ARISTOTLE

Aristotle

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I. LIFE AND WORKS

II. THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES: SCIENTIFIC METHOD

III. FIRST PHILOSOPHY

IV. PHYSICS

V. PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARISTOTLE

CHAPTER I

LIFE AND WORKS

It has not commonly been the lot of philosophers, as it is of great poets, that their names should become household words. We should hardly call an Englishman well read if he had not heard the name of Sophocles or Molière. An educated man is expected to know at least who these great writers were, and to understand an allusion to the Antigone or Le Misanthrope. But we call a man well read if his mind is stored with the verse of poets and the prose of historians, even though he were ignorant of the name of Descartes or Kant. Yet there are a few philosophers whose influence on thought and language has been so extensive that no one who reads can be ignorant of their names, and that every man who speaks the language of educated Europeans is constantly using their vocabulary. Among this few Aristotle holds not the lowest place. We have all heard of him, as we have all heard of Homer. He has left his impress so firmly on theology that many of the formulae of the Churches are unintelligible without acquaintance with his conception of the universe. If we are interested in the growth of modern science we shall readily discover for ourselves that some knowledge of Aristotelianism is necessary for the understanding of Bacon and Galileo and the other great anti-Aristotelians who created the "modern scientific" view of Nature. If we turn to the imaginative literature of the modern languages, Dante is a sealed book, and many a passage of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton is half unmeaning to us unless we are at home in the outlines of Aristotle's philosophy. And if we turn to ordinary language, we find that many of the familiar turns of modern speech cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of the doctrines they were first forged to express. An Englishman who speaks of the "golden mean" or of "liberal education," or contrasts the "matter" of a work of literature with its "form," or the "essential" features of a situation or a scheme of policy with its "accidents," or "theory" with "practice," is using words which derive their significance from the part they play in the vocabulary of Aristotle. The unambitious object of this little book is, then, to help the English reader to a better understanding of such familiar language and a fuller comprehension of much that he will find in Dante and Shakespeare and Bacon.

Life of Aristotle.--The main facts of Aristotle's life may be briefly told. He was born in 385-4 B.C. at Stagirus, a little city of the Chalcidic peninsula, still called, almost by its ancient name, Chalcis, and died at the age of sixty-two at Chalcis in Euboea. Thus he is a contemporary of Demosthenes, his manhood witnessed the struggle which ended in the establishment of the Macedonian monarchy as the dominant power in Hellas, and his later years the campaigns in which his pupil Alexander the Great overthrew the Persian Empire and carried Greek civilisation to the banks of the Jumna. In studying the constitutional theories of Aristotle, it is necessary to bear these facts in mind. They help to explain certain limitations of outlook which might otherwise appear strange in so great a man. It throws a great deal of light on the philosopher's intense conviction of the natural inferiority of the "barbarian" intellect and character to remember that he grew up in an outlying region where the "barbarian" was seen to disadvantage in the ordinary course of life. Hence the distinction between Greek and "barbarian" came to mean for him much what the "colour-line" does to an American brought up in a Southern State. So, again, when we are struck by his "provincialism," his apparent satisfaction with the ideal of a small self-contained city-state with a decently oligarchical government, a good system of public education, and no "social problems," but devoid alike of great traditions and far-reaching ambitions, we must remember that the philosopher himself belonged to just such a tiny community without a past and without a future. The Chalcidic cities had been first founded, as the name of the peninsula implies, as colonies from the town of Chalcis in Euboea; Corinth had also been prominent in establishing settlements in the same region. At the height of Athenian Imperial prosperity in the age of Pericles the district had fallen politically under Athenian control, but had been detached again from Athens, in the last years of the Archidamian war, by the genius of the great Spartan soldier and diplomat Brasidas. Early in the fourth century the Chalcidic cities had attempted to form themselves into an independent federation, but the movement had been put down by Sparta, and the cities had fallen under the control of the rising Macedonian monarchy, when Aristotle was a baby. A generation later, a double intrigue of the cities with Philip of