TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 39 
 
 Edited by E. Haldeman-Jullna 
 
 A Guide to Aristotle 
 
 Will Durant, Ph.D. 
 
 i 
 
 
 HALDEM AN-JULIUS COMPANY 
 GIRARD, KANSAS 
 
I 
 
 
 Copyright, 1923 
 Haldeman-Julius Company. 
 
90 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 fers a certain changelessness that near re¬ 
 sembles death. He lacks that Heraclitean sense 
 of flux which justifies the conservative in be¬ 
 lieving that all permanent change is gradual, 
 but justifies the radical in believing that no 
 changelessness is permanent. He forgets that 
 Plato’s communism was meant only for the 
 Slite, the unselfish and ungreedy few; and he 
 comes deviously to a Platonic result when he 
 says that though property should be private its 
 use should be as far as possible common. He 
 does not see (and perhaps he could not be 
 expected in his early day to see) that pri¬ 
 vate control of the means of production was 
 stimulating and salutary only when these 
 means were so simple as to be purchasable 
 by any man; and that their increasing com¬ 
 plexity and cost lead to a dangerous centraliza¬ 
 tion of ownership and power, and to an arti¬ 
 ficial and finally disruptive inequality. 
 
 But after all, these are quite inessential 
 criticisms of what remains the most marvelous 
 and influential system of thought ever put to¬ 
 gether by any single mind. It may be doubted 
 if any other thinker has contributed so much 
 to the enlightenment of the world. Every 
 
90 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 fers a certain changelessness that near re¬ 
 sembles death. He lacks that Heraclitean sense 
 of flux which justifies the conservative in be¬ 
 lieving that all permanent change is gradual, 
 but justifies the radical in believing that no 
 changelessness is permanent. He forgets that 
 Plato’s communism was meant only for the 
 Slite, the unselfish and ungreedy few; and he 
 comes deviously to a Platonic result when he 
 says that though property should be private its 
 use should be as far as possible common. He 
 does not see (and perhaps he could not be 
 expected in his early day to see) that pri¬ 
 vate control of the means of production was 
 stimulating and salutary only when these 
 means were so simple as to be purchasable 
 by any man; and that their increasing com¬ 
 plexity and cost lead to a dangerous centraliza¬ 
 tion of ownership and power, and to an arti¬ 
 ficial and finally disruptive inequality. 
 
 But after all, these are quite inessential 
 criticisms of what remains the most marvelous 
 and influential system of thought ever put to¬ 
 gether by any single mind. It may be doubted 
 if any other thinker has contributed so much 
 to the enlightenment of the world. Every 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 WILL DURANT, PH. D. 
 
 Director, Labor Temple School, New York City, 
 Late Instructor in Philosophy, Columbia University. 
 Author of “Philosophy and the Social Problem,” 
 “A Guide to Plato,” etc. 
 
 t 
 
TABLE OP CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 I. The Historical Background. 6 
 
 II. The Work of Aristotle. 15 
 
 III. The Foundation of Logic.23 
 
 IV. The Organization of Science.32 
 
 1. Greek Science before Aristotle.32 
 
 2. Aristotle as a Naturalist. A. 38 
 
 3. The Foundation of Biology.41 
 
 ▼. Metaphysics and the Nature of God.. 47 
 YI. Psychology and the Nature of Art... 52 
 
 VII. Ethics and the Nature of Happiness.. 56 
 VIII. Politics . 66 
 
 1. Communism and Conservatism.... 66 
 
 2. Marriage and Education.73 
 
 3. Democracy and Aristocracy.79 
 
 DL Criticism .85 
 
 X. Later Life and Death.93 
 
A WORD TO THE READER 
 
 The student -who has come to philosophy un¬ 
 der the spur of Plato’s eloquence will need some 
 encouragement to face the more practical and 
 prosaic work of Aristotle. If he finds the fol¬ 
 lowing essay difficult and unattractive, let him 
 reflect that Aristotle’s is almost the most ab¬ 
 stract and obscure of all the great philosophies; 
 and that only the exigencies of logical and 
 chronological sequence have led us to study 
 him before mastering Simpler systems. Aris¬ 
 totle is hard to grasp because his work is so 
 varied and manifold that no centralizing unity 
 can be found to co-ordinate it for easier com¬ 
 prehension. Nor is there in his work any en¬ 
 thralling drama of passionate^reform; he is a 
 man of the world who has become almost recon¬ 
 ciled to the eternity of human imperfections. 
 The author has spared neither time nor labor 
 to make out under the mummy-like mass of 
 lecture notes in which Aristotle has come down 
 to us, the features of the living man; but he 
 is very much afraid that he has failed. 
 
 W. D. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
 
 Aristotle was born at Stagira, a Macedonian 
 city some two hundred miles to the north of 
 Athens, in the year 384 B. C. His father was 
 friend and physician to Amyntas, King of 
 Macedon and grandfather of Alexander. Aris¬ 
 totle himself seems to have become a member 
 of the great medical fraternity of Asclepiads. 
 He was brought up in the odor of medicine as 
 many later philosophers were brought up in 
 the odor of sanctity; he had every opportunity 
 and encouragement to develop a scientific bent 
 of mind; he was prepared from the beginning 
 to become the founder of science. 
 
 We have a choice of stories for his youth. 
 One narrative represents him as squandering 
 his patrimony in riotous living, joining the 
 army to avoid starvation, returning to Stagira 
 to practice medicine, and going to Athens at 
 the age of thirty to study philosophy under 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 96 
 
 Arrived at Chalets, Aristotle fell ill; Diogenes 
 Laertius tells us that the old philosopher, in 
 utter disappointment with the turn of all things 
 against him, committed suicide by drinking 
 hemlock. 1 However induced, his illness proved 
 fatal; and a few months after leaving Athens 
 (322 B. C.) the lonely Aristotle died. 
 
 In the same year, and at the same age, sixty* 
 two, Demosthenes, greatest of Alexander’s 
 enemies, drank poison. Within twelve months 
 Greece had lost her greatest ruler, her greatest 
 orator, and her greatest philosopher. The glory 
 
 I 
 
 that had been Greece faded now in the dawn of 
 the Roman sun; and the grandeur that was 
 Rome was the pomp of power rather than the 
 light of thought. And then that grandeur too 
 decayed, that little light went almost out. For 
 a thousand years darkness brooded over the 
 face of Europe. All the world awaited the 
 resurrection of philosophy. 
 
 .Grote, 22; Zeller, i, 37 note. . 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 https://archive.org/details/guidetoaristotleOOdura 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 7 
 
 Plato. A more dignified story takes him to 
 Athens at the age of eighteen, and puts him at 
 once under the tutelage of the great Master; 
 but even in this likelier account there is suf¬ 
 ficient echo of a reckless and irregular youth, 
 living rapidly. 1 The horrified reader may con¬ 
 sole himself by observing that in either story 
 our philosopher anchors at last in the quiet 
 groves of the Academy. 
 
 Under Plato he studied eight—or twenty— 
 years; and indeed the pervasive Platonism of 
 Aristotle’s speculations—even of those most 
 anti-Platonic—suggests the longer period. One 
 would like to imagine these as very happy 
 years: a brilliant pupil guided by an incompar¬ 
 able teacher, walking like Greek lowers in the 
 gardens of philosophy. But they were both 
 geniuses; and it is notorious that geniuses ac¬ 
 cord with one another as harmoniously as 
 dynamite with fire. Almost half a century 
 separated them; it was difficult for under¬ 
 standing to bridge this gap of years and cancel 
 the incompatibility of souls. Plato recognized 
 the greatness of this strange new pupil from 
 
 *Grote, Aristotle, London, 1872. p. 4; Zeller, Aristotle 
 and the Earlier Peripatetics, London, 1897, voL i, pp. 6f. 
 
8 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 f 
 
 the supposedly barbarian north, and spoke of 
 him once as the Nous of the Academy,—as if to 
 say, Intelligence personified. Aristotle had 
 spent money lavishly on the collection of books 
 (that is, in those printless days, manuscripts); 
 he was the first, after Euripides, to gather to¬ 
 gether a library, and the foundation of the 
 principles of library classification was among 
 his many contributions to scholarship. There¬ 
 fore Plato spoke of Aristotle’s home as ,4 the 
 house of the reader,” and seems to have meant 
 the sincerest compliment; but some ancient 
 gossip will have it that the Master intended a 
 sly but vigorous dig at a certain book-wormish- 
 ness in Aristotle. A more authentic quarrel 
 seems to have arisen towards the end of Plato’s 
 life. Our ambitious youth apparently developed 
 an “CEdipus complex” against his spiritual 
 father for the favors and affections of philoso¬ 
 phy, and began to hint that wisdom would not 
 die with Plato; while the old sage spoke of hlB 
 pupil as a foal that kicks his mother after 
 draining her dry. 1 The learned Zeller,* In 
 whose pages Aristotle almost achieves the 
 
 1 Benn, The Greek Philosophers, London, 1882, roL. i, 
 p* 283* s 
 
 *Vol. i, p. 11. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 9 
 
 Nirvana of respectability, would have us reject 
 these stories; but we may presume that where 
 there is still so much smoke there was once a 
 fire. 
 
 % 
 
 The other incidents of this Athenian period 
 are still more problematical. Some biographers 
 tell us that Aristotle founded a school of 
 oratory to rival Isocrates; and that he had 
 among his pupils in this school the wealthy 
 Hermias, who was soon to become autocrat of 
 the city-state of Atarneus. After reaching this 
 elevation Hermias invited Aristotle to his 
 court; and in the year 844 B. C. he rewarded 
 his teacher for past favors .by bestowing upon 
 him a sister (or a niece) in marriage. One 
 might suspect this as a Greek gift; but the 
 historians hasten to assure us that Aristotle, 
 despite his genius, lived happily enough with 
 his wife, and spoke of her most affectionately 
 in his will. It was just a year later that Philip, 
 King of Macedon, called Aristotle to the court 
 at Pella to undertake the education of 
 Alexander. It bespeaks the rising repute of 
 our philosopher that the greatest monarch of 
 the time, looking about for the greatest teacher, 
 should single out Aristotle to be the tutor of the 
 future master of the world. 
 
10 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 Philip was determined that his son should 
 have every educational advantage, for he had 
 made for him illimitable designs. His conquest 
 of Thrace in 356 B. C. had given him command 
 of gold mines which at once began to yield him 
 precious metal to ten times the amount then 
 coming to Athens from the falling silver of 
 Laurium; his people were vigorous peasants 
 and warriors, as yet unspoiled by city luxury 
 and vice: here was the combination that would 
 make possible the subjugation of a hundred 
 petty city-states and the political unification 
 of Greece. Philip had no sympathy with the in¬ 
 dividualism that had fostered the art and in¬ 
 tellect of Greece but had at the same time dis¬ 
 integrated her social order; in all these little 
 capitals he saw not the exhilarating culture and 
 the unsurpassable art, but the commercial cor¬ 
 ruption and the political chaos; he saw in¬ 
 satiable merchants and bankers absorbing the 
 vital resources of the nation, incompetent 
 politicians and clever orators misleading a busy 
 populace into disastrous plots and wars, fac¬ 
 tions cleaving^ classes and classes congealing 
 into castes: this, said Philip, was not a nation 
 but only a welter of individuals,—geniuses and 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 49 
 
 and structure and entelechy; 1 the egg of the 
 hen is internally designed or destined to be¬ 
 come not a duck but a chick; the acorn becomes 
 not a willow but an oak. This does not mean 
 for Aristotle that there is an external provi¬ 
 dence designing earthly structures and events; 
 rather the design is internal, and arises from 
 the type and function of the thing. “Divine 
 Providence coincides completely for Aristotle 
 with the operation of natural causes ”* * 
 
 Yet there is a God, though not perhaps the 
 simple and human god conceived by the for¬ 
 givable anthropomorphism of the adolescent 
 mind. Aristotle approaches the problem from 
 the old puzzle about motion—how, he asks, 
 does motion begin? He will not accept the 
 possibility that motion is as beginningless as 
 he conceives matter to be: matter may be 
 eternal, because it is merely the everlasting 
 possibility of future forms; but when and how 
 did that vast process of motion and formation 
 
 • l Entelecheia —having {echo) its purpose ( telos ) within 
 ( entos ); one of those magnificent Aristotelian terms 
 which gather up into themselves a whole philosophy. The 
 informed reader need not be reminded that the “ortho¬ 
 genic” school of evolutionists finds its first formulation 
 in these passages of Aristotle. 
 
 *Ethics, i, 10; Zeller, ii, 829. 
 
50 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 begin which at last filled the wide universe 
 with an infinity of shapes? Surely motion has 
 a source, says Aristotle; and if we are not to 
 plunge drearily into an infinite regress, putting 
 back our problem step by step, endlessly, we 
 must posit a prime mover unmoved (primum 
 mobile immotum), a being incorporeal, indi¬ 
 visible, spaceless, sexless, passionless, change¬ 
 less, perfect and eternal. God does not create, 
 but he moves, the world; and he moves it not 
 as a mechanical force but as the total motive 
 of all operations in the world; “God mokes the 
 wofld as the beloved object moves the lover.” 1 
 He is the final cause of nature, the drive and 
 purpose of things, the form of the world; the 
 principle of its life, the sum of its vital pro¬ 
 cesses and powers, the inherent goal of its 
 growth, the energizing entelechy of the whole. 
 He is pure energy; 1 the Scholastic Actus Purus 
 —activity per $e; perhaps the mystic “Force” 
 of modern physics and philosophy. He is not 
 so much a person as a magnetic power.* 
 
 Yet, with his usual inconsistency, Aristoue 
 
 1 Metaphysics, ix, T. 
 
 2 Ibid„ xii, 8. 
 
 ‘Grant. 173. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 61 
 
 represents God as self-conscious spirit. A rath¬ 
 er mysterious spirit; for Aristotle's God never 
 does anything; he has no desires, no will, no 
 purpose; he is activity so pure that he never 
 acts. He is absolutely perfect; therefore he 
 cannot desire anything; therefore he does noth¬ 
 ing*. His only occupation is to contemplate 
 
 * 
 
 the essence of things; and since he himself is 
 the essence of all things, the form of all forms, 
 his sole employment is the contemplation of 
 himself. 1 Poor Aristotelian God!—he is a rov 
 faineant, a do-nothing king; "the king reigns, 
 but he does not rule." No wonder the British 
 like Aristotle; his God is obviously copied from 
 their king. 
 
 Or from Aristotle himself. Our philosopher 
 so loved contemplation that he sacrificed to it 
 his conception of divinity. His God is of the 
 quiet Aristotelian type, nothing romantic, with¬ 
 drawn to his ivory tower froip the strife and 
 stain of things; all the world away from the 
 philosopher-kings of Plato, or from the stern 
 flesh-and-blood reality of Yahveh, or the gentle 
 and solicitous fatherhood of the Christian God. 
 
 'Meta, xii. 8; Ethics, x„ 8. 
 
62 
 
 A GUIDES TO ARISTOTLE) 
 
 VI. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NATURE OF ART 
 
 Aristotle’s psychology is marred with similar 
 obscurity and vacillation. There are many in¬ 
 teresting passages: the power of habit is em¬ 
 phasized, and is for the first time called “sec¬ 
 ond nature"; and the laws of association, 
 though not developed, find here a definite for¬ 
 mulation. But both the crucial problems of 
 philosophical psychology—the freedom of the 
 will and the immortality of the soul—are left 
 in haze and doubt. Aristotle talks at times 
 like a determinist—“We cannot directly will 
 to be different from what we are"; but he goes 
 on to argue, against determinism', that we can 
 choose what we shall be, by choosing now the 
 environment that shall mould us; so we are 
 free in the sense that we mould our own char¬ 
 acters by our choice of friends, books, occupa¬ 
 tions, and amusements. 1 He does not anticipate 
 the determinist’s ready reply that these forma¬ 
 tive choices are themselves determined by our 
 antecedent character, and this at last by un« 
 
 'Ethics, iii, 7. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 81 
 
 later age has drawn upon Aristotle, and stood 
 upon his shoulders to see the truth. The varied 
 and magnificent culture of Alexandria found its 
 scientific inspiration in him. His Organon 
 played a central rdle in shaping the minds of 
 the medieval barbarians into disciplined and 
 consistent thought. The other works, trans¬ 
 lated by Nestorian Christians into Syriac in the 
 fifth century A. D., and thence into Arabic and 
 Hebrew in the tenth century, and thence into 
 Latin towards 1225, turned scholasticism from 
 its eloquent beginnings in AbSlard to encyclo¬ 
 pedic completion in Thomas Aquinas (1227- 
 1274). The Crusaders brought back more ac¬ 
 curate Greek copies of the philosopher’s texts; 
 and the Greek scholars of Constantinople 
 brought further Aristotelian treasures with 
 them when, after 1453, they fled from the be¬ 
 sieging Turks. The works of Aristotle came to 
 be for European philosophy what the Bible was 
 for theology—an almost infallible text, with 
 solutions for every problem. In 1215 the Papal 
 legate at Paris forbade teachers to lecture on 
 his works; in 1231 Gregory IX appointed a 
 commission to expurgate him; by 1260 he was 
 de rigueur in every Christian school, and 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 ecclesiastical assemblies penalized deviations 
 from his views. Chaucer describes hiB student 
 as happy by having 
 
 At his beddes hed 
 
 v Twenty bookes clothed in blake or red , 
 
 Of Aristotle and his philosophic; 1 
 
 and in the first circles of Hell, Bays Dante, 
 
 “I saw the Master there of those who know. 
 Amid the philosophic family. 
 
 By all admired, and by all reverenced; 
 There Plato too I saw, and Socrates, 
 
 Who stood beside him closer than the rest.* 
 
 Such lines give us some inkling of the honor 
 which a thousand years offered to the Stagirite. 
 Not till new instruments, accumulated observa¬ 
 tions, and patient experiments remade science 
 and gave irresistible weapons to Occam and 
 Ramus, to Roger and Francis Bacon, was the 
 reign of Aristotle ended. No other mind had 
 for so long a time ruled the intellect of man¬ 
 kind. V 
 
 x Quoted by Benn, i, S7S. 
 inferno, iv, 131f. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 93 
 
 X. LATER LIFE AND DEATH 
 
 Meanwhile life had become unmanageably 
 complicated for our philosopher. He found him¬ 
 self on the one hand embroiled with Alexander 
 for protesting against the execution of Cal- 
 listhenes (a nephew of Aristotle), who had re¬ 
 fused to worship Alexander as a god; and 
 Alexander had answered the protest by hinting 
 that it was quite within his omnipotence to 
 put even philosophers to death. At the same 
 time Aristotle was busy defending Alexander 
 among the Athenians. He preferred Greek 
 solidarity to city patriotism, and thought cul¬ 
 ture and science would flourish better when 
 petty sovereignties and disputes were ended; 
 and he saw in Alexander what Goethe was to 
 see in Napoleon—the philosophic unity of a 
 chaotic and intolerably manifold world. The 
 Athenians, hungering for liberty, growled at 
 Aristotle, and became bitter when Alexander 
 had a statue of the philosopher put up in the 
 heart of the hostile city. In this turmoil we get 
 an impression of Aristotle quite contrary to 
 that left upon us by his Ethics: here is a man 
 
94 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 not cold and inhumanly calm, but a fighter, 
 pursuing his Titanic work in a circle of enemies 
 on every side. The successors of Plato at the 
 Academy, * the oratorical school of Isocrates, 
 and the angry crowds that hung on Demos¬ 
 thenes* acid eloquence, intrigued and clamored 
 for his exile or his death. 
 
 And then, suddenly (323 B. C.), Alexander 
 died. Athens went wild with patriotic joy; 
 the Macedonian party was overthrown, and 
 Athenian independence was proclaimed. An¬ 
 tipater, successor of Alexander and intimate 
 friend of Aristotle, marched upon the rebellious 
 city. Most of the Macedonian party fled. 
 Eurymedon, a chief priest, brought In an indict¬ 
 ment against Aristotle, charging him with 
 having taught that prayer and sacrifice were 
 of no avail. Aristotle saw himself fated to be 
 tried by juries and crowds incomparably more 
 hostile than those that had murdered Socrates. 
 Very wisely, he left the city, saying that he 
 would not give Athens a chance to sin a second 
 time against philosophy. There was no 
 cowardice in this; an accused person at Athens 
 had always the option of preferring exile. 1 
 
 l Grote, 80. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 95 
 
 Arrived at Chalcis, Aristotle fell ill; Diogenes 
 Laertius tells us that the old philosopher, in 
 utter disappointment with the turn of all things 
 against him, committed suicide by drinking 
 hemlock. 1 However induced, his illness proved 
 fatal; and a few months after leaving Athens 
 (322 B. C.) the lonely Aristotle died. 
 
 m 
 
 In the same year, and at the same age, sixty- 
 two, Demosthenes, greatest of Alexander’s 
 enemies, drank poison. Within twelve months 
 Greece had lost her greatest ruler, her greatest 
 
 orator, and her greatest philosopher. The glory 
 
 | 
 
 that had been Greece faded now in the dawn of 
 the Roman sun; and the grandeur that was 
 Rome was the pomp of power rather than the 
 light of thought. And then that grandeur too 
 decayed, that little light went almost out. For 
 a thousand years darkness brooded over the 
 face of Europe. All the world awaited the 
 resurrection of philosophy. 
 
 L Grote, 22; Zeller, i, 37 note. . 
 
CN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 39 
 
 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius 
 
 Guide to Aristotle 
 
 Will Durant, Ph.D. 
 
 HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY 
 GIRARD, KANSAS 
 

 
 t 
 
 H- . 
 
 . 
 
 c ' 
 
 .. • 
 
 . ■ „ 
 
 .■ \ 
 
 Copyright, 1923 
 Haldeman-Julius Company. 
 
1 vs 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 WILL DURANT, PH. D. 
 
 tor, Labor Temple School, New York City. 
 Instructor in Philosophy, Columbia University, 
 or of “Philosophy and the Social Problem,” 
 “A Guide to Plato,” etc. 
 
 
I. The Historical Background. 6 
 
 II. The Work of Aristotle ....V. 15 
 
 IIL The Foundation of Logic. 23 
 
 IV. The Organization of Science. 32 
 
 1. Greek Science before Aristotle. 32 
 
 2. Aristotle as a Naturalist. 38 
 
 3. The Foundation of Biology. 41 
 
 V. Metaphysics and the Nature of God.. 47 
 
 VI. Psychology and the Nature of Art... 52 
 
 VII. Ethics and the Nature of Happiness.. 56 
 
 Till. Politics . 66 
 
 1. Communism and Conservatism_ 66 
 
 2. Marriage and Education. 73 
 
 3. Democracy and Aristocracy. 79 
 
 DL Criticism.85 
 
 X. Later Life and Death. 93 
 
A WORD TO THE READER 
 
 The student who has come to philosophy un¬ 
 der the spur of Plato’s eloquence will need some 
 encouragement to face the more practical and 
 prosaic work of Aristotle. If he finds the fol¬ 
 lowing essay difficult and unattractive, let him 
 reflect that Aristotle’s is almost the most ab¬ 
 stract and obscure of all the great philosophies; 
 and that only the exigencies of logical and 
 chronological sequence have led us to study 
 him before mastering simpler systems. Aris¬ 
 totle is hard to grasp because his work is so 
 varied and manifold that no centralizing unity 
 can be found to co-ordinate it for easier com¬ 
 prehension. Nor is there in his work any en¬ 
 thralling drama of passionate reform; he is a 
 njan of the world who has become almost recon¬ 
 ciled to the eternity of human imperfections. 
 The author has spared neither time nor labor 
 to make out under the mummy-like mass of 
 lecture notes in which Aristotle has come down 
 to us, the features of the living man; but he 
 is very much afraid that he has failed. 
 
 W. D. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
 
 Aristotle was born at Stagira, a Macedonia* 
 city some two hundred miles to the north ol 
 Athens, in the year 384 B. C. His father was 
 friend and physician to Amyntas, King o: 
 Macedon and grandfather of Alexander. Aris 
 totle himself seems to have become a membei 
 of the great medical fraternity of Asclepiada 
 He was brought up in the odor of medicine ai 
 many later philosophers were brought up h 
 the odor of sanctity; he had every opportunit; 
 and encouragement to develop a scientific ben 
 of mind; he was prepared from the beginnin 
 to become the founder of science. 
 
 We have a choice of stories for his youtl 
 One narrative represents him as squanderin 
 his patrimony in riotous living, joining tt 
 army to avoid starvation, returning to Stagli 
 to practice medicine, and going to Athens i 
 the age of thirty to study philosophy und< 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 7 
 
 Plato. A more dignified story takes him to 
 Athens at the age of eighteen, and puts him at 
 once under the tutelage of the great Master; 
 but even in this likelier account there is suf- 
 
 fcIS, * 
 
 ficient echo of a reckless and irregular youth, 
 living rapidly. 1 The horrified reader may con¬ 
 sole himself by observing that in either story 
 our philosopher anchors at last in the quiet 
 groves of the Academy. 
 
 \ Under Plato he studied eight—or twenty— 
 years; and indeed the pervasive Platonism of 
 Aristotle’s speculations—even of those most 
 anti-Platonic—suggests the longer period. One 
 would like to imagine these as very happy 
 years: a brilliant pupil guided by an incompar¬ 
 able teacher, walking like Greek lovers in the 
 gardens of philosophy. But they were both 
 geniuses; and it is notorious that geniuses ac¬ 
 cord with one another as harmoniously as 
 dynamite with fire. Almost half a century 
 separated them; it was difficult for under¬ 
 standing to bridge this gap of years and cancel 
 the incompatibility of souls. Plato recognized 
 the greatness of this strange new pupil from 
 -u— 
 
 KIrote, Aristotle, London, 1872. p. 4; Zeller, Aristotle 
 < tnd the Earlier Peripatetics, London, 1897, vol. i, pp. 6f. 
 
8 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 the supposedly barbarian north, and spoke of 
 him once as the Nous of the Academy,—as if to 
 say, Intelligence personified. Aristotle had 
 spent money lavishly on the collection of books 
 (that is, in those printless days, manuscripts); 
 he was the first, after Euripides, to gather to¬ 
 gether a library, and the foundation of the 
 principles of library classification was among 
 his many contributions to scholarship. There¬ 
 fore Plato spoke of Aristotle’s home as ‘‘the 
 house of the reader,” and seems to have meant 
 the sincerest compliment; but some ancient 
 gossip will have it that the Master intended si 
 sly but vigorous dig at a certain book-wormish- 
 ness in Aristotle. A more authentic quarrel 
 seems to have arisen towards the end of Plato’s 
 life. Our ambitious youth apparently developed 
 an “(Edipus complex” against his spiritual 
 father for the favors and affections of philoso¬ 
 phy, and began to hint that wisdom would not 
 die with Plato; while the old sage spoke of his 
 pupil as a foal that kicks his mother after 
 draining her dry. 1 2 The learned Zeller, 8 in 
 whose pages Aristotle almost achieves the 
 
 1 Benn, The Greek Philosophers, London, 1882, vol. k 
 p. 283. ‘ '* 
 
 2 Vol. i, p. 11. 
 
9 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 irvana of respectability, would have us reject 
 xese stories; but we may presume that where 
 | iere is still so much smoke there w T as once a 
 ; re. ' 
 
 j The other incidents of this Athenian period 
 re still more problematical. Some biographers 
 All us that Aristotle founded a school of 
 ratory to rival Isocrates; and that he had 
 mong his pupils in this school the wealthy 
 lermias, who was soon to become autocrat of 
 | tie city-state of Atarneus. After reaching this 
 levation Hermias invited Aristotle to his 
 ourt; and in the year 344 B. C. he rewarded 
 is teacher for past favors by bestowing upon 
 im a sister (or a niece) in marriage. One 
 light suspect this as a Greek gift; but the 
 istorians hasten to assure us that Aristotle, 
 
 I espite his genius, lived happily enough with 
 is wife, and spoke of her most, affectionately 
 l a his will. It was just a year later that Philip, 
 
 ! :ing of Macedon, called Aristotle to the court 
 ! c Pella to undertake the education of 
 ! dexander. It bespeaks the rising repute of 
 uk* philosopher that the greatest monarch of 
 tie time, looking about for the greatest teacher, 
 hould single out Aristotle to be the tutor of the 
 uture master of the world. 
 
10 ’ A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 Philip was determined that his son shouL 
 have every educational advantage, for he ha 
 made for him illimitable designs. His conques 
 of Thrace in 356 B. C. had given him comman 
 of gold mines which at once began to yield hii 
 precious metal to ten times the amount the 
 coming to Athens from the failing silver o 
 Laurium; his people were vigorous peasant 
 and warriors, as yet unspoiled by city luxur; 
 and vice: here was the combination that wouh 
 make possible the subjugation of a hundree 
 petty city-states and the political unificatioi 
 of Greece. Philip had no sympathy with the in 
 dividualism that had fostered the art and in 
 tellect of Greece but had at the same time dis 
 integrated her social order; in all these little 
 capitals he saw not the exhilarating culture ant 
 the unsurpassable art, but the commercial cor 
 ruption and the political chaos; he saw in 
 satiable merchants and bankers absorbing the 
 vital resources of the nation, incompeten 
 politicians and clever orators misleading a bus: 
 populace into disastrous plots and wars, fiac 
 tions cleaving classes and classes congealing 
 into castes: this, said Philip, was not a nation 
 but only a welter of individuals,—geniuses and 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 11 
 
 slaves; he would bring the hand of order down 
 x’pon this turmoil, and make all Greece stand 
 up united* and strong as the political center and 
 basis of the world. In his youth in Thebes he 
 had learned the ar.ts of military strategy and 
 civil organization under the noble Epami- 
 
 : 
 
 nondas; and now, with courage as boundless 
 as his ambition, he bettered the instruction. 
 In 338 B. C. he defeated the Athenians at 
 
 I • 
 
 Chaeronea, and saw at last a Grepce united, 
 
 ^ though with chains. And then, as he stood 
 1 upon this victory, and planned how he and his 
 | son should masted and unify the world, he fell 
 t under an assassin’s hand. 
 
 nr 
 
 tfij 
 
 iH 
 
 'U 
 
 13 ; 
 
 Alexander, when Aristotle came, was a wild 
 youth of thirteen; passionate, epileptic, almost 
 alcoholic; it was his pastime to tame horses 
 untamable by men. The efforts of the 
 philosopher to cool the fires of this budding 
 volcano were not of much avail; Alexander had 
 better success with Bucephalus than Aristotle 
 with Alexander. “For a while,” says Plutarch, 
 “Alexander loved and cherished Aristotle no 
 less than as if he had been his own father; say¬ 
 ing that though he had received life from the 
 
 one, the other had taught him the art of living.’ 
 
12 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 (“Life,” says a fine Greek adage, “is the gift 
 of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of 
 wisdom.”) “For. my part,” said Alexander in 
 a letter to Aristotle, “I had rather excel in 
 the knowledge of what is good than in the 
 extent of my power and dominion.” But this 
 was probably no more than a royal-youthful 
 compliment; beneath the enthusiastic tyro of 
 philosophy was the fiery son of a barbarian 
 princess and an untamed king; the restraints 
 of reason were too delicate to hold these an¬ 
 cestral passions in leash; and Alexander left 
 philosophy after two years to mount the throne 
 and ride the world. History leaves us free to 
 believe (though we should suspect these 
 pleasant thoughts) that Alexander’s unifying 
 passion derived some of its force and grandeur 
 from his teacher, the most synthetic thinker 
 in the history of thought; and that the con¬ 
 quest of order in the political realm by the 
 pupil, and in the philosophic realm by the 
 master, were but diverse sides of one noble 
 and epic project—two magnificent Macedonians 
 unifying two chaotic worlds. 
 
 
 But as usual, impersonal economic factors lay 
 hidden under the surface of personal and 
 
 STm 
 
13 
 
 A GUIDE TO AklSTOTLE 
 dramatic events. The development of com¬ 
 merce had bound the Mediterranean nations, 
 from Persia to Spain, into one great web of 
 trade; and this commercial unity, harassed in 
 a thousand ways by political frontiers, auto¬ 
 cratic tolls, and the vicissitudes of unprotected 
 transport, called insistently for unity of 
 political and military administration. Persia 
 controlled the Asiatic land routes of the eastern 
 half of this economic system; Gr.eece (or, since 
 Philip, Macedon) controlled the Mediterranean 
 sea-routes of the western half. It appeared to 
 Alexander that the absorption of one of these 
 political systems by the other was made in¬ 
 evitable by the growing pressure of economic 
 circumstance. Hence his reply to the Persian 
 embassy which came to him from Darius, sug¬ 
 gesting conciliation and division of rule: “As it 
 would be impossible for order to reign in the 
 world with two suns, so it is impossible for 
 the earth to be at peace with two masters.” 
 And so he set out, in the year 334 B. C., to con¬ 
 quer Persia. Three years later the task was 
 
 accomplished, and the Mediterranean world 
 was one. 
 
 He had left behind ^him, in the cities df 
 
14 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 Greece, governments favorable to him but 
 populations resolutely hostile. The long 
 tradition of a free and once imperial Athens 
 made subjection—even to a brilliant world-con¬ 
 quering despot—intolerable; and the bitter 
 eloquence of Demosthenes kept the Assembly 
 always on the edge of revolt against the 
 “Macedonian party” that held the reins of city 
 power. Now when Aristotle, after another 
 
 X 
 
 period of travel, returned to Athens in the year 
 334 B. C., he very naturally associated with 
 this Macedonian group, and took no pains to 
 conceal his approval of Alexander’s unifying 
 rule. As we study the remarkable succession 
 of works, in speculation and research, which. 
 Aristotle proceeded to unfold in the last twelve 
 years of his life; and as we watch him in 
 his multifold tasks of organizing his school, 
 and of organizing such a wealth of knowledge 
 as probably never before had passed through 
 the mind of one man; let us occasionally 
 remember that this was no quiet and secure 
 pursuit of truth; that at any minute the 
 political sky might change, and precipitate a 
 storm in this peaceful philosophic life. Only 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 15 
 
 with this situation in mind shall we understand 
 Aristotle’s political philosophy, and his tragic 
 end. 
 
 II. THE WORK OF ARISTOTLE 
 
 It was not hard for the instructor of the 
 king of kings to find pupils even in so hostile 
 a city as Athens. When, in the fifty-third year 
 of his age, Aristotle established his school, the 
 Lyceum, so many students flocked to him that 
 it became necessary to make complicated regu¬ 
 lations for the maintenance of order. The 
 students themselves determined the rules, and 
 elected, every ten days, one of their number 
 to supervise the School. But we must not 
 think of it as a place of rigid discipline; rather 
 the * picture which comes down to us is of 
 scholars eating their meals in common with 
 the master, and learning from him as he and 
 they strolled up and down the Walk along the 
 athletic field from which the Lyceum took its 
 name. 1 
 
 VThe Walk was called Peripatos; hence the later name 
 Peripatetic School. The athletic field was part of the 
 grounds of the temple of Apollo Lyceus—the protector 
 of the flock against the wolf ( lycos ). 
 
16 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 The new School was no mere replica of that 
 which Plato had left behind him. The Academy 
 was devoted above all to mathematics and to 
 speculative and political philosophy; the 
 Lyceum had rather a tendency to biology and 
 the natural sciences. If we may believe Pliny, 1 
 Alexander instructed his hunters, gamekeepers, 
 gardeners and fishermen to furnish Aristotle 
 with all the zoological and botanical material 
 he might desire; other ancient writers tell us 
 that at one time he had at his disposal a 
 thousand men scattered throughout Greece 
 
 s 
 
 and Asia, collecting for him specimens of the 
 fauna and flora of every land. With this 
 wealth of material he was enabled to establish 
 the first great zoological garden that the world 
 had seen. We can hardly exaggerate the in¬ 
 fluence of this collection upon his science and 
 his philosophy. 
 
 Where did Aristotle derive the funds to 
 finance these undertakings? He was himself, 
 by this time, a man of spacious income; and he 
 had married into the fortune of one of the most 
 powerful public men in Greece. Athenaeus (no 
 
 Wist. Nat., viii, 16; in Lewes, Aristotle, a Chapter 
 from the History of Science, London, 1864, p. 15. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 17 
 
 doubt with some exaggeration) relates that 
 Alexander gave Ariatotl®, for physical and 
 biological equipment and research, the sum of 
 800 talents (in modern purchasing power, some 
 $4,000,000). 1 2 It was at Aristotle’s suggestion, 
 some think, that Alexander sent a costly ex¬ 
 pedition to explore the sources of the Nile and' 
 discover the causes of its periodical overflow. 3 
 Such works as the digest of 158 political com 
 stitutions, drawn up for Aristotle, indicate a 
 considerable corps of aides and secretaries. In 
 
 k 
 
 short we have here the first example in 
 European history of the large-scale financing of 
 science by public wealth. What knowledge 
 would we not win if modern states were to sup¬ 
 port research on a proportionately lavish scale! 
 
 Yet we should do Aristotle injustice if we 
 were to ignore the almost fatal limitations of 
 equipment which accompanied these unpre¬ 
 cedented resources and facilities. He was com¬ 
 pelled “to fix time without a watch, to compare 
 degrees of heat without a thermometer, to 
 observe the heavens without a telescope, and 
 the weather without a barometer. ... Of all 
 
 1 Grant, Aristotle, Edinburgh, 1877, p. 18. 
 
 2 The expedition reported that the inundations were due 
 
 to the melting of the snow on the mountains of Abyssinia. 
 
18 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE » 
 
 our mathematical, optical and physical instru¬ 
 ments he possessed only the rule and compass, 
 together with the most imperfe-ct substitutes 
 
 * t N ---. 
 
 for some few others. Chemical analysis, cor¬ 
 rect measurements and‘weights, and a thorough 
 application of mathematics to physics, were 
 unknown. The attractive force of matter, the 
 law of gravitation, electrical phenomena, the 
 conditions of chemical combination, pressure of 
 air and its effects, the nature of light, heat, 
 combustion, etc., in short, all the facts on 
 which the physical theories of modern science 
 are based were wholly, or almost wholly, un¬ 
 discovered.” 1 
 
 See, here, how inventions make history: for 
 lack of a telescope Aristotle’s astronomy is a 
 tissue of childish romance; for lack of a micro¬ 
 scope his biology wanders endlessly astray. 
 Indeed, it was in industrial and technical in¬ 
 vention that Greece fell furthest below the 
 general standard of its unparalleled achieve¬ 
 ments. ,, The Greek disdain of manual work 
 kept everybody but the listless slave from 
 direct acquaintance with the processes of pro¬ 
 duction, from that stimulating contact with 
 
 teller, i, 264, 443. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE ig 
 
 machinery which reveals defects and prefigures 
 possibilities; technical invention was possible 
 only to those who had no interest in it, and 
 could not derive from it any material reward. 
 Perhaps the very cheapness of the slaves made 
 invention lag; muscle was still less costly than 
 machines. And so, while Greek commerce con¬ 
 quered the Mediterranean Sea, and Greek 
 philosophy conquered the Mediterranean mind, 
 Greek science straggled, and Greek industry 
 remained almost where ^Egean industry had 
 been when the invading Greeks had come down 
 upon it, at Cnossos, at Tiryns and Mycene, a 
 thousand years before. No doubt we have here 
 the reason why Aristotle so seldom appeals to 
 experiment; the mechanisms of experiment 
 had not yet been made; and the best he could 
 do was to achieve an almost universal and con¬ 
 tinuous observation. Nevertheless the vast 
 body of data gathered by him and his assistants 
 became the groundwork of the progress of 
 science, the text-book of knowledge for two 
 thousand years; one of the wonders of the 
 
 work of man. 
 
 * * 
 
 Aristotle’s writings ran into the hundreds. 
 Some ancient authors cr,edit him with four 
 
20 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 hundred volumes, others with a thousand. 
 What remains is but a part, and yet it is a 
 library in itself—conceive the scope and 
 grandeur of the whole. There are, first, the 
 Logical works: “Categories,” “Topics,” “Prior” 
 and “Posterior Analytics,” “Propositions,” and 
 “Sophistical Refutations;” these works were 
 collected and edited by the later Peripatetics 
 under the general title of Aristotle’s “Organon,” 
 —that is, the organ or instrument of correct 
 thinking. Secondly, there are the Scientific 
 works: “Physics,” “On the ' Heavens,” 
 
 “Growth and Decay,” “Meteorology,” “Natural 
 History,” “On the Soul,” “The Parts of 
 Animals,” “The Movements of Animals,” and 
 “The Generation of Animals.”- There are, 
 thirdly, the Esthetic works: “Rhetoric” and 
 “Poetics.” And fourthly come the more strictly 
 Philosophical works: “Ethics,” “Politics,” and 
 “Metaphysics.” 1 Here, evidently, is the Encylo- 
 pedia Brittanica of Greece: every problem 
 under the sun and about it finds a place; no 
 wonder there are more errors and absurdities 
 here than in any other philosopher who ever 
 
 1 This is the chronological order, so far as known 
 (Zeller, i, 156f). Our discussion will follow this order 
 except in the case of the “Metaphysics.” 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 21 
 
 wrote. Here is such a synthesis of knowledge 
 and theory as no man would ever achieve again 
 t .11 Spencer's day, and even then not half so 
 fvf 6 '] 11 C ^ ntly ’ ^ ere * better than Alexander’s 
 
 1 aD victor y- Was a conquest of the 
 
 world. If philosophy is the quest of unity 
 Aristotle deserves the high name that twenty 
 
 cen uries gave him I lie PMlosophus: The 
 Philosopher. 
 
 Naturally, in a mind of such scientific turn 
 poesy was lacking. We must not expect of 
 Aristotle such literary brilliance as floods the 
 Pages of the dramatist-philosopher Plato. 
 Instead of giving us great literature, in which 
 philosophy is embodied (and obscured) in myth 
 and imagery, Aristotle gives us science, 
 technical, abstract, concentrated; if we go to 
 him for entertainment we shall sue for the 
 return of our money. Instead of giving terms 
 to' literature, as Plato did, he builds the 
 terminology,of science and philosophy; we can 
 hardly speak of any science today without em- 
 p oying terms which he invented; they lie like 
 fossils in the strata of our speech: faJS 
 mean, maxim, (meaning, in Aristotle, the 
 major premiss of a syllogism), category, energy. 
 
22 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 actuality, motive, end, principle, form—these 
 indispensable coins of philosophic thought were 
 minted in his mind. And perhaps this passage 
 from delightful dialogue to precise scientific 
 treatise was a necessary step in the development 
 of philosophy; and science, which is the basis 
 and backbone of philosophy, could not grow 
 until it had evolved its own strict methods of 
 procedure and expression. Aristotle, too, wrote 
 literary dialogues, as highly reputed in their 
 day as Plato’s; but they are lost, just as the 
 scientific v treatises of Plato have perished. 
 Probably time has preserved of each man the 
 better part. 
 
 Finally, it is possible that the writings at¬ 
 tributed to Aristotle were not his, but were 
 largely the compilations of students and fol¬ 
 lowers who had embalmed the unadorned sub¬ 
 stance of his lectures in their notes. It does 
 not appear that Aristotle published in his life¬ 
 time any writings 'except those on logic and 
 rhetoric; and the present form of the logical 
 treatises is due to later editing. In the case of 
 the Metaphysics and the Politics the notes left 
 by Aristotle seem to have been put together by 
 his executors without revision or alteration. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 23 
 
 Even the unity of style which marks Aristotle’s 
 writings, and offers an argument to those who 
 defend his direct authorship, may be, after all, 
 merely a unity given them through common 
 editing by the Peripatetic School. About this 
 matter there rages a sort of Homeric question, 
 of almost epic scope, into which the busy reader 
 will not care to go, and on which a modest 
 student will not undertake to judge. 1 We may 
 at all events be sure that Aristotle is the 
 spiritual author of all these books that bear his 
 name: that the hand may be in some cases 
 another’s hand, but that the head and the heart 
 are his. 3 
 
 III. THE FOUNDATION OF LOGIC. 
 
 The first great distinction of Aristotle is that 
 
 almost without predecessors, almost entirely by 
 
 his own hard thinking, he created a new 
 - «s , 
 
 Kif. Zeller, ii, 204, note; Encyc. Britt., ii, 509; and 
 Shule: History of the Aristotelian Writings. 
 
 2 The reader who wishes to go to the philosopher him¬ 
 self will find the Meteorology an interesting example of 
 Aristotle’s scientific work; he will derive much practical 
 instruction from the Rhetoric; and he will find Aristotle 
 at his best in books i-ii of the Ethics, and books i-iv of 
 the Politics. The best translation of the Ethics is Well- 
 don’s; of the Politics, Jowett’s. Sir Alexander Grant’s 
 Aristotle is a simple book; Zeller’s Aristotle (vols. iii- 
 iv in his Greek Philosophy) , is scholarly but dry; Gom- 
 perz’s Greek Thinkers (vol. iv) is masterly but difficult. 
 
24 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 science—Logic. Renan 1 speaks of “the ill train¬ 
 ing of every mind that has not, directly or in¬ 
 directly, come under Greek discipline;” hut in 
 truth the Greek intellect itself was undiscip¬ 
 lined and chaotic till the ruthless formulae of 
 Aristotle provided a ready method for the test 
 and correction of thought. Even Plato (if a 
 lover may so far presume) was an unruly and 
 irregular soul, caught up too frequently in a 
 cloud of myth, and letting beauty too richly 
 veil the face of truth. Aristotle himself, as we 
 shall see, violated his own canons plentifully; 
 but then he was the product of his past, and 
 not of that future which his thought would 
 build. The political and economic decay of 
 Greece brought a weakening of the Hellenic 
 mind and character after Aristotle; but when 
 a new race, after a millenium of barbaric 
 darkness, £ound again the leisure and ability for 
 speculation, it was Aristotle’s “Organon” of 
 logic, translated by Boethius (470-525 A. D.), 
 that became the very mould of medieval 
 thought, the strict mother of that scholastic 
 philosophy which, though rendered sterile by 
 encircling, dogmas, nevertheless trained the in- 
 
 1 History of the People of Israel, vol. v, p. 328. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 25 
 
 tellect of adolescent Europe to reasoning and 
 subtlety, constructed the terminology of modern 
 science, and laid the bases of that same matur¬ 
 ity of mind which was to outgrow and over¬ 
 throw the very system and methods which had 
 given it birth and sustenance. 
 
 Logic means, simply, the art and method of 
 correct thinking. It is the logy or method of 
 every science, of every discipline and every 
 art; and even music harbors it. It is a science 
 because to a considerable extent the processes 
 of right thinking (and we use “right” not in a 
 moral but in a mathematical sense) can be re¬ 
 duced to rules like physics and geometry, and 
 taught to any normal mind; it is an art because 
 by practice it gives to thought, at last, that 
 unconscious and immediate accuracy which 
 guides the fingers of the pianist over his in¬ 
 strument to effortless harmonies. Nothing is 
 so dull as logic, and nothing is so important. 
 
 There was a hint of this new science in 
 Socrates’ maddening insistence on definitions, 
 and in Plato s constant refining of every concept. 
 Aristotle s little treatise on Definitions shows 
 how his logic found nourishment at this source. 
 “If you wish to converse'with me,” said Vol- 
 
26 A GXJIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 tair#, “define your terms.” How many a debat# 
 would have been deflated into a paragraph if 
 the disputants had dared to define their terms! 
 This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart 
 and soul of it, that every important term in 
 serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest 
 scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and 
 ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is 
 half of any task. 
 
 Yet how shall we proceed to define an object 
 
 v ) 
 
 or a term? Aristotle answers that every good 
 definition has two parts, stands on two solid 
 feet: first, it assigns the object in question to 
 a class or group of objects whose general 
 characteristics are also its own—so man is, 
 first of all, an animal; and secondly, it in¬ 
 dicates wherein the object differs from all the 
 other members in its class—so man, in the 
 Aristotelian system, is a rational animal, his 
 “specific difference” is that unlike all other 
 animals he is rational (here, you see, is the 
 origin of a pretty legend). Aristotle drops an 
 object into the ocean of its class, then takes it 
 out all dripping with generic meaning, with 
 the marks of its kind and group; while its 
 individuality and difference shine out all the 
 
A GUIQJE TO ARISTOTLE 27 
 
 more clearly (or this juxtaposition with other 
 
 objects which resemble it so much and are so 
 different. 
 
 Passing out from this rear line of logic we 
 come into the great battlefield on which Aris¬ 
 totle fought out with Plato the dread question 
 of “universal^ ; it was the fir'st conflict in a 
 war which was to last till our own day, and 
 make all medieval Europe ring with the clash 
 of realists” and “nominalists .” 1 A universal, 
 to Aristotle, is any common noun, any name 
 capable of universal application to the members 
 of a class: so animal, man, look, tree, are 
 universal. But these universal are subjective 
 notions, not tangibly objective realities; they 
 are nomina (names), not res (things); all that 
 exists outside us is a world of individual and 
 specific objects, not of generic and universal 
 things; men exist, and trees, and animals; but 
 ma-n-in-general, or the universal man, does not 
 exist, except in thought; he is a handy mental 
 abstraction, not an external presence or re-ality. 
 Now Aristotle understands Plato to “have held 
 
 SchLeTsaid 1 “F^ t0 - debate that Friedrich 
 In e„her a Pla.onis, 
 
 or 
 
28 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 that universals have objective existence; and 
 indeed Plato had said that the universal is in¬ 
 comparably more lasting and important and 
 substantial than the individual,—the latter 
 being but a little wavelet in a ceaseless surf; 
 men come and go, but man goes on forever. 
 Aristotle’s is a matter-of-fact mind; as William 
 James would say, a tough, not a tender, mind; 
 he sees the root of endless mysticism and 
 scholarly nonsense in this Platonic “realism;” 
 and he attacks it with all the vigor of a first 
 polemic. As Brutus loved not Caesar less but 
 Rome more, so Aristotle says, Amicus Plato , 
 sed magis arnica vcritas —“Dear is Plato, but 
 dearer still is ( truth.” A hostile commentator 
 might remark that Aristotle (like Nietzsche) 
 criticizes Plato so keenly because he is con¬ 
 scious of having borrowed from him generously; 
 no man is a hero to his debtors. But Aristotle 
 has a healthy attitude, nevertheless; he is a 
 realist almost in the modern sense; he is re¬ 
 solved to concern himself with the objective 
 presence, while Plato is absorbed in a subjective 
 future; or, to juggle with the words, Aristotle 
 has a present objective, and Plato’s subject is 
 the future. There was, in the Socratic-Platonic 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 29 
 
 demand for definitions, a tendency away from 
 things and facts to theories and ideas, from 
 particulars to generalities, from science to 
 scholasticism; at last Plato became so devoted 
 to generalities that they began to determine 
 his particulars, so devoted to ideas that they 
 began to define or select his facts. Aristotle 
 preaches a return to things, to the “unwithered 
 face of nature” and reality; he had a lusty 
 preference for the concrete particular, for the 
 flesh and blood individual. But Plato so loved 
 the general and universal that in the Republic 
 he destroyed the individual to make a perfect 
 state. 
 
 Yet, as is the usual humor of history, the 
 young warrior takes over many of the qualities 
 of the old master whom he assails. We have 
 always goodly stock in us of that which we 
 condemn: as only similars can be profitably 
 contrasted, so only similar people quarrel, and 
 the bitterest wars are over the slightest 
 variations of purpose or belief. The knightly 
 Crusaders found in Saladin a gentleman with 
 whom they could quarrel amicably; but when 
 the Christians of Eurdpe broke into hostile 
 camps there was no quarter for even the 
 
30 , A GUIDE 10 ARISTOTLE 
 
 •ourtliest foe. Aristotle is so ruthless wHh 
 Plato because there is so much of Plato in him; 
 he too remains a lover of abstractions and gen¬ 
 eralities, repeatedly betraying the simple fact 
 for some speciously bedizened theory, and com¬ 
 pelled to a continuous struggle to conquer the 
 philosophic passion for exploring the empyrean. 
 
 There is a heavy trace of this in the most 
 characteristic and original of Aristotle’s con¬ 
 tributions to philosophy—the doctrine of the 
 syllogism. A syllogism is a trio ‘of propositions 
 of which the third (the conclusion) follows 
 from the conceded truth of the other two (the 
 “major” and “minor” premisses). E. g., man 
 is a rational animal; but Socrates is a man; 
 therefore Socrates is a rational animal. The 
 mathematical reader will see at once that the 
 structure of *the syllogism resembles the 
 proposition that two things equal to the same 
 thing are equal to each other; if A is B, and 
 C is A, then C is B. As in the mathematical 
 case the conclusion is reached by canceling 
 from both premisses their common term, A; 
 so in our syllogism the conclusion is reached 
 by canceling from both premisses their common 
 term “man,” and combining what remains. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 31 
 
 The difficulty, as logicians have pointed out 
 from the days of Pyrrho to those of Stuart 
 Mill, lies in this, that the major premiss of the 
 syllogism takes for granted precisely the point 
 to be proved; for if Socrates is not rational 
 (and since no one questions that he is a man) 
 it is not universally true that man is a rational 
 animal. Aristotle would reply, no doubt, that 
 where an individual is found to have a large 
 number of qualities characteristic of a class 
 ( Socrates is a man”), a strong presumption 
 is established that the individual has the other 
 qualities characteristic of the class (“rational¬ 
 ity ). But apparently the syllogism is not a 
 mechanism for the discovery of truth so much 
 as for the clarification of exposition and 
 thought. 
 
 All this, then, like the many other items of 
 the Organon, has its value: “Aristotle has dis¬ 
 covered and formulated every canon of theoreti¬ 
 cal consistency, and every artifice of dialectical 
 debate, with an industry and acuteness which 
 cannot be too highly extolled; and his labors 
 in this direction have perhaps contributed more 
 than any other single writer to the intellectual 
 
32 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 stimulation of after ages .” 1 But no man ever 
 lived who could lift logic to a lofty strain: a 
 guide to correct reasoning is as elevating as a 
 manual of etiquette; iwe may use it, but it 
 hardly spurs us to nobility. Not even the brav¬ 
 est philosopher would sin£ to a book of logic 
 underneath the bough. One always feels to¬ 
 wards logic as Virgil bade Dante feel towards 
 those w r ho had been damned because of their 
 colorless neutrality: Non ragionam di lor, ma 
 guarda e passa —“Let us think no more about 
 them, but look once and pass on.” * 
 
 IV. THE ORGANIZATION OF SCIENCE 
 
 1. GREEK SCIENCE BEFORE ARISTOTLE 
 
 “Socrates,” says Renan , 2 “gave philosophy to 
 mankind, and Aristotle gave it science. There 
 was philosophy before Socrates, and science be¬ 
 fore Aristotle; and since Socrates and since 
 Aristotle, philosophy and science have made im¬ 
 mense advances. But all has been built upon 
 the foundation which they laid.” Before Aris- 
 
 y Benn, i, 307. 
 
 2 Inferno, iii, 60. 
 a Life of Jesus, ch. 28. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 33 
 
 totle, science was in embryo; with him it was 
 born. 
 
 Earlier civilizations than the Greek had made 
 attempts at science; but so far as we can catch 
 their ^thought through their still obscure cunei¬ 
 form and hieroglyphic script, their science was 
 indistinguishable from theology. That is to 
 say, these pre-Hellenic peoples explained every 
 obscure operation in nature by some supernat¬ 
 ural agency; everywhere there were gods. Appar¬ 
 ently it was the Ionian Greeks who first dared 
 to give natural explanations of cosmic complex¬ 
 ities and mysterious events: they sought in 
 physics the natural causes of particular inci¬ 
 dents, and in philosophy a natural theory of 
 the whole. Thales (640-550 B. C.), the “Father 
 of Philosophy,” was primarily an astronomer, 
 who astonished the natives of Miletus by in¬ 
 forming them that the sun and stars (which 
 they were wont to worship as gods) were mere¬ 
 ly balls of fire. His pupil Anaximander (610- 
 540 B. C.), the first Greek to make astronomic 
 and geographical charts, believed that the uni¬ 
 verse had begun as an undifferentiated mass, 
 from which all things had arisen by the separa¬ 
 tion of opposites; that astronomic history peri- 
 
34 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 odically repeated itself in the evolution y and 
 dissolution of an infinite number of worlds; 
 that the earth was at rest in space by a balance 
 of internal impulsions (like Buridan’s ass); 
 that all our planet had once been fluid, but had 
 been evaporated by the sun; that life had first 
 been formed in the sea, but had been driven 
 upon the land by the subsidence of the water; 
 that of these stranded animals some had devel¬ 
 oped the capacity to breathe air, and had so be¬ 
 come the progenitors of all later land life; that 
 man could not from the beginning have been 
 what he now was, for if man, on his first ap¬ 
 pearance, had been so helpless at birth, and had/ 
 required so long an adolescence, as in these 
 later days, he could not possibly have survived. 
 Anaximenes, another Milesian (fl. 450 B. C.), 
 described the primeval condition of things as a 
 very rarefied mass, gradually condensing into 
 wind, cloud, water, earth, and stone; the three 
 forms of matter—gas, liquid and solid—were 
 progressive stages of condensation; heat and 
 cold were merely rarefaction and condensation; 
 earthquakes were due to the solidification of 
 an originally fluid earth; life and soul were 
 one, an animating and expansive force present 
 
35 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 in everything everywhere. Anaxagoras (500- 
 428 B. C.), teacher of Pericles, seems to have 
 given a correct explanation of solar and lunar 
 eclipses; he discovered the processes of res¬ 
 piration in plants and fishes; and he explained 
 man’s intelligence by the power of manipula¬ 
 tion that came when the fore-limbs were freed 
 from the tasks of locomotion. 
 
 Heraclitus (530-470 B.C.), who left wealth and 
 its cares to live a life of poverty and study in 
 the shade of the temple porticoes at Ephesus, 
 turned science from astronomy to earthlier con¬ 
 cerns. All things forever flow and change, he 
 said; even in the stillest matter there is un¬ 
 seen flux and movement. Cosmic history runs 
 in repetitious cycles, each beginning and end¬ 
 ing in fire (here is one source of the Stoic and 
 Christian doctrine of last judgment and hell). 
 “Through strife,” says Heraclitus, “all things 
 arise and pass away...War is the father and 
 king of all: some he has made gods, and some 
 men; some slaves, and some free.” Where there 
 is no strife there is decay: “the mixture which 
 is not shaken decomposes.” In this flux of 
 change and struggle and selection, only one 
 
36 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 thing is constant, and that is law. “This order, 
 the same for all things, no one of gods or men 
 has made; hut it always was, and is, and shall 
 he.”—Empedocles (fl 445 B. C., in Sicily) de¬ 
 veloped to a further stage the idea of evolution. 1 
 Organs arise not by design hut hy selection. 
 Nature makes many trials and experiments 
 
 with organisms, combining organs variously; 
 
 * 
 
 where the combination meets environmental 
 needs the organism survives and perpetuates 
 its like; where the combination fails, the or¬ 
 ganism is weeded out; as time goes on, or¬ 
 ganisms are more and more intricately and 
 successfully adapted to their surroundings.— 
 Finally, in Leucippus (fl. 445 B. C.) and Demo¬ 
 critus (460-360), master and pupil in Thracian 
 Abdera, we get the last stage of pre-Aristotelian 
 science—materialistic, deterministic atomism. 
 “Everything,” said Leucippus, “is driven 
 by necessity.” “In reality,” says Demo¬ 
 critus, 2 “there are only atoms and the void.” 
 Perception is due to the expulsion of atoms 
 
 1 Cf. Osborn, From the Greeks to Darwin; and M. Ar¬ 
 nold, Empedocles on Etna. 
 
 2 Democritus is ranked above Plato and Aristotle in 
 Francis Bacon’s De Principus (Philosophical Works, ed. 
 Robertson, London, 1905, p. 650). 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 37 
 
 from the object upon the sense organ. 1 There 
 is or have been or will be an infinite number 
 of worlds; at every moment planets are collid¬ 
 ing and dying, and new worlds are rising out 
 of chaos by the selective aggregation of atoms 
 of similar size and shape. There is no design; 
 the universe is a machine. 
 
 This, in dizzy and superficial summary, is 
 the story of Greek science before Aristotle. Its 
 cruder items can be well forgiven when we con¬ 
 sider the narrow circle of experimental and ob¬ 
 servational equipment within which these pion¬ 
 eers were compelled to work. The stagnation 
 of Greek industry under the incubus of slavery 
 prevented the full development of these mag¬ 
 nificent beginnings; and the rapid complica¬ 
 tion of political life in Athens turned the Soph¬ 
 ists and Socrates and Plato away from these 
 physical and biological researches into the 
 vaguer paths of ethical and political theory. It 
 is one of the many glories of Aristotle that 
 he was broad and brave enough to compass 
 and combine these two lines of Greek thought, 
 the physical and the moral; that going back 
 
 returning e ^nto' S favor. r ^ ° £ n ° W (thr0Ugk Ei ” s * ei "> 
 
38 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 beyond his teacher, he caught again the thread 
 of scientific development in the pre-Socratic 
 Greeks, carried on their work with more reso¬ 
 lute detail, and more varied observation, and 
 brought together all the accumulated results in 
 a magnificent body of organized science. 
 
 I 
 
 ... /' .4 
 
 2. ARISTOTLE AS A NATURALIST 
 
 If we begin here chronologically, with his 
 Physics, we shall be disappointed; for we find 
 that this treatise is really a metaphysics, an 
 abstruse analysis of matter, motion, space, time, 
 infinity, cause, and other such “ultimate con¬ 
 cepts.” One of the more lively passages is an 
 attack on Democritus’ “void”: there can be no 
 void or vacuum in nature, says Aristotle, for in 
 a vacuum all bodies would fall with equal 
 velocity; this being impossible, “the supposed 
 void turns out to have nothing in it”—an in¬ 
 stance at once of Aristotle’s very occasional 
 humor, his addiction to unproved assumptions, 
 and his tendency to disparage his predecessors 
 in philosophy. It was the habit of our phi- 
 
 * 
 
 losopher to preface his works with historical 
 sketches of previous contributions to the sub- 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 39 
 
 JecMn hand, and to add to every contribution 
 an annihilating refutation. “Aristotle, after the 
 Ottoman manner,” says Bacon, “thought he 
 could not reign secure without putting all his 
 brethren to death.” 1 But to this fratricidal 
 mania we owe much of our knowledge of pre- 
 Socratic thought. 
 
 For reasons already given, Aristotle’s astron¬ 
 omy represents very little advance upon his 
 predecessors. He rejects the view of Pytha¬ 
 goras (sixth century B. C.) that the sun is the 
 center of our system; he prefers to give that 
 honor to the earth. But the little treatise on 
 'meteorology is full of brilliant observations, 
 and even its speculations strike illuminating 
 fire. This is a cyclic world, says our philoso¬ 
 pher: the sun forever evaporates the sea, dries 
 up rivers and springs, and transforms at last 
 the boundless ocean into the barest rock; while 
 conversely the uplifted moisture, gathered into 
 clouds, falls and renews the rivers and the 
 seas. Everywhere change goes on, impercept¬ 
 ibly but effectively. Egypt is “the work of the 
 Nile,” the product of its deposits through a 
 
 1 Advancement of Learning, bk. iii, ck. 4. 
 
40 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 thousand centuries. Here the sea encroaches 
 upon the land, there the land reaches out 
 timidly into the sea; new continents and new 
 oceans rise, old oceans and old continents dis¬ 
 appear, and all the face of the world is chang¬ 
 ed and rechanged in a great systole and diastole 
 of growth and dissolution. Sometimes these 
 vast effects occur suddenly, and destroy the 
 geological and material bases of civilization and 
 even of life; great catastrophes have periodical¬ 
 ly denuded the earth and reduced man again 
 to his first beginnings; like Sisyphus, civiliza¬ 
 tion has repeatedly neared its zenith only to 
 fall back into barbarism and begin da capo ita 
 
 i 
 
 upward travail. Hence the almost “eternal re¬ 
 currence,” in civilization after civilization, of 
 the same inventions and discoveries, the same 
 “dark ages” of slow economic and cultural ac¬ 
 cumulation, the same rebirths of learning and 
 science and art. No doubt some popular myth3 
 are vague traditions surviving from earlier 
 cultures. So the story of man runs in a dreary 
 circle, because he is not yet master of the earth 
 that holds him. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 3. THE FOUNDATION OF BIOLOGY 
 
 It is not so with life. 
 
 As Aristotle walked wondering through his 
 great zoological garden, he became convinced 
 that the infinite variety of life could be ar¬ 
 ranged in a continuous series in which each 
 link would be almost indistinguishable from the 
 next. In all respects, whether in structure, or 
 mode of life, or reproduction and rearing, or 
 sensation and feeling, there are minute grada¬ 
 tions and progressions from the lowest organ¬ 
 isms'to the highest. ‘ At the bottom of the scale 
 we can scarcely divide the living from the 
 “dead”: “nature makes so gradual a transition 
 from the inanimate to the animate, kingdom 
 that the boundary lines which separate them 
 are indistinct and doubtful”; and perhaps a 
 degree of life exists even in the inorganic. 
 Again, many species cannot with certainty be 
 called plants or animals. And as in these 
 lower organisms it is almost impossible at times 
 to assign them to their proper genus and spe¬ 
 cies, so similar are they; so in every order of 
 
 iHist. Animalium, viii. 
 
41 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 life the continuity of gradations and differences 
 is as remarkable as the diversity of functions 
 and forms. But in the midst of this bewilder¬ 
 ing richness of structures certain things stand 
 out convincingly: that life has grown steadily 
 in complexity and in power; 1 that intelligence 
 has progressed in correlation with complexity 
 of structure and mobility of form; 2 that there 
 has been an increasing specialization of func¬ 
 tion, and a continuous centralization of physio¬ 
 logical control. 3 Slowdy life created for itself 
 a nervous system and a brain; and mind moved 
 resolutely on towards the mastery of its en¬ 
 vironment. 
 
 The remarkable fact here is that with all 
 these gradations and similarities leaping to 
 Aristotle’s eyes, he does not come to the theory 
 of evolution. He rejects Empedocles’ doctrine 
 that all organs and organisms are a survival 
 of the fittest, 4 and Anaxagoras’ idea that man 
 became intelligent by using his hands for ma¬ 
 nipulation rather than for movement; Aristotle 
 thinks, on the contrary, that man so used his 
 
 1 De Anima, ii, 2. 
 
 2 De Parhbus Ammalium, i, 7; ii, 10. 
 
 s Ibid., iv, 5-6. 
 
 4 De Anima, ii, 4. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 43 
 
 hands because he had become intelligent. 1 In¬ 
 deed, Aristotle makes as many mistakes as pos¬ 
 sible for a man who is founding the science of 
 biology. He thinks, for example, that the male 
 element in reproduction merely stimulates and 
 quickens; it does not occur to him (what we 
 now know from experiments in partheno¬ 
 genesis) that the essential function of the sperm 
 is not so much to fertilize the ovum as to pro¬ 
 vide the embryo with the heritable qualities 
 of the male parent, and so permit the offspring 
 to be a vigorous variant, a new admixture of 
 two ancestral lines. As human dissection was 
 not practised in his time, he is particularly fer¬ 
 tile in physiological errors: he knows nothing 
 of muscles, not even of their existence; he does 
 not distinguish arteries from veins; he thinks 
 the brain is an organ for cooling the blood; 
 he believes, forgivably, that man has more su¬ 
 tures in the skull than woman; he believes, less 
 forgivably, that man has only eight ribs on 
 each side; he believes, incredibly and unfor¬ 
 givably, that woman has fewer teeth than 
 man. 2 Apparently Aristotle's relations with 
 women were of the most amicable kind. 
 
 1 De Part. An., iv. 10. 
 
 AGomperzf iv, 57; Zeller, i, 262, note; Lewes, 158, 165, 
 etc. 
 
44 • A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 Yet he makes a greater total advance in 
 biology than any Greek before or after him. 
 He perceives that birds and reptiles are near 
 allied in structure; that the monkey is in form 
 intermediate between quadrupeds and man; and 
 once he boldly declares that man belongs i£ 
 one group of animals with the viviparous quad¬ 
 rupeds (our ‘'mammals”). 1 He remarks that 
 the soul in infancy is scarcely distinguishable 
 from the soul of animals. 2 He makes the il¬ 
 luminating observation that diet often de¬ 
 termines the mode of life; “for of beasts some 
 are gregarious, and others solitary—they live 
 in the way which is best adapted to . v . obtain 
 the food of their choice.” 3 He anticipates Von 
 Baer’s famous law that characters common to 
 the genus (like eyes and ears) appear in the 
 developing organism before characters peculiar 
 to its species (like the “formula” of the 
 teeth), or to its individual self (like the final 
 color of the eyes); 4 and he reaches out across 
 two thousand years to anticipate Spencer’s gen¬ 
 eralization that individuation varies inversely as 
 
 1 Hist. An. i, 6; ii, 3. 
 
 2 Ibid., viii, .1. 
 
 s Politics, i, 8. 
 
 1 Hist. An. i, G; ii, 8. 
 
45 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 genesis—that is, that the more highly developed 
 and specialized a species or an individual hap¬ 
 pens to be, the smaller will be the number of its 
 offspring. 1 He notices and explains reversion 
 to type—the tendency of a prominent variation 
 (like genius) to be diluted in mating and lost 
 in • successive generations. He makes many 
 zoological observations which, temporarily re¬ 
 jected by later biologists, have been confirmed 
 by modern research—of fishes that make nests, 
 for example, and a species of shark that boasts 
 of a placenta. 
 
 And finally he establishes the science of em¬ 
 bryology. “He who sees things grow from their 
 beginning,” he writes, “will have the finest 
 view of them.” Hippocrates (b. 460 B. C.), 
 greatest of Greek physicians, had given a fine 
 example of the experimental method, by break¬ 
 ing a hen’s eggs at various stages of incubation; 
 and had applied the results of these studies in 
 his treatise “On the Origin of the Child.” Aris¬ 
 totle followed this lead and performed experi¬ 
 ments which enabled him to give a description 
 of the development of the chick which even 
 
 i De Generation# Aniinaliwn, ii, 12. 
 
46 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 today arouses the admiration of embryologists. 1 
 He must have performed some novel experi¬ 
 ments in genetics, for he disproves the theory 
 that the sex o^ the child depends on what testis 
 supplies the reproductive fluid, by quoting a 
 case where the right testis of the father had 
 been tied and yet the children had been of 
 different sexes. 2 He raises some very modern 
 problems of heredity. A woman of Elis had , 
 married a negro; her children were all whites, 
 but in the next generation negroes reappeared; 
 where, asks Aristotle, was the blackness hidden 
 in the middle generation? 3 There was but a 
 step from such a vital and intelligent query to 
 the epochal experiments of Gregor Mendel (1822- 
 1882). Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae — 
 to know what to ask is already to know half. 
 Surely, despite the errors that mar these bio¬ 
 logical works, they form the greatest monument 
 ever raised to the science by any one man. 
 When we consider that before Aristotle there 
 had been, so far as we know, no biology beyond 
 scattered observations, we perceive that this 
 
 1 LTe Part. An., Hi, ,4. 
 
 2 Lewes, 112. 
 
 3 Gomperz, iv, 169. 
 
47 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 achievement alone might have sufficed for one 
 life-time, and would* have given immortality. 
 But Aristotle had only begun. 
 
 V. METAPHYSICS AND THE NATURE OF GOD 
 
 His metaphysics grew out of his biology. 
 Everything in the world is moved by an inner 
 urge to become something greater than it is. 
 Everything is both the form or reality which 
 has grown out of something which was its 
 matter or raw material; and it may in its turn 
 be the matter out of which still higher forms 
 will grow. So the man is the form of which 
 the child was the matter; the child is the form 
 and its embryo the matter; the embryo^the 
 form, the ovum the matter; and so back till we 
 reach in a vague way the conception of matter 
 without form at all. But such a formless mat¬ 
 ter would be no-thing, for every thing has a 
 form. Matter, in its widest sense, is the pos¬ 
 sibility of form; and form is the actuality, the 
 finished reality, of matter. Matter obstructs, 
 form constructs. Form is not merely the shape 
 but the shaping force, an inner necessity and 
 
48 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 impulse which moulds mere material to 
 specific figure and purpose; it is the realizati 
 of a potential capacity of matter; it is the st 
 of the powers residing in anything to do, to 
 or to become. Nature is the conquest of mat 
 by form, the constant progression and viqt< 
 of life. 1 
 
 Everything in the world moves naturally 
 a specific fulfilment. Of the varied car 
 which determine an event, the final ca 
 which determines the purpose, is the most 
 eisive and important. The mistakes and fu 
 ties of nature are due to the inertia of ma 
 resisting the forming force of purpose—h< 
 the abortions and the monsters that mar 
 panorama of life. Development is not haphaz 
 or accidental (else how could we explain 
 almost universal appearance and transmis* 
 of useful organs?); everything is guided i 
 certain direction from within, by its nal 
 
 1 Half of our readers will be pleased, and the < 
 half amused, to learn that among Aristotle’s favorite 
 amples of matter and form are woman and man; the 
 is the active, formative principle; the female is pa 
 clay, waiting to be formed. Female offspring are 
 result' of the failure of form to dominate matter 
 Gen. An., i, 2). 
 
49 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 structure and entelechy; 1 the egg of the 
 is internally designed or destined to be- 
 5 not a duck but a chick; the acorn becomes 
 a willow but an oak. This does not mean 
 Aristotle that there is an external provi- 
 e designing earthly structures and events; 
 ?r the design is internal, and arises from 
 type and function of the thing. “Divine 
 idence coincides completely for Aristotle 
 the operation of natural causes.” 3 
 t there is a God, though not perhaps the 
 le and human god conceived by the for- 
 )le anthropomorphism of the adolescent 
 l. Aristotle approaches the problem from 
 old puzzle about motion—how, he asks, 
 motion begin? He will not accept the 
 bility that motion is as beginningless as 
 :onceive 3 matter to be: matter may be 
 lal, because it is merely the everlasting 
 [bility of future forms; but when and how 
 that vast process of motion and formation 
 
 itelecheia —having {echo) its purpose ( telos ) within 
 s ); one of those magnificent Aristotelian terms 
 l gather up into themselves a whole philosophy. The 
 med reader need not be reminded that the “ortho- 
 ” school of evolutionists finds its first' formulation 
 ese passages of Aristotle. 
 
 thics, i, 10; Zeller, ii, 329. 
 
50 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 begin which at last filled the wide universe 
 with an infinity of shapes? Surely motion has 
 a source, says Aristotle; and if we are not to 
 plunge drearily into an infinite regress, putting 
 back our problem step by step, endlessly, we 
 must posit a prime mover unmoved ( primum 
 
 i 
 
 mobile immotum), a being incorporeal, indi- 
 % 
 
 visible, spaceless, sexless, passionless, change¬ 
 less, perfect and eternal. God does not create, 
 but he moves, the world; and he moves it not 
 as a mechanical force but as the total motive 
 of all operations in the world; “God moves the 
 world as the beloved object moves the lover.” 1 
 He is the final cause of nature, the drive and 
 purpose of things, the form of the world; the 
 principle of its life, the sum of its vital pro¬ 
 cesses and powers, the inherent goal of its 
 -growth, the energizing entelechy of the whole. 
 He is pure energy; 2 the Scholastic Actus Purus 
 —activity per se; perhaps the mystic “Force” 
 of modern physics and philosophy. He is noc 
 so much a person as a magnetic power. 3 
 
 Yet, with his usual inconsistency, Arlstoue 
 
 1 Metaphysics, ix, 7 . 
 
 -Ibid., xii, 8. 
 
 3 C»rant. 173. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE U 
 
 :*pr«**nta God as self-conscious spirit. A rath¬ 
 er mysterious spirit; for Aristotle’s God never 
 floes anything; he has.no desires, no will, no 
 purpose; he is activity so pure that he never 
 acts. He is absolutely perfect; therefore he 
 cannot desire anything; therefore he does noth¬ 
 ing. His only occupation is to contemplate 
 the essence of things; and since he himself is 
 the essence of all things, the form of all forms, 
 Ms sole employment is the contemplation of 
 himself . 1 Poor Aristotelian God!—he is a roi- 
 faintant, a do-nothing king; “the king reigns, 
 but he does not rule.’’ No wonder the British 
 like Aristotle; his God is obviously copied from 
 their king. 
 
 Or from Aristotle himself. Our philosopher 
 so loved contemplation that he sacrificed to it 
 Ms conception of divinity. His God is of the 
 luiet Aristotelian tjype, nothing romantic, with¬ 
 drawn to his ivory tower from the strife and 
 stain of things; all the world away from the 
 philosopher-kings of Plato, or from the stern 
 flesh-and-blood reality of Yahveh, or the gentle 
 and solicitous fatherhood of the Christian God. 
 
 1 Meta . xii , 8; Ethics, x„ 8, 
 
52 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLB 
 
 * 
 
 VI. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NATURE OF AR1 
 
 Aristotle’s psychology is marred with similar 
 obscurity and vacillation. There are many in¬ 
 teresting passages: the power of habit is em¬ 
 phasized, and is for the first time called “sec¬ 
 ond nature”; and the laws of association, 
 though not developed, find here a definite for¬ 
 mulation. But both the crucial problems of 
 Philosophical psychology—the freedom of the 
 will and the immortality of the soul—are left 
 in haze -and doubt. Aristotle talks at times 
 like a determinist—“We cannot directly will 
 to be different from what we are”; but he goes 
 on to argue, against determinism, that we can 
 choose what we shall be, by choosing now the 
 environment that shall mould us; so we art 
 free in the sense that we mould our own char¬ 
 acters by our choice of friends, books, occupa¬ 
 tions, and amusements. 1 He does not anticipate 
 the determinist’s ready reply that these forma¬ 
 tive choices are themselves determined by our 
 antec edent character, and this at last by un- 
 
 1 Ethics, iii, 7. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 163 
 
 chosen heredity and early environment. He 
 presses the point that our persistent use of 
 praise and blame presupposes moral responsi¬ 
 bility and free will; it does not occur to him 
 that the determinist might reach from the 
 same premisses a precisely opposite conclusion 
 —that praise and blame are given that they 
 may be part of the factors determining subse¬ 
 quent action. 
 
 Aristotle's theory of the soul begins with an 
 interesting definition. The soul is the entire 
 vital principle of any organism, the sum of its 
 powers and processes. In plants the soul is 
 merely a nutritive and reproductive power, in 
 animals it is also a sensitive and locomotor 
 power; in man it is as well the power of reason 
 and thought. 1 The soul, as the sum of the 
 powers of the body, cannot exist without it, 
 the two are as form and wax, separable only 
 in thought, but in reality one organic whole; 
 the soul is not put into the body like the quick¬ 
 silver inserted by Daedalus into the images of 
 Venus to make “stand-ups” of them. A personal 
 and particular soul can exist only in its own 
 body. Nevertheless the soul is not; material, 
 
 1 De Amina » ii. 
 
■ fj / 1! in i 
 
 54 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 1 as Democritus would have it; nor does it all 
 die. Part of the rational power of the human 
 soul is passive: it is bound up with memory, 
 and dies with the body that bore the memory; 
 but the “active reason,” the pure power of 
 thought, is independent of memory and is un¬ 
 touched with decay. The active reason is the 
 universal as distinguished from the individual 
 element in man; what survives is not the per¬ 
 sonality, with its transitory affections and de¬ 
 sires, but mind in its most abstract and im¬ 
 personal form. 1 In short, Aristotle destroys the 
 soul in order to give it immortality; the im¬ 
 mortal soul is “pure thought,” undefiled with 
 reality, just as Aristotle's God is pure activity, 
 undefiled with action. Let him who can, be 
 comforted with this theology. One wonders 
 sometimes whether this metaphysical eating of 
 one’s cake and keeping it is not Aristotle’s sub¬ 
 tle way of saving himself from anti-Macedonian 
 hemlock? 
 
 In a safer field of psychology he writes more 
 originally and to the point, and almost creates 
 the study of esthetics, the theory of beauty and 
 art. Artistic creation, says Aristotle, springs 
 
 1 De Amina, ii, 4; i, 4; iii, 5- 
 
55 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 'from tht formative impulse and the craving for 
 emotional expression. Essentially the form of 
 art is an imitation of reality; it holds the mir¬ 
 ror up to nature. 1 There is in man a pleasure 
 in imitation, apparently missing in lower ani¬ 
 mals. Yet the aim of art is to represent not 
 the outward appearance of things, but their 
 inward significance; for this, and not the ex- 
 ternal mannerism and detail, is their reality. 
 There may be more human verity in the sternly 
 classic moderation of the (E dipus Rex than in 
 all the realistic tears of the Trojan Women. 
 
 The noblest art appeals to the intellect as 
 well as to the feelings (as a symphony appeals 
 to us not only by its harmonies and sequences 
 but by its structure and development); and 
 this intellectual pleasure is the highest form 
 of joy to which a man can rise. Hence a work 
 of art should aim at form, and above all at 
 unity, which is the backbone of structure and 
 the focus of form. A drama, e.g., should have 
 unity of action: there should be no confusing 
 sub-plots, nor any digressive episodes. 2 But 
 
 1 Poetics, i, 1447. 
 
 2 Aristotle gives only one sentence to unity of time; 
 and does not mention unity of place; so that the “three 
 unities” commonly foisted upon him are later inventions 
 (Norwood, Greek Tragedy, p. 42, note). 
 

 ' '< 1 >' i A . 
 
 56 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 above all, the function of art is catharsis, puri¬ 
 fication: emotions accumulated in us under 
 the pressure of social restraints, and liable to 
 
 sudden issue in unsocial and destructive action, 
 
 . 
 
 are touched off and sluiced away in the harm-f 
 less form of theatrical excitement; so tragedy, 
 “through pity and fear, effects the proper pur¬ 
 gation of these emotions.” 1 Aristotle misses 
 certain features of tragedy (e. g., the conflict of 
 principles and personalities); but in this theory 
 of catharsis he has made a suggestion endlessly 
 fertile in the understanding of the almost mys¬ 
 tic power of art. It is an illuminating instance 
 of his ability to enter every field of speculation, 
 and to adorn whatever he touches. 
 
 VII. ETHICS AND THE NATURE OF 
 HAPPINESS 
 
 And yet, as Aristotle developed, and young 
 men crowded about him to be taught and 
 formed, more and more his mind turned from 
 the details of science to the larger and vaguer 
 problems of conduct and character. It came to 
 
 1 Poetics , vi, 1449. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE, 57 
 
 him more clearly that above all questions of 
 the physical world there loomed the question 
 of questions—what is the best life?—what is 
 life’s supreme good?—what is virtue?—how 
 shall we find happiness and fulfilment? 
 
 He is realistically simple in his ethics. His 
 scientific training keeps him from the preach¬ 
 ment of superhuman ideals and empty counsels 
 of perfection. “In Aristotle,” says Santayana, 
 “the conception of human nature is perfectly 
 sound; every ideal has a natural basis, and 
 everything natural has an ideal development.” * 
 Aristotle begins by frankly recognizmg that the 
 aim of life is not goodness for its own sake, but 
 happiness. “For we choose happiness for it¬ 
 self, and never with a view to anything fur¬ 
 ther; whereas we choose honor, pleasure, intel¬ 
 lect... .because we believe that through them 
 we shall be made happy.” 1 But he realizes 
 that to call happiness the supreme good is a 
 mere truism; what is wanted is some clearer 
 account of the nature of happiness, and the way 
 to it. He hopes to find this way by asking 
 wherein man differs from other^ beings; and 
 by presuming that man’s happiness will lie in 
 
 1 Ethics, i, 7. 
 
58 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 the full functioning of this specifically human 
 quality. Now the peculiar excellence of man 
 is his power of thought; it is hy this that he 
 surpasses and rules all other forms of life; and 
 as the growth of this faculty has given him his 
 supremacy, so, we may presume, its develop¬ 
 ment will give him fulfilment and happiness. 
 
 The chief condition of happiness, then, bar¬ 
 ring certain physical pre-requisites, is the life of 
 reason—the specific glory and power of man. 
 Virtue, or rather excellence, 1 will depend on 
 clear judgment, self-control, symmetry of de¬ 
 sire, artistry of means; it is not the possession 
 of the simple man, nor the gift of innocent in¬ 
 tent, but the achievement of experience in the 
 fully developed man. Yet there is a road to it, 
 a guide to excellence, which may save many 
 detours and delays: it is the middle way, the 
 golden mean. The qualities of character can be 
 arranged in triads, in each of which the first 
 
 VThe word excellence is probably the fittest translation 
 of the Greek arete, usually mistranslated virtue. The 
 reader will avoid misunderstanding Plato and Afistotle if, 
 where translators write virtue, he will substitute excel¬ 
 lence, ability, or capacity. The Greek arete is the Roman 
 virtus; both imply a masculine sort of excellence (Ares, 
 god of war; vir, a male). Classical antiquity conceived 
 virtue in terms of man, just as medieval Christianity 
 conceived it in terms of woman. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 5 9 
 
 and last qualities will be extremes and vices, 
 and the middle quality a virtue or an excellence. 
 So between cowardice and rashness is courage; 
 between stinginess and extravagance is liber¬ 
 ality; between sloth and greed is ambition; 
 between humility and pride, is modesty; be¬ 
 tween secrecy and loquacity, honesty; between 
 moroseness and buffoonery, good humor; be¬ 
 tween quarrelsomeness and flattery, friendship; 
 between Hamlet’s indecisiveness and Quixote’s 
 impulsiveness is self-control. 1 “Right,” then, 
 in ethics or conduct, is not different from 
 “right” in mathematics or engineering; it 
 means correct, fit, what works best to the best 
 result. The golden mean, however, is not, like 
 the mathematical mean, an exact average of two 
 precisely calculable extremes; it fluctuates with 
 the collateral circumstances of each situation, 
 and discovers itself only to mature and flexible 
 reason. Excellence is an art won by training 
 and habituation: we do not act rightly because 
 we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have 
 these because we have acted rightly; “these vir¬ 
 tues are formed in man by his doing the ac- 
 
 x Ethics, i, 7. 
 
60 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 tions”; 1 we are what we repeatedly do. Ex¬ 
 cellence, then, is not an act but a habit: “the 
 good of man is a working of the soul in the way 
 of excellence in a complete life:... .for as it is 
 not one swallow or one fine day that makes a 
 spring, so it is not one day or a short time that 
 makes a man blessed and happy.” 2 
 
 Youth is the age of extremes: “if the young 
 commit a fault it is always on the side of ex¬ 
 cess and exaggeration.” The great difficulty 
 of youth (and of many of youth’s elders) is to 
 get out of one extreme without falling into its 
 opposite. For one extreme easily passes into 
 the other, whether through “over-correction” or 
 elsewise: insincerity doth protest too much, and 
 humility hovers on the precipice of conceit. 3 
 Those who are consciously at one extreme will 
 give the name of virtue not to the mean but 
 to the opposite extreme. Sometimes this is 
 well; for if we are conscious of erring in one 
 extreme “we should aim at the other, and so 
 we may reach the middle position,.as men 
 
 r Ethics, ii, 4. 
 
 *lbid, i, 7. 
 
 s “The vanity of Antishenes” the Cynic, said Plato, 
 “peeps out through the holes in his cloak.” 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE «1 
 
 do in straightening hent timber.” 1 But uncon¬ 
 scious extremists look upon the golden mean 
 as the greatest vice; they “expel towards each 
 other the man in the middle position; the 
 brave man is called rash by the coward, and 
 cowardly by the rash man, and in other cases 
 accordingly”; a so in modern politics the “lib¬ 
 eral” is called “conservative” hnd “radical” by 
 th© radical and the conservative. 
 
 It is obvious that this doctrine of the mean 
 is the formulation of a characteristic attitude 
 which appears in almost every system of Greek 
 philosophy. Plato had had it in mind when he 
 called virtue harmonious action; Socrates when 
 he identified virtue with knowledge. The Seven 
 Wise Men had established the tradition by en¬ 
 graving, on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the 
 motto meden agan ,—nothing in excess. Per¬ 
 haps, as Nietzsche claims, * 7 8 all these were at¬ 
 tempts of the Greeks to check their own vio¬ 
 lence and impulsiveness of character; more 
 truly, they reflected the Greek feeling that pas¬ 
 sions are not of themselves vices, but the raw 
 
 1 Ethics, ii, 9. 
 
 7 Ibid., ii, 8. 
 
 *The Birth of Tragedy< 
 
62 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 material of both vice and virtue, according as 
 they function in excess and disproportion, or in 
 measure and harmony. 1 / 
 
 But the golden mean, says our matter-of-fact 
 philosopher, is not all of the secret of happi¬ 
 ness. We must have, too, a fair degree of world¬ 
 ly goods: poverty makes one stingy and grasp¬ 
 ing; while possessions give one that freedom 
 from care and greed which is the source of 
 aristocratic ease and charm. The noblest of 
 these external aids to happiness is friendship. 
 Indeed, friendship is more necessary to the 
 happy than to the unhappy; for happiness is 
 
 multiplied by being shared. It is more im- 
 
 • , 
 
 portant than justice: for “when men are 
 friends, justice is unnecessary; but when men 
 are just, friendship is still a boon.” “A friend 
 is one soul in two bodies.” Yet friendship im¬ 
 plies few friends rather than many; “he who 
 has many friends has no friend”; and “to be 
 
 1 Cf. a sociological formulation of the same idea: “Values 
 are never absolute, but only relative. ... A certain 
 quality in human nature is deemed to be less abundant 
 than it ought to be; therefore we place a value upon it, 
 and . . . encourage and cultivate it. As a result of 
 this valuation we call it a virtue; but' if the same quality 
 should become superabundant we should call it a vice and 
 try to repress it.”—Carver, Essays in Social Justice. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 63 
 
 a friend to many people in the way of perfect 
 friendship is impossible.” Fine friendship re¬ 
 quires duration rather than fitful intensity; 
 and this implies stability of character; it is to 
 altered character that we must attribute the 
 dissolving kaleidoscope of friendship. And 
 friendship requires equality; for gratitude gives 
 it at best a slippery basis. “Benefactors are 
 commonly held to have more friendship for the 
 objects of their kindness than these for them. 
 
 The account of the matter which satisfies most 
 persons is that the one are debtors and the 
 others creditors,.. .and that the debtors wish 
 their creditors out of the way, while the credi¬ 
 tors are anxious, that their debtors should be 
 preserved.” Aristotle rejects this interpreta¬ 
 tion; he prefers to believe that the greater tend¬ 
 erness of the benefactor is to be explained on 
 the analogy of the artist’s affection for his 
 work, or the mother’s for her child. We love 
 that which we have made. 1 
 
 And yet, though external goods and relation¬ 
 ships are necessary to happiness, its essence re¬ 
 mains within us, in rounded knowledge and 
 
 i-Etlrics, viii and ix. 
 
64 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 clarity of soul. Surely sense pleasure is not 
 the way: that road is a circle; as Socrates 
 phrased the coarser Epicurean idea, we scratch 
 that we may itch, and itch that we may scratch. 
 Nor can a political career he the way; for there¬ 
 in we walk subject to the whims of the people; 
 and nothing is so fickle as the crowd. No, hap¬ 
 piness must be a pleasure of the mind; and we 
 may trust it only when it comes from the pur¬ 
 suit or the capture of truth. “The operation of 
 the intellect.. .aims at no end beyond itself, 
 and finds in itself the pleasure which stimu¬ 
 lates it to further operation; and since the at¬ 
 tributes of self-sufficiency, unweariedness, and 
 capacity for rest,.. .plainly belong to this oc¬ 
 cupation, in it must lie perfect happiness.” 1 
 
 Aristotle’s ideal man, however, is no mere 
 metaphysician. “He does not expose himself 
 needlessly to danger, since there are few things 
 for which he cares sufficiently; but he is will¬ 
 ing, in great crises, to give even his life,— 
 knowing that under certain conditions it is not 
 worth while to live. He is of a disposition to do 
 men service, though he is ashamed to have a 
 service done to him. To confer a kindness is a 
 
 1 Ethics, x, 7. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 6o 
 
 mark o£ superiority; to receive one is a mark 
 of subordination.. .He does not take part in 
 public displays.. .He is open in his dislikes and 
 preferences; he talks and acts ftankly, because 
 of his contempt for men and things...He is 
 never fired with admiration, since there is noth¬ 
 ing great in his eyes. He cannot live in com¬ 
 plaisance with others, except it be a friend; 
 complaisance is the characteristic of a slave.. 
 
 He never feels malice, and always forgets and 
 passes over injuries.. .He is not fond of talk¬ 
 ing... It is no concern of his that he should 
 be" praised, or that others should be blamed. 
 He does not speak evil of others, even of his 
 enemies, unless it be to themselves. His car¬ 
 riage is sedate, his voice deep, his speech meas¬ 
 ured; he is not given to hurry, for he is con¬ 
 cerned about only a few things; he Is not prone 
 to vehemence, for he thinks nothing very im¬ 
 portant. A shrill voice and hasty steps come 
 to a man through care.. .He bears the accidents 
 of life with dignity and grace, making the best 
 of his circumstances, like a skilful general who 
 marshals his limited forces with all the strategy 
 of war...He is his own best friend, and takes 
 delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue 
 
*3 6 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 or ability is bis own worst enemy, and is'afraid 
 of solitude.” 1 
 
 Such is the Superman of Aristotle. 
 
 VIII. POLITICS 
 
 1. COMMUNISM AND CONSERVATISM. 
 
 To so aristocratic an ethic there naturally 
 follows (or was the sequence the other way?) 
 a severely aristocratic political philosophy. It 
 was not to be expected that the tutor of an 
 emperor and the husband of a princess would 
 have any exaggerated attachment to the com¬ 
 mon people, or even to the mercantile bour¬ 
 geoisie; our philosophy is where our treasure 
 lies. But further, Aristotle was honestly con¬ 
 servative because of the turmoil and disaster 
 that had come out of Athenian democracy; like 
 a typical scholar he longed for order, se¬ 
 curity, and peace; this, he felt, was no time for 
 political extravaganzas. Radicalism is a luxury 
 of stability; we may dare to change things only 
 when things li© steady under our hands. And 
 
 y Ethics, iv, 3. 
 
67 
 
 A GUIL E TO ARISTOTLE 
 m general, says Aristotle, “the habit of lightly 
 changing the laws is an evil; and when the 
 advantage of change is small, some defects 
 whether in the law or in the ruler had better 
 be met with philosophic toleration. The citizen 
 will gain less by the change than he will lose 
 by acquiring the habit of disobedience.” 1 The 
 power of the law to secure observance, and 
 therefore to maintain political stability, rests 
 very largely on custom; and to pass lightly 
 from old laws to new ones is a certain means 
 of weakening the inmost essence of all law 
 whatever.” 2 “Let us not disregard the ex¬ 
 perience of ages: surely, in the multitude of 
 years, these things, if they were good, would 
 not have remained unknown.” 3 
 
 “These things,” of course, means chiefly 
 Plato’s communistic republic. Aristotle fights 
 the realism of Plato about universals, and the 
 idealism of Plato about government. He finds 
 many dark spots in the picture painted by the 
 Master. He does not relish the barrack-like 
 continuity of contact to which Plato apparently 
 
 i. Politics, ii, 8. 
 z Ibid, v. 8. 
 s lbid.,* ii, i- 
 
 
68 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 condemned his guardian philosophers; conserv¬ 
 ative though he is, Aristotle values individual 
 quality, privacy, and liberty above social effi¬ 
 ciency and power. He would not care to call 
 every contemporary brother or sister, nor every 
 elder person father or mother; if all are your 
 brothers, none is; and “how much better it is to 
 be the real cousin of somebody than to be a son 
 after Plato’s fashion!” 1 * In a state having 
 women and children in common, “love will be 
 watery...Of the two qualities which chiefly 
 inspire regard and affection—that a thing is 
 your own, and that it awakens real love in you 
 
 —neither can exist in such a state” as Plato’s. 3 
 
 \ 
 
 Perhaps there was, in the dim past, a com¬ 
 munistic society, when the family was the only 
 state, and pasturage or simple tillage the only 
 form of life. But “in a more divided state of 
 society,” where the division of labor into un¬ 
 equally important fuhctions elicits and en¬ 
 larges the natural inequality of men, com¬ 
 munism breaks down because it provides no 
 adequate incentive for the exertion of superior 
 abilities. The stimulus of gain is necessary to 
 
 l Politics, ii, 3. 
 
 Hbid., ii, 4, 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 69 
 
 arduous work; and the stimulus of ownership 
 is necessary to proper industry, husbandry and 
 care. When everybody owns everything no¬ 
 body will take care of anything. “That which 
 is common to the greatest number has the least 
 attention bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks 
 chiefly of his own, hardly ever of the public, 
 interest.” * 1 And “there is always a difficulty in 
 living together, or having things in common, 
 but especially in having common property. The 
 partnerships of fellow-travellers” (to say noth, 
 ing of the arduous communism of marriage), 
 “are an example to the point; for they gen¬ 
 erally fall out by the way, and quarrel about 
 any trifle that turns up.” 2 
 
 “Men readily listen” to Utopias, “and are 
 easily induced to believe that in some wonder¬ 
 ful manner everybody will become everybody’s 
 friend, especially when some one is heard de¬ 
 nouncing the evils now existing,.. .which are 
 s^id to arise out of the possession of private 
 property. These evils, however, arise from 
 quite another source—the wickedness of human 
 
 1 Politics , ii, 3. 
 
 l Ibid., ii, 5. 
 
70 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 nature.” 1 “Political science does not make 
 men, but must take them as they come from 
 
 nature.” 2 * 
 
 And human nature, the human average, is 
 nearer to the beast than to the god. The great 
 majority of men are natural dunces and slug¬ 
 gards; in any system whatever these men will 
 sink to the bottom; and to help them with state 
 subsidies is “like pouring water into a leaking 
 cask.” Such people must be ruled in politics 
 and directed in industry; with their consent 
 if possible, without it if necessary. “From the 
 hour of their birth some are marked out for 
 subjection, and others for command.” 8 “For he 
 who can foresee with his mind is by nature in¬ 
 tended to be lord and master; and he who can 
 work only with his body is by nature a slave.” 4 * * * 
 
 1 Politics. Note that conservatives are pessimists, and 
 radicals are optimists, about human nature, which is prob¬ 
 ably neither so good nor so bad as they would like to 
 believe, and may be not so much nature as early training 
 and environment. 
 
 2 Ibid., i, 10. 
 
 z Ibid., i, 5. 
 
 *Ibid., i, 2. Perhaps slave is too harsh a rendering of 
 
 doulos; the word was merely a frank recognition of a 
 
 brutal fact which in our day is perfumed with talk about 
 
 the dignity of labor and the brotherhood of man; in 
 
 nothing do we so far surpass the ancients as in making 
 phrases. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 The slave is to the master what the body Is to 
 the mind; and as the body should be subject 
 to the mind, so “it is better for all inferiors 
 that they should be under the rule of a master. 
 “The slave is a tool with life in it, the tool is 
 a lifeless slave.” And then our hard-hearted 
 philosopher, with a glimmer of possibilities 
 which the Industrial Revolution has opened to 
 our hands, writes for a moment with wistful 
 hope: “If every instrument would accomplish 
 its own work, obeying or anticipating the will 
 of others,...if the shuttle would weave, or the 
 plectrum touch the lyre, without a hand to 
 guide them, then chief workmen would not 
 need assistants, nor masters slaves.” 1 2 
 
 This philosophy typifies the Greek disdain for 
 manual labor. Such work in Athens had not 
 become so complicated as it is today, when the 
 intelligence demanded in many manual trades 
 is at times much greater than that required 
 for the operations of the lower middle class, and 
 even a college professor may look upon an 
 automobile mechanic (in certain exigencies) as 
 a very god; manual work was then merely 
 
 1 Politics , i, 5. 
 
 2 Ibid., i, 4. 
 
72 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 manual, and Aristotle looked down upon it, 
 from the heights of philosophy, as belonging to 
 men without minds, as only fit for slaves, and 
 fitting men only for slavery. Manual labor, 
 he believes, dulls and deteriorates the mind, and 
 leaves neither time nor energy for political in¬ 
 telligence; it seems to Aristotle a reasonable 
 corollary that only persons of some leisure 
 should have a voice in government. 1 “The best 
 form of state will not admit mechanics to 
 citizenship.. .At Thebes there was a law that 
 no man could hold office who had not retired 
 from business ten years before.” 2 Even mer¬ 
 chants and financiers are classed by Aristotle 
 among slaves. “Retail trade is unnatural,... 
 and a mode by which men gain from one an¬ 
 other. The most hated sort of such exchange 
 is...usury, which makes a gain out of money 
 itself, and not from its natural use. For 
 money was intended as an instrument of ex¬ 
 change, and as the mother of interest. This 
 usury (tokos), which means the birth of money 
 from money,... is of all modes of gain the most 
 
 1 Politics, iii, 3; vii, 8. 
 
 mid., iii, 5. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 unnatural.” 1 Money should not breed. Hence 
 “the discussion of the theory of finance is not 
 unworthy of philosophy; but to be engaged in 
 finance, or in money-making, is unworthy of 
 a free man.” 2 
 
 2. MARRIAGE AND EDUCATION 
 
 Woman is to man as the slave to the master, 
 the manual to the mental worker, the bar¬ 
 barian to the Greek. Woman is an unfinished 
 man, left standing on a lower step in the scale 
 of development. 3 The male is by nature su¬ 
 perior, and the female inferior; the one rules 
 and the other is ruled; and this principle ex¬ 
 tends, of necessity, to all mankind.” Woman 
 is weak of will, and therefore incapable of in¬ 
 dependence of character or position; her best 
 
 l. Politics, i, 10. This view influenced the medieval pro¬ 
 hibition of interest. ... , , 
 
 2 Ibid. i, 11. Aristotle adds that philosophers could 
 succeed in such fields if they cared to descend into 
 them; and he proudly points to Thales, who,, foreseeing 
 a good harvest, bought up all the reapers in his city, and 
 then, at harvest time, sold them at his own sweet price, 
 whereupon Aristotle observes that the universal seciet ox 
 great riches is the creation of a monopoly. ... 
 
 a De Gen. Animalium, ii, 3; Hist. Animahum, vm, 1; 
 Pol, i, 5. Cf. Weininger; and Merediths Woman will 
 be the last thing civilized by man” (Ordeal of Richard 
 Fevcrel, p. 1). It appears, however, that man was, (or 
 will be) the last thing civilized by woman; for the great 
 civilizing agencies are the family and a settled economic 
 life; and both of these are the creations of woman. 
 
74 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 condition is a quiet home life in which, while 
 ruled by the man in her external relations, she 
 may be in domestic affairs supreme. Women 
 should not be made more like men, as in 
 Plato's republic; rather the dissimilarity should 
 be increased; nothing is so attractive as the 
 different. “The courage of a man and that of 
 a woman are not, as Socrates supposed, the 
 same: the courage of a man is shown in com¬ 
 manding; that of a woman in obeying.. .As the 
 poet says, ‘Silence is a woman’s glory.’ ” 1 
 Aristotle seems to suspect that this ideal 
 enslavement of woman is a rare achievement 
 for man, and that as often as not the sceptre 
 is with the tongue rather than with the arm. 
 As if to give the male an indispensable advan¬ 
 tage, he advises him to defer marriage till the 
 vicinity of thirty-seven, and then to marry a 
 lass of some twenty years. A girl who is 
 rounding the twenties is usually the equal 
 of a- man of thirty, but may perhaps be 
 managed by a seasoned warrior of thirty- 
 
 seven. What attracts Aristotle to this mat- 
 
 « 
 
 rimonial mathematics is the consideration 
 that two such disparate persons will lose their 
 
 1 Politics . i, 13. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 75' 
 
 reproductive power and passions at approxi¬ 
 mately the same time. “If the man is still able 
 to beget children while the woman is unable 
 to bear them, or vice versa , quarrels and dif¬ 
 ferences will arise. . . . Since the time of 
 generation is commonly limited within the age 
 of seventy years in the man, and fifty in the 
 woman, the commencement of their union 
 should conform to these periods. The union 
 of male and female when too young is bad for 
 the creation of children; in all animals the off¬ 
 spring of the young are small and ill-developed, 
 and generally female.” ? Health is more im¬ 
 portant than love. Further, “it conduces to 
 temperance not too marry too soon; for women 
 who marry early are apt to be wanton; and 
 in men too the bodily frame is. stunted if they 
 marry while they are growing.” 1 These matters 
 should not be left to youthful caprice, they 
 should be under state supervision and control: 
 the state should determine the minimum and 
 maximum ages of marriages for each sex, the 
 best seasons for conception, and the rate of 
 increase in population. If the natural rate of 
 
 1 Politics, vii, 16. It is apparent that Aristotle has in mind 
 only the temperance of women; the moral effect of de¬ 
 ferred marriage upon men does not seem to agnate him. 
 
76 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 increase is too high, the cruel practice of in¬ 
 fanticide may be replaced by abortion; and ‘‘let 
 abortion be procured before sense and life have 
 begun.” 1 There is an ideal number of population 
 for every state, varying with its position and 
 resources. “A state when composed of too few 
 is not, as a state should be, self-sufficing; while 
 if it has too many .... it becomes a nation 
 and not a state, and is almost incapable of 
 constitutional government,” 2 or of ethnic or 
 political unity. Probably anything in excess of 
 a population of 10,000 is undesirable. 
 
 Education, too, should be in the hands of the 
 
 state. ‘‘That which most contributes to the 
 
 permanence of constitutions is the adaptation 
 
 * 
 
 of education to the form of government. . . The 
 citizen should , be moulded to the form of 
 government under which he lives.” 3 By state 
 control of schools we might divert men from 
 industry and trade to agriculture; and we might 
 train men, while keeping property private, to 
 open their possessions to discriminately com¬ 
 mon use. “Among good men, with respect to 
 the use of property, the proverb will hold, that 
 
 1 Politics . 
 
 *Ibid., vii, 4. 
 
 z Ibid. t v. 9; viii, 1.. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 77 
 
 ‘friends should have all things in common.’ ” 1 
 But above all the growing citizen must be 
 taught obedience to law, else a state is impos¬ 
 sible. “It has been well said that ‘he who has 
 never learned to obey cannot be a good com¬ 
 mander.’ . . . The good citizen should be cap- 
 1 able of both.” And only a state system of 
 schools can achieve social unity amid ethnic 
 heterogeneity; the state is a plurality which 
 must be made into a unity and a community by 
 education. 2 Let youth be taught, too, the 
 great boon it has in the state, the unappreciated 
 security which comes of social organization, the 
 freedom that comes of law. “Man, when per¬ 
 fected, is the best of animals; but when 
 isolated he is the worst of all; for injustice is 
 more dangerous when armed, and man is 
 equipped at birth with the weapon of intelli* 
 gence, and with qualities of character , which 
 he may use for the vilest ends. Wherefore if 
 he have not virtue he is the most unholy and 
 savage of animals, full of gluttony and lust.” 
 And only social control can give him virtue. 
 Through speech man evolved society; through 
 
 1 Politics, vi, 4; ii, 5. 
 
 a Ibid., iii, 4; ii, 5. 
 
78 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 •ociety, Intelligence; through intelligence, 
 order; and through order, civilization. In such 
 an ordered state the individual has a thousand 
 opportunities and avenues of development open 
 to him which a solitary life would never give. 
 “To live alone,” then, “one must he either an 
 animal or a god.” 1 
 
 Hence revolution is almost always unwise; it 
 may achieve some good, but at the cost of 
 many evils, the chief of which is the disturb¬ 
 ance, and perhaps the dissolution, of that social 
 order and structure on which every political 
 good depends. The direct consequences of 
 revolutionary innovations may be calculable 
 and salutary; but the indirect are generally 
 incalculable, and not seldom disastrous. “They 
 who take only a few points into account find it 
 easy to pronounce judgment;” and a man can 
 make up his mind quickly if he has only a little 
 to make up. “Young men are easily deceived, 
 for they are quick to ho$e.” The suppression 
 of long-established habits brings the overthrow 
 of innovating governments because 'the old 
 
 1 Politics, i, 2. “Or,” adds Nietzsche, who takes nearly 
 
 all of his political philosophy from Aristotle, “one must 
 be both—that is, a philosopher.” 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE ' 79 
 
 habits persist among the people; characters are 
 not as easily changed as laws. If a consti¬ 
 tution is to be permanent, all the parts of a 
 society must desire it to be maintained. There¬ 
 fore a ruler who would avoid revolution should 
 prevent extremes of poverty and wealth,—“a 
 condition which is most often the result of 
 war;” he should (like j^ie English) encourage 
 colonization as an outlet for a dangerously con¬ 
 gested population; and he should foster and 
 practice religion. An autocratic ruler particu¬ 
 larly “should appear to be earnest in the wor¬ 
 ship of the gods; for if men think that a ruler 
 is religious and reveres the gods, they are 
 less afraid of suffering injustice at his hands, 
 and are less disposed to conspire against him, 
 since they believe that the gods themselves are 
 fighting on his side.” 1 
 
 3 . DEMOCRACY AND ARISTOCRACY 
 
 With such safeguards in religion, in education, 
 and in the ordering of family life, almost any 
 of the traditional forms of government will 
 serve. All forms have good and bad com¬ 
 mingled in them, and are severally adapted to 
 
 Politics, iv, 5; ii, 9; v, 7; ii, 11. 
 
80 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 various conditions. Theoretically, the ideal 
 form of government would be the centralization 
 of all political power in the one best man. 
 Homer is right: “Bad is the lordship of many; 
 let one be your ruler and master.” For such a 
 man law would be rather an instrument than 
 a limit: “for men of eminent ability there is 
 no law—they are themselves a law. Anyone 
 would be ridiculous Who should attempt to 
 make laws for them; they would probably re¬ 
 tort what, in the fable of Antisthenes, the lions 
 said to the hares when, in the council of beasts, 
 the latter began hai mguing and claiming 
 ©quality for all—“Whei e are your claws?” 1 
 
 But in practice, monarchy is usually the 
 worst form of government, for great strength 
 and great virtue are not near allied. Hence 
 the best practicable polity is aristocracy, the 
 rule of the informed and capable few. Govern¬ 
 ment is too complex a thing to have its issues 
 decided by number, when lesser issues are re¬ 
 served for knowledge and ability. “As th® 
 
 1 Politics, Hi, 13. Aristotle probably bad Alexander or 
 Philip in mind while writing this passage, just a» 
 Nietzsche seems to have been influenced towards similar 
 conclusions by the alluring career of Napoleon. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 81 
 
 physician ought to be judged by the physician, 
 so ought men in general to be judged by their 
 peers. . . Now does not this same principle 
 apply to elections? For a right election can 
 only be made by those who have knowledge: a 
 geometrician, e.g., will choose rightly in mat¬ 
 ters of geometry; or a pilot in matters of 
 navigation. . } So that neither the election 
 of magistrates nor the calling of them to ac¬ 
 count should be entrusted to the many.” 
 
 The difficulty with hereditary aristocracy is 
 that it has no permanent economic base; the 
 eternal recurrence of the nouveaux riches puts 
 political office sooner or later at the disposal 
 of the highest bidder. “It is surely a bad thing 
 that the greatest offices . . . should be bought. 
 The law which permits this abuse makes wealth 
 of more account than ability, and the whole 
 state becomes avaricious. For whenever the 
 chiefs of the state deem anything honorable, 
 
 the other citizens are sure to follow their ex¬ 
 ample” (the “prestige imitation” of modern 
 social psychology); “and where ability has not - 
 the first place there is no real aristocracy” 1 2 
 
 1 Politics, iii, 11. Cf. the modern argument for “occupa¬ 
 tional representation.” 
 
 *Ibid., ii, 11. 
 
81 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 Democracy is usually the result of a revolu¬ 
 tion against plutocracy. “Love of gain in the 
 ruling classes tends constantly to diminish 
 their number” (Marx's “elimination of the mid¬ 
 dle class”), “and so to strengthen the masses, 
 who in the end set upon their masters and 
 establish democracies.” This “rule by the poor” 
 has some advantages. “The people, though in¬ 
 dividually they may be worse judges than those 
 who have special knowledge, are collectively as 
 good. Moreover, there are some artists whose 
 works are best judged not by themselves alone, 
 but by those who do not possess the art; e.g., 
 the user or master of a house will be a.better 
 judge of it than the builder; . . . and the guest 
 will be a better judge of a feast than the cook.” 1 
 And “the many are more incorruptible than the 
 few; they are like the greater quantity of water 
 which is less easily spoiled than a little. The 
 individual is liable to be overcome by anger, or 
 by some other passion, and then his judgment 
 
 1 Politics, iii, 15, 8, 11. In these passages we have a fair 
 outline of a desirable amendment to democracy: adminis¬ 
 tration by experts democratically chosen by occupational 
 ballot, and pursuing ends determined by the whole com¬ 
 munity. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 83 
 
 is necessarily perverted; but it is hardly to be 
 supposed that a great number of persons would 
 all get into a passion and go wrong at the 
 same moment.” 1 
 
 Yet democracy is on the whole inferior to 
 aristocracy. 2 For it is based on a false assump¬ 
 tion of equality; it “arises out of the notion 
 that those who are equal in one respect (e.g., 
 in respect of the law) are equal in all respects; 
 because men are equally free they claim to be 
 absolutely equal.” The upshot is that ability is 
 sacrificed to number, while numbers are 
 manipulated by trickery. Because the people 
 are so easily misled, and so fickle in their 
 views, the ballot should be limited to the in¬ 
 telligent. What ,we need is a combination of 
 aristocracy and democracy. 
 
 Constitutional government offers this happy 
 union. It is not the best conceivable govern¬ 
 ment—that would be an aristocracy of educa- 
 
 1 Politics, iii, 15. Tarde, Le Bon and other social psy¬ 
 chologists assert precisely the contrary; and though they 
 exaggerate the vices of the crowd, they might find better 
 support than Aristotle in the behavior of the Athenian 
 Assembly 430-330 B. C. 
 
 2 Ibid w ii, 9. 
 
84 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 tion—but it is the best possible state. “We 
 must ask what is the best constitution for most 
 states, and the best life for most men; neither 
 assuming a standard of excellence which will 
 be above ordinary persons, nor an education 
 exceptionally favored by nature or circum¬ 
 stance, nor yet an ideal state which will be 
 only an aspiration; but having in mind such a 
 life as the majority will be able to share, and a 
 form of government to which states in general 
 can attain.” “It is necessary to begin by as¬ 
 suming - a principle of general application, 
 namely, that that part of the state which de¬ 
 sires the continuance of the government must 
 be stronger than that which does not;” 1 and 
 strength consists neither in number alone, nor 
 in property alone, nor in military or political 
 ability alone, but in a combination of these, so 
 that regard has to be taken of “freedom, wealth, 
 culture and noble birth, as well as of mere 
 numerical superiority.” Now where shall we 
 find such an economic majority to support our 
 constitutional government? Perhaps best in 
 the middle class: here again we have the golden 
 
 *, Politics, iv, 11, 10. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 85 
 
 mean, just as constitutional government itself 
 would be a mean between democracy and 
 aristocracy. Our state will be sufficiently 
 democratic if the road to every office is open 
 to all; and sufficiently aristocratic if the 
 offices themselves are closed except to those 
 who have traveled the road and arrived fully 
 prepared. From whatever angle we approach 
 our eternal political problem we monotonously 
 reach the same conclusion: that the community 
 should determine the ends to be pursued, but 
 that only experts should select and apply the 
 means; that choice should be democratically 
 spread, but that office should be rigidly re¬ 
 served for the equipped and winnowed best. 
 
 IX. CRITICISM 
 
 What shall we say of this philosophy? Per¬ 
 haps nothing rapturous. It is difficult to be 
 enthusiastic about Aristotle, because it was dif¬ 
 ficult for him to be enthusiastic about any¬ 
 thing; and si vis me flere, primum tibi 
 
86 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 flendum. 1 His motto is nil admirari —to admire 
 or marvel at nothing; and we hesitate to violate 
 his motto in his case. We miss in him the 
 reforming zeal of Plato, the angry love of 
 humanity which made the great idealist de¬ 
 nounce his fellow-men. We miss the daring 
 originality of his teacher, the lofty imagination, 
 the capacity for generous delusion. And yet, 
 after reading Plato, nothing could be so salu¬ 
 tary for us as Aristotle's sceptic calm. 
 
 fyet us summarize our disagreement. We are 
 bothered, at the outset, with his insistence on 
 logic. We want him to describe his ideal, and 
 he describes a perfect syllogism; not content 
 with that he makes his syllogism judge of our 
 ideals. He thinks the syllogism a description 
 of man’s way of reasoning, whereas it merely 
 describes man’s way of dressing up his reason¬ 
 ing for the persuasion of another mind; he sup¬ 
 poses that.thought begins with premisses and 
 seeks their conclusions, when actually thought 
 begins with hypothetical conclusions and seeks 
 their justifying premisses,—and seeks them best 
 by the observation of particular events und^r 
 
 . 1<4 If you wish me to weep you must weep first”— 
 
 Horace (Ars Poetica ) to actors and writers. 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 87 
 
 the controlled and isolated conditions of ex¬ 
 periment. Yet how foolish we should be to 
 forget that two thousand years have changed 
 merely the incidentals of Aristotle’s logic, that 
 Occam and Bacon and Whewell and Mill and a 
 hundred others have but found spots in his sun, 
 and that Aristotle’s creation of this new dis¬ 
 cipline of thought, and his firm establishment 
 of its essential lines, remain among the lasting 
 achievements of the human mind. 
 
 It is again the absence of experiment and 
 fruitful hypothesis that leaves Aristotle’s 
 natural science a mass of undigested observa¬ 
 tions. His specialty is the collection and classi¬ 
 fication of data; in every field he wields his 
 categories and produces catalogues. But side 
 by side with this bent and talent for observation 
 goes a Platonic addiction to metaphysics; this 
 trips him up in every science, and inveigles him 
 into the wildest presuppositions. Here indeed 
 was the great defect of the Greek mind: it was 
 not disciplined; it lacked limiting and steady¬ 
 ing traditions; it moved freely in an uncharted 
 field, and ran too readily to theories and con¬ 
 clusions. So Greek philosophy leaped on to 
 heights yet unreached again, while Greek 
 
38 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 science limped behind. Our modern danger is 
 precisely opposite; inductive data fall upon us 
 from all sides like the lava of Vesuvius; we 
 suffocate with uncoordinated facts; our minds 
 are overwhelmed with sciences breeding and 
 multiplying into specialistic chaos for want of 
 synthetic thought and a unifying philosophy. 
 We are all mere fragments of what a man 
 might be. 
 
 Aristotle’s ethics is a branch of his logic: the 
 ideal life is like a proper syllogism. He gives 
 us a handbook of propriety rather than a 
 stimulus to improvement. , An ancient critic 
 spoke of him as “moderate to “excess.” An 
 extremist might call the Ethics the champion 
 collection of platitudes in all literature; and an 
 Anglophobe would be consoled with the thought 
 that Englishmen in their youth had done ad¬ 
 vance penance for the imperialistic sins of their 
 adult years, since both at Cambridge and at 
 Oxford they had been compelled to read every 
 word of the Nicomachean Ethics. One longs to 
 mingle fresh green Leaves of Grass with these 
 drier - pages, to add Whitman’s exhilarating 
 justification of sense joy to Aristotle’s exaltation 
 of a purely intellectual happiness. One won- 
 
89 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 ders if this Aristotelian ideal of immoderate 
 moderation has had anything to do with the 
 colorless virtue, the starched perfection, the ex¬ 
 pressionless good form, of the British aristoc¬ 
 racy. Matthew Arnold tells us that in his 
 time Oxford tutors looked upon the Ethics as 
 infallible. For three hundred years this book 
 and the Politics have formed the ruling British 
 mind, perhaps to great and noble achievements, 
 but certainly to a hard and cold efficiency: one 
 wonders what the result would have been if the 
 masters of the greatest of empires had been 
 nurtured, instead, on the holy fervor and the 
 constructive passion of the Republic. 
 
 After all, Aristotle was not quite Greek; he 
 had been settled and formed before coming to 
 Athens; there was nothing Athenian about him,, 
 nothing of the hasty and inspiriting experi- 
 mentalism which made Athens throb with 
 political 6lan and at last helped to subject her 
 to a unifying despot. He realized too com¬ 
 pletely the Delphic command to avoid excess: 
 he is so anxious to pare away extremes that at 
 last nothing is left. He is so fearful of dis¬ 
 order that he forgets to be fearful of slavery; 
 he is so timid of uncertain change that he pre- 
 
90 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 fers a certain changelessness that near r« 
 sembles death. He lacks that Heraclitean sens 
 of flux which justifies the conservative in b< 
 lieving that all permanent change is gradua 
 but justifies the radical in believing that n 
 changelessness is permanent. He forgets th£ 
 Plato’s communism was meant only for tb 
 elite, the unselfish and ungreedy few; and b 
 comes deviously to a Platonic result when l 
 says that though property should be private ii 
 use should be as far as possible common. H 
 does not see (and perhaps he could not t 
 expected in his early day to see) that pr 
 vate control of the means of production W£ 
 stimulating and salutary only when thej 
 means were so simple as to be purchasab 
 by any man; and that their increasing cor 
 plexity and cost lead to a dangerous centraliz 
 tion of ownership and power, and to an art 
 ficial and finally disruptive inequality. 
 
 But after all, these are quite inessenti; 
 criticisms of what remains the most marveloi 
 and influential system of thought ever put t 
 gether by any single mind. It may be doubte 
 if any other thinker has contributed so muc 
 to the enlightenment of the world. Ever 
 
A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 91 
 
 later age has dra\y n upon Aristotle, and stood 
 upon his shoulders to see the truth. The varied 
 and magnificent culture of Alexandria found its 
 
 scientific inspiration in him. His Organon 
 
 ___ ♦ 
 
 flayed a central role in shaping the minds of 
 the medieval barbarians into disciplined and 
 consistent thought. The other works, trans¬ 
 lated by Nestorian Christians into Syriac in the 
 fifth century A. D., and thence into Arabic and 
 Hebrew in the tenth century, and thence into 
 Latin towards 1225, turned scholasticism from 
 its eloquent beginnings in Abelard to encyclo¬ 
 pedic completion in Thomas Aquinas (1227- 
 1274). The Crusaders brought back more ac¬ 
 curate Greek copies of the philosopher’s texts; 
 and the Greek scholars of Constantinople 
 brought further Aristotelian treasures with 
 them when, after 1453, they fled from the be- 
 sieging.Turks. The works of Aristotle came to 
 be for European philosophy what the Bible was 
 for theology—an almost infallible text, with 
 solutions for every problem. In 1215 the Papal 
 legate at Paris forbade teachers to lecture on 
 his works; in 1231 Gregory IX appointed k 
 commission to expurgate him; by 1260 he was 
 de rigueur in every Christian school, and 
 
92 A GUIDE TO ARIST'QTLE 
 
 ecclesiastical assemblies penalized deviatic's 
 from his views. Chaucer describes his student 
 as happy by kaving 
 
 At his beddes hed 
 
 Twenty bookes clothed in blake or red , 
 
 Of Aristotle and his philosophic; 1 
 
 and in the first circles of Hell, says Dante, 
 
 “I saw the Master there of those who know. 
 Amid the philosophic family, 
 
 By all admired, and by all reverenced; 
 
 There Plato too I saw, and Socrates, 
 
 Who stood beside him closer than the rest.* 
 
 Such lines give us some inkling of the honor 
 which a thousand years offered to the Stagirite.. 
 Not till new instruments, accumulated observa¬ 
 tions, and patient experiments remade science 
 and gave irresistible weapons to Occam and 
 Ramus, to Roger and Francis Bacon, was the 
 reign of Aristotle ended. No other mind had 
 for so long a time ruled the intellect of man¬ 
 kind. 
 
 1 Quoted by Benn, i, 276. \ 
 
 s Inferno, iv, 131f. 
 
93 
 
 f 
 
 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 X. LATER LIFE AND DEATH 
 
 Meanwhile life had become unmanageably 
 complicated for our philosopher. He found him¬ 
 self on the one hand embroiled with Alexander 
 for protesting against the execution of Cal-j 
 listhenes (a nephew of Aristotle), who had re{ 
 fused to worship Alexander as a god; and) 
 Alexander had answered the protest by hinting! 
 that it was quite within his omnipotence to 
 put even philosophers to death. At the same 
 time Aristotle was busy defending Alexander 
 among the Athenians. He preferred Greek 
 solidarity to city patriotism, and thought cul¬ 
 ture and science would flourish better when 
 petty sovereignties and disputes were ended; 
 and he saw in Alexander what Goethe was to 
 see in Napoleon—the philosophic unity of a 
 chaotic and intolerably manifold world. The 
 Athenians, hungering for liberty, growled at 
 Aristotle, and became bitter when Alexander 
 had a statue of the philosopher put up in the 
 heart of the hostile city. In this turmoil we get 
 an impression of Aristotle quite contrary to 
 that left upon us by his Ethics : here is a man 
 
94 A GUIDE TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 not cold and inhumanly calm, but a fighter, 
 pursuing his Titanic work in a circle of enemies 
 on every side. The successors of Plato at the 
 Academy, the oratorical school of Isocrates, 
 and the angry crowds that hung on Demos¬ 
 thenes’ acid eloquence, intrigued and clamored 
 ior his exile or his death. 
 
 I And then, suddenly (323 B. C.), Alexander 
 tied. Athens went wild with patriotic joy; 
 Ihe Macedonian party was overthrown, and 
 [Athenian independence was proclaimed. An¬ 
 tipater, successor of Alexander and intimate 
 friend of Aristotle, marched upon the rebellious 
 city. Most of the Macedonian party fled. 
 Eurymedon, a chief priest, brought in an indict¬ 
 ment against Aristotle, charging him with 
 having taught that prayer and sacrifice were 
 
 of no avail. Aristotle saw himself fated to be 
 
 , 
 
 tried by juries and crowds incomparably more 
 hostile than those that had murdered Socrates. 
 Very wisely, he left the city, saying that he 
 would not give Athens a chance to sin a second 
 time against philosophy. There was no 
 cowardice in this; an accused person at Athens 
 had always the option of preferring exile. 1 
 
 x Grote, 20.