faculties which go beyond sensuous perception and imagination without yet reaching the highest stage of thought": the creative reason being itself apparently just this highest stage of intellectual development. Renan returns rather to the position of Alexander and the Arabians. The creative reason is, he thinks, analogous to Malebranche's theory of seeing things in God. Borrowed perhaps from Anaxagoras it is in decided conflict with many other assertions of the Stagyrite: but it is but lost labour to try to reconcile what Aristotle himself left unsolved. And lastly, Brentano interprets the passive reason as equivalent to the imaginative or representative powers and regards the creative intellect as the spiritual faculty which operates before all thought, and therefore operates unconsciously-a faculty which once it is applied to our sensitive capacity gives it the necessary impulse for acting on our spiritual nature, and so becomes the efficient cause of our thought. It is in fact "the light which illuminating the images of sense makes the intelligible, within the sensible, knowable to the eye of our mind'.”

The scattered truths exhibited by these divergent theories would seem more or less comprised in the explanation which has been already suggested. The creative intellect is clearly, to begin with, not the intelligence of God as such: it is, Aristotle expressly tells us, 'in the soul' of man that the distinction which he draws is found: and whatever account we give of it must harmonize with this one fact. But if this creative thought be the act of mind which for each one of us translates a world of phenomena into a world of real objects, which renders what is merely sensuous capable of forming parts in a rational experience, if it be the very condition of discursive thought because without it our intellectual powers would have no object on which to operate-it follows that it is a process which is confined to no one individual, but which every man goes through consciously or unconsciously. It represents the very act which called the world, as a thing which could be known, into existence: it takes 1 Brentano, Psychologie des Aris., p. 180.

us back to the time when man first thought the universe: and it thus easily approximates to that universal thought or Xoyos which “was in the beginning "—as the a priori condition of a rational experience—and which was also God himself'.

What then, let us ask, is the general significance or import of Aristotle's theory of a creative reason, and how does it stand to his general psychology and metaphysic? The answer to the question is twofold. It overcomes on the one hand the antithesis between body and soul; it explains on the other hand the parts played by sense and thought respectively in knowledge. So long as soul was merely the entelechy of the body, the explanation of their unity and co-operation was but half completed; and it was difficult to understand how merely material phenomena became cognitive and intellectual conditions. But with the consideration that it is only through an act of thought that body can be known at all, that body is body only in so far as it is interpreted by intellect, the antithesis which the definition of the soul had only partially removed is brought finally to unity. And though we need not assert that Aristotle himself gave this application to his theory, it cannot be far wrong in us to draw the conclusions which his theory would seem to warrant.

Still greater is the importance of this theory of Reason in its bearings on Aristotle's account of the beginnings and development of knowledge. Most students are acquainted with the popular summary of Aristotle's doctrine-nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. And it is a comparatively easy task to collect a number of passages in which Aristotle would seem to make sense the source of all our knowledge, the source even of our ultimate principles of thought. The last chapter of the Posterior Analytics would be especially quoted in support of such an account of Aristotle's Erkenntnisslehre or Epistemology: and there is no doubt but the passage if it stood alone would make the writer a mere empirical sensationalist. For the point

1 Teichmüller developes the comparison farther, Studien zur Geschichte d. Begriffe (1874), P. 399.

insisted on by Aristotle is just that our primary ideas, our general notions, our cognitive faculties, are not ready-made and determined faculties—ἀφωρισμέναι ἕξεις—they start from no higher source of knowledge than sense-perception'. And the chapters explain how the 'inborn discriminating faculty' of sense is followed by a continuance of the sensation in memory-how a number of memories go to form one experience (èμтeiρía)—and how from experience or from "every universal which has settled down as a one beside the many" comes the origin of art and science. Nor does the chapter leave us in any uncertainty as to how these universals are to be formed. A right use of generalization and abstraction clears up all the difficulty. Amid the flux of sensitive impressions, the writer explains, some one or other becomes fixed as an object of conscious observation and once so fixed it becomes a centre round which other impressions may gradually group themselves, just as the soldier who stays the flight of his defeated comrades becomes a rallying-point from which they may again recover order. It is easy to see how the process will go on. Round this particular impression a number of like sensations group themselves a class of lower generality is so formed-and the process goes on with ever-widening circles until general ideas of the greatest scope are ultimately reached3.

Generalization or Induction-the process of advancing from particular instances to general laws-seems thus the agency by which we must explain the origin of general ideas. And since this induction itself is primarily dependent on sense-perception -since in fact apart from sense-perception induction cannot

1 Post. Anal. 11. 19, 100310, οὔτε δὴ ἐνυπάρχουσιν ἀφωρισμέναι αἱ ἕξεις, οὔτ ̓ ἀπ ̓ άλλων έξεων γίνονται γνωστικωτέρων ἀλλ ̓ ἀπ' αἰσθήσεως.

2 Ibid., οἷον ἐν μάχῃ τροπῆς γενομένης ἑνὸς στάντος ἕτερος ἔστη, εἶθ ̓ ἕτερος ἕως ἐπὶ ἀρχὴν ἦλθεν, ἡ δὲ ψυχὴ ὑπάρχει τοιαύτη οὖσα οἵα δύνασθαι πάσχειν τοῦτο.

3 στάντος γὰρ τῶν ἀδιαφόρων ἑνός, πρῶτον μὲν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ καθόλου, πάλιν ἐν τούτοις ἵσταται ἕως ἂν τὰ ἀμερῆ στῇ καὶ τὰ καθόλου οἷον τοιονδὶ ζῷον ἕως ζῷον· καὶ ἐν τούτῳ ὡσαύτως.

4 δῆλον δὴ ὅτι ἡμῖν τὰ πρῶτα ἐπαγωγῇ γνωρίζειν ἀναγκαῖον· καὶ γὰρ καὶ αἴσθησις οὕτω τὸ καθόλου ἐμποιεῖ.

operate at all-it seems to follow that sense is in the last resort the origin of our ideas and our knowledge'. But alongside of this emphatic assertion of the value of sense in generating knowledge and ideas, comes the ascription of the knowledge of the apxal or first principles of our experience to reason. We find them so accounted for in the Posterior Analytics and in the sixth book of the Ethics. While one chapter asserts that as syllogism cannot itself supply the principles on which demonstration rests induction must discover them, another chapter maintains that as neither science nor opinion can supply the principles of science, reason itself must be their source3.

The contradiction which is here apparent and which is in accordance with Aristotle's general attitude upon the subject can only be solved, if it be explicable at all, by a true understanding of his creative reason. It seems no doubt at first sight absurd that one and the same writer should assign the origin of our ideas, the first beginnings of our knowledge, at one time to sense, at another time to reason. But we have gone a long way towards reconciling his conflicting statements when we understand that a creative reason as the thought which makes things, which constructs an intelligible world, is the necessary presupposition of sense-perception itself. Nor do other passages which might be brought forward in support of Aristotle's sensationalism really conflict with this interpretation. No doubt Aristotle says it is impossible to exercise thought without the help of a sensuous image-voeîv oik čσtiv åveu þavTáoμaтos-and the passage might be taken to mean that thought itself presupposes a constant sensuous accompaniment as the

1 Post. Anal. 1. 13, δι ̓;, ἐπαχθῆναι δὲ μὴ ἔχοντας αἴσθησιν ἀδύνατον· τῶν γὰρ καθ ̓ ἕκαστον ἡ αἴσθησις.

* ιοούς, ἐπεὶ δὲ τῶν περὶ τὴν διάνοιαν ἕξεων αἷς ἀληθεύομεν αἱ μὲν ἀεὶ ἀληθεῖς εἰσιν, αἱ δὲ ἐπιδέχονται τὸ ψεῦδος, οἷον δόξα καὶ λογισμός, ἀληθῆ δ ̓ ἀεὶ ἐπιστήμη καὶ τοῖς καὶ οὐδὲν ἐπιστήμης ἀκριβέστερον ἄλλο γένος ἢ νοῦς, αἱ δ ̓ ἀρχαὶ τῶν ἀποδείξεων γνωρικώ τεραι, ἐπιστήμη δ ̓ ἅπασα μετὰ λόγον ἐστί, τῶν ἀρχῶν ἐπιστήμη μὲν οὐκ ἂν εἴη· ἐπεὶ δ ̓ οὐδὲν ἀληθέστερον ἐνδέχεται εἶναι ἐπιστήμης ἡ νοῦν, νοῖς ἂν εἴη τῶν ἀρχων.

3 Eth. Nic. VI. 3, 1139, εἰσὶν ἄρα ἀρχαὶ ἐξ ὧν ὁ συλλογισμὸς ὧν οὐκ ἔστι συλλογισμός· ἐπαγωγὴ ἄρα. vi. 6, 11417, λείπεται νοῖν εἶναι τῶν ἀρχῶν.

symbol of its action'. But there is no contradiction in holding on the one hand that thought requires for its exercise an object suggested by sense and maintaining on the other hand that thought requires to illuminate this object in order that it may think it. The two points of view, in fact, refer to different aspects or stages of the work of knowledge. When Aristotle says that it is thought which gives thought its object, he is referring to the primary and fundamental act by which a conscious mind interprets the universe; when he says that thought finds its object in the images of sense and cannot operate without them, he is referring to the elaboration in discursive thought of the materials so determined by thought. Nor does this merely mean that Aristotle gave a subjective expression to an objective fact that he regarded the forms of things as impressing themselves by their own action on the reason or that he wishes us to believe that "it is only in our consciousness that the eternal ideas of transient phenomena become conscious of themselves:" so that "the creative Nous means simply the forms of things acting through the imagination on the possibilities of subjective conception." For Aristotle says, not that things make thought, but that thought makes things and though he never loses sight of the correspondence between the two sides of the relation, so that our thought is merely as it were finding itself in things, he is none the less aware that it is thought which stands first in the universe. No doubt it is within the phenomena of sense that the forms of reason are to be discovered—ἐν τοῖς εἴδεσι τοῖς αἰσθητοῖς τὰ Vonτá éσTi3—but this merely emphasizes the fact that it is because phenomena are thought that they are intelligible to

1 De Mem. I. 449330, νοεῖν οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνευ φαντάσματος· συμβαίνει γὰρ τὸ αὐτὸ πάθος ἐν τῷ νοεῖν ὅπερ καὶ ἐν τῷ διαγράφειν· ἐκεῖ τε γὰρ οὐθὲν προσχρώμενοι τῷ τὸ ποσὸν ὡρισμένον εἶναι τὸ τριγώνου, ὅμως γράφομεν ὡρισμένον κατὰ τὸ ποσόν· καὶ ὁ νοῶν ὡσαύτως, κἂν μὴ ποσὸν νοῇ, τίθεται πρὸ ὀμμάτων ποσόν, νοεῖ δ' οὐχ ᾗ ποσόν. Cp. De An. III. 7, 431a17, III. 8, 432a8.

2 Westminster Review for October, 1881.

3 III. 8, 432*10.

W. AR.