single common force which finally becomes the principle of action'. And when we ask how this object of our final wish is framed, the answer must be, that it is so through the agency of reason. Ultimately, and transcendentally in fact, there is no difference between the object of thought and the object of wish; the Bounтòv and the vonтòv are merely different aspects of one and the same great generality. Even in our own experience it is thought which determines desire: and the principle and starting-point of conduct turns out to be an exercise of reason. And when Aristotle proceeds to state more definitely what is this object of perfect wish which thus determines and regulates our natural desires, he becomes still more of an idealist. For while the object of wish to any individual is but the apparent and relative good, still to a perfect man it is the absolute ideal good and the aim of life comes to be an attempt to make our practical views in life elevate themselves to the full height of the absolute ideal of goodness3. It would take us outside psychology to develope these views further here. But it shews us once more the correspondence between the cognitive and ethical philosophy of Aristotle. The same writer who repro

duces Plato's idea of good as the constructive reason which gives both knowledge and reality to things, now finds the determining aim of conduct in an absolute ideal which constitutes the pattern to which morality must raise itself.

XIII. GENERAL ESTIMATE.

The unsatisfactory character of many of Aristotle's psychological results is probably apparent to most readers. In following his account of our mental processes we are brought face

1

ΙΙΙ. 10, 433 21, ἐν δή τι τὸ κινοῦν τὸ ὀρεκτόν.

2 Metaph. Α. 7, 107219, ὀρεγόμεθα δὲ διότι δοκεῖ μᾶλλον ἢ δοκεῖ διότι ὀρεγόμεθα. ἀρχὴ δὲ ἡ νόησις.

3 Eth. Nic. 111. 4, 1113 22, άρα φατέον ἁπλῶς μὲν καὶ κατ ̓ ἀλήθειαν βουλητὸν εἶναι τἀγαθόν, ἑκάστῳ δὲ τὸ φαινόμενον ;

to face with the same defects as also with the same merits as meet us in his other works. There is the same picture of a thinker who is distracted between two solutions of a question, who indulges in what at first sight are the most palpable contradictions and who leaves us without any satisfactory solution. of the difficulties which he raises. The result might have been different had Aristotle sought to develope instead of merely seeking to criticise the Platonic idealism, and while noting the imperfections of Plato's theory, tried to correct and complete those points in the spirit of Plato himself. He chose instead to put himself in opposition to the teaching of his master and preferred (speaking generally) to state his views in such a form as would bring them into sharpest antagonism to the Platonic doctrines. Meanwhile however the mantle of the master had descended even on the pupil who set himself to oppose his teaching and the Aristotelian Anti-Platonism became itself a phase of Platonism. But this fact is constantly obscured by the phraseology in which Aristotle is led to state his results. And thus the unity by which Aristotle really tries to reconcile matter and form, individual and universal, the world and God, sense and reason, the material and the spiritual, is one which we must discover for ourselves rather than expect to find in Aristotle himself.

This unifying link between complementary or antagonistic conceptions is what a modern reader will assuredly most desiderate in Aristotle. Aristotle himself no doubt sees clearly enough the defects of the Platonic Psychology with its doctrine of locally separated faculties. But what inner unity is there in Aristotle's own theory? How does body become soul, how does a merely material organization become a spiritual agency, is a question which Aristotle only very partially solves by his view of soul as the truth or reality of body. And when we examine the different faculties of the soul, a like want of unity in the soul itself strikes us. No hint is given of a continuous development of one faculty from the other.

The perceptive powers presuppose the vegetative, the rational presuppose the perceptive and imaginative: but how the one leads to the other is a question on which Aristotle tells us little. And how-a defect which Zeller has especially emphasized-how does this congeries of faculties resolve itself into a personal self, an individual me? We need perhaps hardly be astonished that Aristotle does not directly answer this question. Ideas develope themselves but slowly in the history of thought and the conception of a personal, isolated and yet universal, self had not been grasped by the philosophers of antiquity. Reason is no doubt, as we have seen, said to be this self: but Reason as conceived by Aristotle seems, as destitute of any memory of the past and as unaffected by the experiences of life, to be without that attribute of consciousness which would seem necessary to the conception of self. Such criticism is perhaps of somewhat doctrinaire a type, since what applies to reason as creative is true as we have seen only of a phase of reason, and does not interfere with the exercise of consciousness in its application to phenomena. Yet it remains none the less true that Aristotle's theory of reason is full of difficulties which we indeed may try to solve but which are certainly not solved in Aristotle's own writings.

The number of these difficulties might easily be increased: and though, as we have seen, some of them are not so great as they at first sight appear, it is impossible to blind our eyes to the real nature of very many of them. But in place of pointing out defects, it is a pleasanter and perhaps more useful task to enumerate the really important truths which Aristotle's psychological treatise may be allowed to teach us. (1) To begin with, Aristotle was the first who constituted Psychology into a special science. He mapped out the phenomena of mind as the subject of a particular ioTopía: and gave a definite turn. to the humanitarian studies of Socrates by shewing that the knowledge of man involved particularly a knowledge of the nature of man's vxý. But (2) while holding that psychology

was to be studied as an independent science, Aristotle further saw that the study of soul could not be successfully conducted so long as it was confined exclusively to the human manifestation of it. Man's yux in fact Aristotle found was simply one phase of that general tendency which nature at each stage of life displayed—a tendency to concentrate the specific functional activity of that stage in some definite form. And the law of such stages of life was, he found, one of regular subordination, so that the faculties of thought implied the possession of the faculties of sense and these again the faculties of nutrition. Thus (3) he called attention to the semi-physiological and corporeal character of some mental phenomena: he was especially struck by the material bodily side of the feelings: and he maintained that the body was not to be studied as an abstract entity but with particular reference to the bodily organization adapted to it. (4) He recognized and yet partially solved this, dualism in man's nature by his own definition of the yuxý as the implicit realization or truth of body. While unable fully to explain the union of the antithesis he yet shewed that soul and body were not so much two contradictory forces as two complementary counterparts in human nature. But (5) he did not merely content himself with such an abstract explanation of man's vux; he expanded and illustrated it by an enumeration of the different stages in the development of this soul from lower to higher forms; and by his explanation of the relation of these faculties to one another he advanced considerably beyond the standpoint of Plato. (6) He sketched with considerable success the object, organs and operations of the several senses his analysis of sound and colour especially deserves notice for its anticipation of modern research. But (7) he also shewed the need of rising above sense in order to explain its intimations. His theory of a central or common sense, though mistaken in ascribing to sense what sense as such is unable to bestow-the distinction, comparison and interpretation of sensations-directs attention nevertheless to the presuppositions of every purely

sensational system of cognition. And the unity of consciousness which he claims for the exercise of sense goes some way in explaining how the different faculties of soul become an indivisible personal self. Still more is this brought out (8) in his theory of a creative reason as the presupposition of the exercise of ordinary thought. For fragmentary though the theory is, it is nevertheless an emphatic assertion of the priority of thought to matter in the universe. How, Aristotle finds himself obliged to ask, does thought think things, how does an immaterial force come to receive and know material phenomena. And his answer is, as we have seen, that thought knows and thinks things only in so far as things are thought, so far as they are the work of reason, so that our subjective thought is but finding itself in outward things. Lastly, (9) Aristotle's theory of will forms a natural pendant to this same theory of reason. In place of the vague unsatisfactory conception of Ovμós in Plato, we find the will conceived not as a single faculty but as the consilience of reason and feeling; while at the same time Aristotle never loses sight of the fact that mere appetite as such does not lead to action, but requires to be constituted by thought as a rational desire before it can issue in conduct.

Psychological research has made great progress since the days of Aristotle. He would have been surprised to find that the association of ideas which he noticed so casually had been constituted by some into a universal key to the whole mental furniture of man, or that the higher mental processes no less than the lower had been resolved into the answer to an external stimulus-into that same conception of 'suffering' and imprintreceiving which he himself regarded as applicable to all but the highest exercise of thought. No true student of his writings will seek to discover these or other modern developments in his writings. But in his conception of the relation of soul and body, in his theory of a central sense and his intuitions of a creative reason, he left behind him lessons which no psychologist can afford to disregard.