‘It has been said’, wrote Borges, ‘that all men are born either Aristotelians or Platonists.’ Philosophers may wince at the opposition, but I suspect it to be literally true. Plato invites us to the world of abstractions, Aristotle to the world of tangible things. You begin with particulars, a box of seashells, say; gather them together and rearrange them endlessly in order to apprehend their logic and order. This apprehension, Aristotle says, is the gift of reason and the beginning of science. It is also where true beauty lies. This was inarticulately obvious to me when I was ten.
