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ventured into the province of Physical Science, Aristotle was endeavouring to map out a terra incognita which he had no means for exploring. He had neither the methods nor the instruments which were needed: but were men to wait for the microscope and telescope, or for the full development of the various branches of mathematical and physical science, before formulating any ideas on the general character of the universe in which they were placed? Now, that we know that Aristotle was following a blind path in his endless refinements on the meaning of 'motion' and similar terms, we may find his physical treatises 'inexpressibly fatiguing and unfruitful';' but the question is, whether it was not worth while to make some attempt at a working hypothesis which might supply men with a framework in which to arrange their thoughts and feelings with regard to the nature of the world around them. There is a value in the prophet's vision as well as in the historian's narrative; and men may be thankful to the philosopher who gives wings to their imagination and extends the limit of their mental horizon, however much he may have failed to anticipate the revelations of modern science.

To turn now to the history of Aristotle's writings. All readers of Aristotle have had to complain of the defective arrangement and the general abstruseness of

then we must trust observation more than theory, and only trust our theory if it gives results corresponding to the phenomena,' TOIS λόγοις πιστευτέον ἐὰν ὁμολογούμενα δεικνύωσι τοῖς φαινομένοις. Compare a multitude of similar passages in Bonitz's Index under φαινόμενα.

1 Lewes Aristotle, p. 127.

his works. This has been accounted for, partly, by the supposition that the treatises which have come down to us under his name, consist of notes for lectures hastily revised by himself, or edited after his death by his disciples, and partly by the story, reported by Strabo and others, of their concealment for nearly 150 years in the cellar of Neleus. According to this story, the Library and MSS. of Aristotle passed, at the death of his successor Theophrastus, into the hands of Neleus, a pupil of the latter, and were taken by him to Scepsis, a city which was then under the rule of the kings of Pergamus. These kings appear to have paid little regard to the rights of property in their desire to augment the royal library, which was almost as renowned as that of the Ptolemies; and the descendants of Neleus could only preserve their treasures by hiding them in a cellar where they suffered much from worms and damp. When the last Attalus left his kingdom to the Romans in 133 B.C., the then owner of the MSS. brought them out from their concealment and sold them to Apellicon, a Peripatetic residing at Athens, who at once had copies made, and endeavoured, not very succesfully, to restore the text where it was defective. The library of Apellicon was seized by Sulla on his conquest of Athens in 86 B.C., and transported to Rome, where the Aristotelian MSS. once more fell into the hands of a competent reader in the person of the Rhodian Andronicus, who brought out a new edition in which the treatises were rearranged and the text much improved. This edition is considered to be the foundation of our existing text of Aristotle. There seems no doubt that somehow or other the abstruser works of Aristotle had been lost to common use not many years after his death. Strabo

tells us that only a few of the more popular treatises were in the possession of the Peripatetic school at Athens, and this is what we might infer from the manner in which Cicero speaks of the style of Aristotle,'-using expressions which are certainly anything but appropriate to the books which have come down to us,—as well as from the comparative frequency of his references to the lost Dialogues. Again we find in Diogenes Laertius a list taken probably from the catalogue of the Alexandrine Library, containing the names of 146 separate Aristotelian treatises, of which more than twenty are dialogues. This would represent Aristotle as he was known at the beginning of the 2nd century B.C. Our existing Aristotle consists of 46 treatises, very few of which appear in the list of Diogenes.

As a specimen of the more popular style by which Aristotle was best known during the interval from Theophrastus to Andronicus I insert here a translation of a passage from his dialogue De Philosophia preserved by Cicero (N. D. 11. 95).

'Imagine a race of men who had always lived under ground in beautiful houses adorned with pictures and statues and every luxury of wealth. Suppose that some dim rumour of a divine being had reached them in their subterranean world. Then suppose that the earth were to open and they ascended up from their dark abodes and saw before them all the wonders of this world. Could they doubt, when they beheld the earth and the sea and the sky with its gathering clouds and its mighty winds, and the glory and majesty of the sun as he floods the heaven with the light of day, and then the starry

1 See Acad. II. 119, veniet flumen orationis aureum fundens Aristoteles, and the other passages cited in Grote's Aristotle, I. 43.

heaven of night, and the varying brightness of the waxing and the waning moon, and the regular movements of all the heavenly bodies and their risings and settings governed by an everlasting and unchanging law,-could they doubt that the Gods really existed, and that these mighty works were theirs?'

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With the death of Aristotle a new age begins. The fearless spirit of Greek thought which had soared upwards as on eagle wings to the empyrean, gazing with Plato on the Ideas clustered around the one supreme Idea of Good, contemplating with Aristotle the Thought of Thought, the Form and End and Cause of all existence, sank back to earth in weariness when once the spell of the mighty masters was removed. A feebler generation followed whose lot was cast in a more ungenial time. the great prae-Socratic movement had terminated in the scepticism of the Sophists, so this greater movement produced its natural reaction in the scepticism of Pyrrho and the later Academy. Even the dogmatic systems which sprang up along with them, while asserting man's claim to know, yet changed the object and limited the range of knowledge, as it was understood by the preceding age. Lofty idealist systems require strenuous effort of thought and imagination on the part of their adherents, if they are not to wither into mere empty phrases and barren formalism. While the founders live, enthusiastic faith gives a motive for effort, and supplies any deficiency in the evidence demanded by reason: when that first enthusiasm has died away, slumbering doubts awake in the minds of the more independent disciples, and the ruder and coarser among them are likely to seize on some one

portion or aspect of the master's teaching, losing sight of its more subtle and refined elements, and to make that stand for the whole; or perhaps they break away altogether and fall back on some earlier and simpler philosophy.

So here, men were not only repelled by the difficulty of understanding what Plato and Aristotle really meant; they had further positive grounds for departing from them when they found them opposed to each other on essential points, such as the nature and import of ideas, when they saw the weaknesses of the former laid bare in the criticisms of the latter, and became aware of the vagueness and uncertainty which characterized the the critic's own utterances in regard to questions of deep practical interest such as the nature of God and the providential government of the world. Under these circumstances those who still believed that it was possible for men to attain to knowledge, practically limited the range of knowledge to what had reference to man's own immediate use; all that they asked for was knowledge so far as it is needed to direct the life of man; and by man they meant the individual standing alone, not man as the citizen of a Greek πόλις. We shall see, when we come to speak of the Stoics, in what way the political circumstances of the time contributed to this change of view. Again, the abstruseness and indefiniteness, which offended them in preceding philosophers, were especially connected. with Ideas and Forms, with the depreciation of the senses and the glorification of incorporeal spirit. All this might be avoided by the assumption that the sole ground of knowledge is sensation, and that body is the only thing which can either act or be acted upon. The post.

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