The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant

which ruled Russia after the revolution of November, 1917, took a form strangely reminiscent of the Republic. They were a small minority, held together almost by religious conviction, wielding the weapons of orthodoxy and excommunication, as sternly devoted to their cause as any saint to his, and living a frugal existence while ruling half the soil of Europe.

Such examples indicate that within limits and with modifications, Plato’s plan is practicable: and indeed he himself had derived it largely from...

Yet critics from Aristotle’s day to ours have found in the Republic many an opening for objection and doubt. “These things and many others,” says the Stagirite, with cynical brevity, “have been invented several times over in the course of ages.”

So with common property: it would mean a dilution of responsibility; when everything belongs to everybody nobody will take care of anything. And finally, argues the great conservative, communism would fling people into an intolerable continuity of contact; it would leave no room for privacy or individuality; and it would presume such virtues of patience and coöperation as only a saintly

And finally, argues the great conservative, communism would fling people into an intolerable continuity of contact; it would leave no room for privacy or individuality; and it would presume such virtues of patience and coöperation as only a saintly minority possess.

minority possess. “We must neither assume a standard of virtue which is above ordinary persons, nor an education which is exceptionally favored by nature and circumstance; but we must have regard to the life which the majority can share, and t...

he underestimated the possessive jealousy of males in supposing that a man would be content to have merely an aliquot portion of a wife;

he minimized the maternal instinct in supposing that mothers would agree to have their children taken from them and brought up in a heartless anonymity.

To all these criticisms one can reply very simply, that they destroy a straw man. Plato explicitly exempts the majority from his communistic plan;

And as for the maternal instinct, it is not strong before the birth, or even the growth, of the child; the average mother accepts the newborn babe rather with resignation than with joy; love for it is a development, not a sudden miracle, and grows as the child grows, as it takes form under the painstaking care of the mother; not until it has become the embodiment of maternal artistry does it irrevocably catch the heart.

But it may be that the long dominion of the Church was due to the agricultural condition of Europe: an agricultural population is inclined to supernatural belief by its helpless dependence on the caprice of the elements, and by that inability to control nature which always leads to fear and thence to worship; when industry and commerce developed, a new type of mind and man arose, more realistic and terrestrial, and the power of the Church began to crumble as soon as it came into conflict with this new economic fact.

Essentially he is right—is

he not?—what this world needs is to be ruled by its wisest men. It is our business to adapt his thought to our own times and limitations.

We may accept without quarrel his contention that statesmen should be as specifically and thoroughly trained as physicians; we might establish departments of political science and administration in our universities;

Finally, it is only fair to add that Plato understands that his Utopia does not quite fall within the practicable realm. He admits that he has described an ideal difficult of attainment; he answers that there is nevertheless a value in painting these pictures of our desire; man’s significance is that he can image a better world, and will some part of it at least into reality; man is an animal that makes Utopias.

Plato knew: to learn like Solon and to teach like Socrates; to guide the eager young, and find the intellectual love of comrades. For his students loved him as he loved them; he was their friend as well as their philosopher and guide.

All Athens followed him to the grave.

Aristotle was born at Stagira, a Macedonian city some two hundred miles to the north of Athens, in the year 384 B.C.

Under Plato he studied eight—or twenty—years; and indeed the pervasive Platonism of Aristotle’s speculations—even of those most anti-Platonic—suggests the longer period.

Plato recognized the greatness of this strange new pupil from the supposedly barbarian north, and spoke of him once as the Nous of the Academy,—as if to say, Intelligence personified.

among his many contributions to scholarship. Therefore Plato spoke of Aristotle’s home as “the house of the reader,” and

The learned Zeller, in whose pages Aristotle almost achieves the Nirvana of respectability, would have us reject these stories; but we may presume that where there is still so much smoke there was once a flame.

Some biographers tell us that Aristotle founded a school of oratory to rival Isocrates; and that he had among his pupils in this school the wealthy Hermias, who was soon to become autocrat of the city-state of Atarneus.

Philip had no sympathy with the individualism that had fostered the art and intellect of Greece but had at the same time disintegrated her social order; in all these little capitals he saw not the exhilarating culture and the unsurpassable art, but the commercial corruption and the political chaos: he saw insatiable merchants and bankers absorbing the vital resources of the nation, incompetent politicians and clever orators misleading a busy populace into disastrous plots and wars, factions cleaving classes and classes congealing into castes: this, said Philip, was not a nation but only a welter of individuals—geniuses and slaves; he would bring the hand of order down upon this turmoil, and make all Greece stand up united and strong as the political center and basis of the world.

Alexander, when Aristotle came, was a wild youth of thirteen; passionate, epileptic, almost alcoholic; it was his pastime to tame horses untamable by men. The efforts of the philosopher to cool the fires of this budding volcano were not of much avail; Alexander had better success with Bucephalus than Aristotle with Alexander.

Alexander left philosophy after two years to mount the throne and ride the world. History leaves us free to believe (though we should suspect these pleasant thoughts) that Alexander’s unifying passion derived some of its force and grandeur from his teacher,

Setting out to conquer Asia, Alexander left behind him, in the cities of Greece, governments favorable to him but populations resolutely hostile.

With this wealth of material he was enabled to establish the first great zoological garden that the world had seen.

Athenæus (no doubt with some exaggeration) relates that Alexander gave Aristotle, for physical and biological equipment and research, the sum of 800 talents (in modern purchasing power, some $4,000,000).20 It was at Aristotle’s suggestion, some think, that Alexander sent a costly expedition to explore the sources of the Nile and discover the causes of its periodical overflow.21 Such works as the digest of 158 political constitutions, drawn up for Aristotle, indicate a considerable corps of aides and secretaries. In short we have here the first example in European history of the large-scale financing of science by public wealth. What knowledge would we not win if modern states were to support research on a proportionately lavish scale!

The Greek disdain of manual work kept everybody but the listless slave from direct acquaintance with the processes of production, from that stimulating contact with machinery which reveals defects and prefigures possibilities; technical invention was possible only to those who had no interest in it, and could not derive from it any material reward.

No doubt we have here the reason why Aristotle so seldom appeals to experiment; the mechanisms of experiment had not yet been made; and the best he could do was to achieve an almost universal and continuous observation. Nevertheless the vast body of data gathered by him and his assistants became the groundwork of the progress of science, the textbook of knowledge for two thousand years; one of the wonders of the work of man.

collected and edited by the later Peripatetics under the general title of Aristotle’s “Organon,”—that

And fourthly come the more strictly Philosophical works: “Ethics,” “Politics,” and “Metaphysics.”

Here, evidently, is the Encyclopedia Britannica of Greece: every problem under the sun and about it finds a place; no wonder there are more errors and absurdities in Aristotle than in any other philosopher who ever wrote. Here is such a synthesis of knowledge and theory as no man would ever achieve again till Spencer’s day,

Naturally, in a mind of such scientific turn, poesy was lacking. We must not expect of Aristotle such literary brilliance as floods the pages of the dramatist-philosopher Plato.

We may at all events be sure that Aristotle is the spiritual author of all these books that bear his name: that the hand may be in some cases another’s hand, but that the head and the heart are his.

The first great distinction of Aristotle is that almost without predecessors, almost entirely by his own hard thinking, he created a new science—Logic.

Nothing is so dull as logic, and nothing is so important.

Passing out from this rear line of logic we come into the great battlefield on which Aristotle fought out with Plato the dread question of “universals”; it was the first conflict in a war which was to last till our own day, and make all medieval Europe ring with the clash of “realists” and “nominalists.”

As Brutus loved not Cæsar less but Rome more, so Aristotle says, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas—“Dear is Plato, but dearer still is truth.”

debtors. But Aristotle has a healthy attitude, nevertheless; he is a realist almost in the modern sense; he is resolved to concern himself with the objective present, while Plato is absorbed in a subjective future.

at last Plato became so devoted to generalities that they began to determine his particulars, so devoted to ideas that they began to define or select his facts. Aristotle preaches a return to things, to the “unwithered face of nature” and reality;

Thales (640–550 B.C.), the “Father of Philosophy,” was primarily an astronomer, who astonished the natives of Miletus by informing them that the sun and stars (which they were wont to worship as gods) were merely balls of fire.

Anaximander (610–540 B.C.),

Anaximenes, another Milesian (fl. 450 B.C.),

Anaxagoras (500–428 B.C.),

Heraclitus (530–470 B.C.), who left wealth and its cares to live a life of poverty and study in the shade of the temple porticoes at Ephesus, turned science from astronomy to earthlier concerns. All things forever flow and change, he said; even in the stillest matter

there is unseen flux and movement. Cosmic history runs in repetitious cycles, each beginning and ending in fire (here is one source of the Stoic and Christian doctrine of last judgment and hell). “Through strife,” says Heraclitus, “all things arise and pass away... War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves, and some free.” Where there is no strife there is decay: “the mixture which is not shaken decomposes.” In this flux of change and struggle and selection, only one thing is constant, and that is law.

Empedocles (fl. 445 B.C., in Sicily) developed to a further stage the idea of evolution.

Finally, in Leucippus (fl. 445 B.C.) and Democritus (460–360 B.C.), master and pupil in Thracian Abdera, we get the last stage of pre-Aristotelian science—materialistic, deterministic atomism.