aristo. With
the King was his son Philip, a lad about the age of Aristo, but not so
tall nor so active. The boys became fast friends, and once when a
stranger saw them together he complimented the King on his fine,
intelligent boys, and the King had to explain, "The other boy is
mine--but I wish they both were."
Aristo knew where the wild boars fed in gulches, and where the stunted
oaks grew close and thick. Higher up in the mountains there were bears,
which occasionally came down and made the wild pigs scamper. You could
always tell when the bears were around, for then the little pigs would
run out into the open. The bears had a liking for little pigs, and the
bears had a liking for the honey in the bee-trees, too. Aristo could
find the bee-trees better than the bears--all you had to do was to watch
the flight of the bees as they left the clover.
Then there were deer--you could see their tracks any time around the
mountain marshes where the springs gushed forth and the watercress grew
lush. Still higher up the mountains, beyond where bears ever traveled,
there were mountain-sheep, and still higher up were goats. The goats
were so wild that hardly any one but Aristo had ever seen them, but he
knew they were there.
The King was delighted to have such a lad as companion for his son, and
insisted that he should go back to the capital with them and become a
member of the Court.
Not he--there were other ambitions. He wanted to go to Athens and study
at the school of Plato--Plato, the pupil of the great Socrates.
The King laughed--he had never heard of Plato. That a youth should
refuse to become part of the Macedonian Court, preferring the company of
an unknown school-master, was amusing--he laughed.
The next year when the King came back to Stagira, Aristo was still
there. "And you haven't gone to Athens yet?" said the King.
"No, but I am going," was the firm reply.
"We will send him," said the King to Proxenus, Aristo's guardian.
And so we find Aristo, aged seventeen, tall and straight and bronzed,
starting off for Athens, his worldly goods rolled up in a bearskin, tied
about with thongs. There is a legend to the effect that Philip went with
Aristo, and that for a time they were together at Plato's school. But,
anyway, Philip did not remain long. Aristo--or Aristotle, we had better
call him--remained with Plato just twenty years.
At Plato's school Aristotle was called by the boys, "the Stagirite," a
name that was to last him through life--and longer. In Winter he wore
his bearskin, caught over one shoulder, for a robe, and his mountain
grace and native beauty of mind and body must have been a joy to Plato
from the first. Such a youth could not be overlooked.
To him that hath shall be given. The pupil that wants to learn is the
teacher's favorite--which is just as it should not be. Plato proved his
humanity by giving his all to the young mountaineer. Plato was then a
little over sixty years of age--about the same age that Socrates was
when Plato became his pupil. But the years had touched Plato
lightly--unlike Socrates, he had endured no Thracian winters in bare
feet, neither had he lived on cold snacks picked up here and there, as
Providence provided. Plato was a bachelor. He still wore the purple
robe, proud, dignified, yet gentle, and his back was straight as that of
a youth. Lowell once said, "When I hear Plato's name mentioned, I always
think of George William Curtis--a combination of pride and intellect, a
man's strength fused with a woman's gentleness."
Plato was an aristocrat. He accepted only such pupils as he invited, or
those that were sent by royalty. Like Franz Liszt, he charged no
tuition, which plan, by the way, is a good scheme for getting more money
than could otherwise be obtained, although no such selfish charge should
be brought against either Plato or Liszt. Yet every benefit must be paid
for, and whether you use the word fee or honorarium, matters little. I
hear there be lecturers who accept invitations to banquets and accept an
honorarium mysteriously placed on the mantel, when they would scorn a
fee.
Plato's Garden School, where the pupils reclined under the trees on
marble benches, and read and talked, or listened to lectures by the
Master, was almost an ideal place. Not the ideal for us, because we
believe that the mental and the manual must go hand in hand. The world
of intellect should not be separated from the world of work. It was too
much to expect that in a time when slavery was everywhere, Plato would
see the fallacy of having one set of men to do the thinking, and another
do the work. We haven't got far from that yet; only free men can see the
whole truth, and a free man is one who lives in a country where there
are no slaves. To own slaves is to be one, and to live in a land of
slavery is to share in the bondage--a partaker in the infamy and the
profits.
Plato and Aristotle became fast friends--comrades. With thinking men
years do not count--only those grow old who think by proxy. Plato had no
sons after the flesh, and the love of his heart went out to the
Stagirite: in him he saw his own life projected.
When Aristotle had turned twenty he was acquainted with all the leading
thinkers of his time; he read constantly, wrote, studied and conversed.
The little property his father left had come to him; the King of Macedon
sent him presents; and he taught various pupils from wealthy
families--finances were easy. But success did not spoil him. The
brightest scholars do not make the greatest success in life, because
alma mater usually catches them for teachers. Sometimes this is well,
but more often it is not. Plato would not hear of Aristotle's leaving
him, and so he remained, the chief ornament and practical leader of the
school.
He became rich, owned the largest private library at Athens, and was
universally regarded as the most learned man of his time.
In many ways he had surpassed Plato. He delved into natural history,
collected plants, rocks, animals, and made studies of the practical
workings of economic schemes. He sought to divest the Platonic teaching
of its poetry, discarded rhetoric, and tried to get at the simple truth
of all subjects.
Toward the last of Plato's career this repudiation by Aristotle of
poetry, rhetoric, elocution and the polite accomplishments caused a
schism to break out in the Garden School. Plato's head was in the clouds
at times; Aristotle's was, too, but his feet were always on the earth.
When Plato died, Aristotle was his natural successor as leader of the
school, but there was opposition to him, both on account of his sturdy,
independent ways and because he was a foreigner.
He left Athens to become a member of the Court of Hermias, a former
pupil, now King of Atarneus.
He remained here long enough to marry the niece of his patron, and
doubtless saw himself settled for life--a kingly crown within his reach
should his student-sovereign pass away.
And the royal friend did pass away, by the dagger's route. As
life-insurance risks I am told that Kings have to pay double premium.
Revolution broke out, and as Aristotle was debating in his mind what
course to pursue, a messenger with soldiers arrived from King Philip of
Macedon, offering safe convoy, enclosing transportation, and asking that
Aristotle come and take charge of the education of his son, Alexander,
aged thirteen.
Aristotle did not wait to parley: he accepted the invitation. Horses
were saddled, camels packed and that night, before the moon arose, the
cavalcade silently moved out into the desert.
* * * * *
The offer that had been made twenty-four years before, by Philip's
father, was now accepted. Aristotle was forty-two years old, in the
prime of his power. Time had tempered his passions, but not subdued his
zest in life. He had the curious, receptive, alert and eager mind of a
child. His intellect was at its ripest and best. He was a lover of
animals, and all outdoor life appealed to him as it does to a growing
boy. He was a daring horseman, and we hear of his riding off into the
desert and sleeping on the sands, his horse untethered watching over
him. Aristotle was the first man to make a scientific study of the
horse, and with the help of Alexander he set up a skeleton, fastening
the bones in place, to the mighty astonishment of the natives, who
mistook the feat for an attempt to make a living animal; and when the
beast was not at last saddled and bridled there were subdued chuckles of
satisfaction among the "hoi polloi" at the failure of the scheme, and
murmurs of "I told you so!"
Eighteen hundred years were to pass before another man was to take up
the horse as a serious scientific study; and this was Leonardo da Vinci,
a man in many ways very much like Aristotle. The distinguishing feature
in these men--the thing that differentiates them from other men--was the
great outpouring sympathy with every living creature. Everything they
saw was related to themselves--it came very close to them--they wanted
to know more about it. This is essentially the child-mind, and the
calamity of life is to lose it.
Leonardo became interested in Aristotle's essay on the horse, and
continued the subject further, dissecting the animal in minutest detail
and illustrating his discoveries with painstaking drawings. His work is
so complete and exhaustive that nobody nowadays has time to more than
read the title-page. Leonardo's bent was natural science, and his first
attempts at drawing were done to illustrate his books. Art was
beautiful, of course--it brought in an income, made friends and brought
him close to people who saw nothing unless you made a picture of it. He
made pictures for recreation and to amuse folks, and his threat to put
the peeping Prior into the "Last Supper," posed as Judas, revealed his
contempt for the person to whom a picture was just a picture. The marvel
to Leonardo was the mind that could imagine, the hand that could
execute, and the soul that could see.
And the curious part is that Leonardo lives for us through his play and
not through his serious work. His science has been superseded, but his
art is immortal.
This expectant mental attitude, this attitude of worship, belongs to all
great scientists. The man divines the thing first and then looks for it,
just as the Herschels knew where the star ought to be and then patiently
waited for it. The Bishop of London said that if Darwin had spent
one-half as much time in reading his Bible as in studying earthworms, he
would have really benefited the world, and saved his soul alive. To
Walt Whitman, a hair on the back of his hand was just as curious and
wonderful as the stars in the sky, or God's revelation to man through a
printed book.
Aristotle loved animals as a boy loves them--his house was a regular
menagerie of pets, and into this world of life Alexander was very early
introduced. We hear of young Alexander breaking the wild horse,
Bucephalus, and beyond a doubt Aristotle was seated on the top rail of
the paddock when he threw the lariat.
Aristotle and his pupil had the first circus of which we know, and they
also inaugurated the first Zoological Garden mentioned in history,
barring Noah, of course.
So much was Alexander bound up in this menagerie, and in his old teacher
as well, that in after-life, in all of his travels, he was continually
sending back to Aristotle specimens of every sort of bird, beast and
fish to be found in the countries through which he traveled.
When Philip was laid low by the assassin's thrust, it was Aristotle who
backed up Alexander, aged twenty--but a man--in his prompt suppression
of the revolution. The will that had been used to subdue man-eating
stallions and to train wild animals, now came in to repress riot, and
the systematic classification of things was a preparation for the
forming of an army out of a mob. Aristotle said, "An army is a huge
animal with a million claws--it must have only one brain, and that the
commander's."
Alexander gave credit again and again to Aristotle for those elements in
his character that went to make up success: steadiness of purpose,
self-reliance, systematic effort, mathematical calculation, attention to
details, and a broad and generous policy that sees the end.
When Aristotle argued with Philip, years before, that horse-breaking
should be included in the educational curriculum of all young men, he
evidently divined football and was endeavoring to supplant it.
* * * * *
I think history has been a trifle severe on Alexander. He was elected
Captain-General of Greece, and ordered to repel the Persian invasion.
And he did the business once for all. War is not all
fighting--Providence is on the side of the strongest commissariat.
Alexander had to train, arm, clothe and feed a million men, and march
them long miles across a desert country. The real foe of a man is in his
own heart, and the foe of an army is in its own camp--disease takes more
prisoners than the enemy. Fever sniped more of our boys in blue than did
the hostile Filipinos.
Alexander's losses were principally from men slain in battle; from this,
I take it that Alexander knew a deal of sanitary science, and had a
knowledge of practical mathematics, in order to systematize that mob of
restless, turbulent helots. We hear of Aristotle cautioning him that
safety lies in keeping his men busy--they must not have too much time to
think, otherwise mutiny is to be feared. Still, they must not be
over-worked, or they will be in no condition to fight when the eventful
time occurs. And we are amazed to see this: "Do not let your men drink
out of stagnant pools--Athenians, city-born, know no better. And when
you carry water on the desert marches, it should be first boiled to
prevent its getting sour."
Concerning the Jews, Alexander writes to his teacher and says, "They are
apt to be in sullen rebellion against their governors, receiving orders
only from their high priests, and this leads to severe measures, which
are construed as persecution"; all of which might have been written
yesterday by the Czar in a message to The Hague Convention.
Alexander captured the East, and was taken captive by the East. Like the
male bee that never lives to tell the tale of its wooing, he succeeded
and died. Yet he vitalized all Asia with the seeds of Greek philosophy,
turned back the hungry barbaric tide, and made a new map of the Eastern
world. He built far more cities than he destroyed. He set Andrew
Carnegie an example at Alexandria, such as the world had never up to
that time seen. At the entrance to the harbor of the same city he
erected a lighthouse, surpassing far the one at Minot's Ledge, or Race
Rock. This structure endured for two centuries, and when at last wind
and weather had their way, there was no Hopkinson Smith who could erect
another.
At Thebes, Alexander paid a compliment to letters, by destroying every
building in the city except the house of the poet, Pindar. At Corinth,
when the great, the wise, the noble, came to pay homage, one great man
did not appear. In vain did Alexander look for his card among all those
handed in at the door--Diogenes, the Philosopher, oft quoted by
Aristotle, was not to be seen.
Alexander went out to hunt him up, and found him sunning himself,
propped up against the wall in the Public Square, busy doing nothing.
The philosopher did not arise to greet the conqueror; he did not even
offer a nod of recognition.
"I am Alexander--is there not something I can do for you?" modestly
asked the descendant of Hercules.
"Just stand out from between me and the sun," replied the philosopher,
and went on with his meditations.
Alexander enjoyed the reply so much that he said to his companions, and
afterward wrote to Aristotle, "If I were not Alexander, I would be
Diogenes," and thus did strenuosity pay its tribute to
self-sufficiency.
* * * * *
Aristotle might have assumed important affairs of State, but practical
politics were not to his liking. "What Aristotle is in the world of
thought I will be in the world of action," said Alexander.
On all of his journeys Alexander found time to keep in touch with his
old teacher at home; and we find the ruler of Asia voicing that old
request, "Send me something to read," and again, "I live alone with my
thoughts, amidst a throng of men, but without companions."
Plutarch gives a copy of a letter sent by Alexander wherein Aristotle is
chided for publishing his lecture on oratory. "Now all the world will
know what formerly belonged to you and me alone," plaintively cries the
young man who sighed for more worlds to conquer, and therein shows he
was the victim of a fallacy that will never die--the idea that truth can
be embodied in a book. When will we ever learn that inspired books
demand inspired readers!
There are no secrets. A book may stimulate thought, but it can never
impart it.
Aristotle wrote out the Laws of Oratory. "Alas!" groans Alexander,
"everybody will turn orator now." But he was wrong, because Oratory and
the Laws of Oratory are totally different things.
A Boston man of excellent parts has just recently given out the Sixteen
Perfective Laws of Oratory, and the Nineteen Steps in Evolution.
The real truth is, there are Fifty-seven Varieties of Artistic Vagaries,
and all are valuable to the man who evolves them--they serve him as a
scaffolding whereby he builds thought. But woe betide Alexander and all
rareripe Bostonians who mistake the scaffolding for the edifice.
There are no Laws of Art. A man evolves first, and builds his laws
afterward. The style is the man, and a great man, full of the spirit,
will express himself in his own way.
Bach ignored all the Laws of Harmony made before his day and set down
new ones--and these marked his limitations, that was all. Beethoven
upset all these, and Wagner succeeded by breaking most of Beethoven's
rules. And now comes Grieg, and writes harmonious discords that Wagner
said were impossible, and still it is music, for by it we are
transported on the wings of song and uplifted to the stars.
The individual soul striving for expression ignores all man-made laws.
Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting
log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But
when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making
laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century
Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is
not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought
from a madman's brain. And when the proud and lofty cactus writes a
book it never mentions violets, because it has never stooped to seek
them.
Art is the blossoming of the Soul.
We can not make the plant blossom--all we can do is to comply with the
conditions of growth. We can supply the sunshine, moisture and aliment,
and God does the rest. In teaching, he only is successful who supplies
the conditions of growth--that is all there is of the Science of
Pedagogics, which is not a science, and if it ever becomes one, it will
be the Science of Letting Alone, and not a scheme of interference. Just
so long as some of the greatest men are those who have broken through
pedagogic fancy and escaped, succeeding by breaking every rule of
pedagogy, as Wagner discarded every Law of Harmony, there will be no
such thing as a Science of Education.
Recently I read Aristotle's Essays on Rhetoric and Oratory, and I was
pained to see how I had been plagiarized by this man who wrote three
hundred years before Christ. Aristotle used charts in teaching and
indicated the mean by a straight horizontal line, and the extreme by an
upright dash. He says: "From one extreme the mean looks extreme, and
from another extreme the mean looks small--it all depends upon your
point of view. Beware of jumping to conclusions, for beside the
appearance you must look within and see from what vantage-ground you
gain the conclusions. All truth is relative, and none can be final to a
man six feet high, who stands on the ground, who can walk but forty
miles at a stretch, who needs four meals a day and one-third of his time
for sleep. A loss of sleep, or loss of a meal, or a meal too much, will
disarrange his point of view, and change his opinions," And thus do we
see that a belief in "eternal punishment" is a mere matter of
indigestion.
A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin
expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret
that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to
earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who
ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate
about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or
what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of God,
he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more
than the barbarians who preceded him.
He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as
the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the
unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point--the net
bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition,
expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: "Essential
being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity
of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another;
that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated." It gives
one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on
the brain, or powdered grasshopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when
he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we
see that he anticipates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of
night lie between them.
Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:
_Definitions:_
All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.
Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal to
one another.
A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.
The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram--that is, an
oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to anything.
A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that meet
together, but are not on the same floor.
All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.
_Postulates and Propositions:_
A pie may be produced any number of times.
The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of
propositions.
A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By
Allen's.
The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not meet.
Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at the
Phalanstery.
On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two
charges for the same thing.
If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the side
of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and the
wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle
between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the weekly bills
of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill be the greater,
then the other bill is less than it might have been, which is absurd.
Therefore the bills are equal.
_Quod erat demonstrandum._
* * * * *
The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To
philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a
certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either
the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the
past behind him, and dives into the future, spreads the present out
thin. Therein lies the bane of most religions. A man goes out into the
woods to study the birds: he walks and walks and walks and sees no
birds. But just let him sit down on a log and wait, and lo! the branches
are full of song.
Those who pursue Culture never catch up with her. Culture takes alarm at
pursuit and avoids the stealthy pounce. Culture is a woman, and a
certain amount of indifference wins her. Ardent wooing will not secure
either wisdom or a woman--except in the case where a woman marries a man
to get rid of him, and then he really does not get the woman--he only
secures her husk. And the husks of culture are pedantry and sciolism.
The highest philosophy of the future will consist in doing each day that
which is most useful. Talking about it will be quite incidental and
secondary.
* * * * *
After Alexander had completed his little task of conquering the world,
it was his intention to sit down and improve his mind. He was going back
to Greece to complete the work Pericles had so well begun. To this end
Aristotle had left Macedonia and established his Peripatetic School at
Athens. Plato was exclusive, and taught in the Garden with its high
walls. Aristotle taught in the "peripatos," or porch of the Lyceum, and
his classes were for all who wished to attend. Socrates was really the
first peripatetic philosopher, but he was a roustabout. Nothing
sanctifies like death--and now Socrates had become respectable, and his
methods were to be made legal and legitimate.
Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty; he taught the rights
of the individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State,
the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more
cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for
the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most
perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer
right than Plato--sin is the expression of individuality and is not
wholly bad--the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the
thinking-power of the individual, you will get a weak and effeminate
body politic; there will be none to govern. The whole fabric will break
down of its own weight. A man must have the privilege of making a fool
of himself--within proper bounds, of course. To that end learning must
be for all, and liberty both to listen and to teach should be the
privilege of every man.
This is a problem that Boston has before it today: Shall free speech be
allowed on the Common? William Morris tried it in Trafalgar Square, to
his sorrow; but in Hyde Park, if you think you have a message, London
will let you give it. But this is not considered good form, and the
"Best Society" listen to no speeches in the park. However, there are
signs that Aristotle's outdoor school may come back. Phillips Brooks
tried outdoor preaching, and if his health had not failed, he might have
popularized it. It only wants a man who is big enough to inaugurate it.
Aristotle had various helpers, and arranged to give his lectures and
conferences daily in certain porches or promenades. These lectures
covered the whole range of human thought--logic, rhetoric, oratory,
physics, ethics, politics, esthetics, and physical culture. These
outdoor talks were called exoteric, and there gradually grew up esoteric
lessons, which were for the rich or luxurious and the dainty. And there
being money in the esoteric lessons, these gradually took the place of
the exoteric, and so we get the genesis of our modern private school or
college, where we send our children to be taught great things by great
men, for a consideration.
Will the exoteric, peripatetic school come back?