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“In reality,” said Democritus, “there are only atoms and the void.”
If we begin here chronologically, with his Physics, we shall be disappointed; for we find that this treatise is really a metaphysics,
“Aristotle, after the Ottoman manner,” says Bacon, “thought he could not reign secure without putting all his brethren to death.”29 But to this fratricidal mania we owe much of our knowledge of pre-Socratic thought.
He rejects the view of Pythagoras that the sun is the
center of our system; he prefers to give that honor to the earth.
As Aristotle walked wondering through his great zoological garden, he became convinced that the infinite variety of life could be arranged in a continuous series in which each link would be almost indistinguishable from the next.
The remarkable fact here is that with all these gradations and similarities leaping to Aristotle’s eyes, he does not come to the theory of evolution. He rejects Empedocles’ doctrine that all organs and organisms are a survival of the fittest, and Anaxagoras’ idea that man became intelligent by using his hands for manipulation rather than for movement;
Yet he makes a greater total advance in biology than any Greek before or after him.
And finally he establishes the science of embryology. “He who sees things grow from their beginning,” he writes, “will have the finest view of them.” Hippocrates (b. 460 B.C.), greatest of Greek physicians, had given a fine example of the experimental method, by breaking a hen’s eggs at various stages of incubation; and had applied the results of these studies in his treatise “On the Origin of the Child.”
A woman of Elis had married a Negro; her children were all whites, but in the next generation Negroes reappeared; where, asks Aristotle, was the blackness hidden in the middle generation? There was but a step from such a vital and intelligent query to the epochal experiments of Gregor Mendel (1822–1882).
Surely, despite the errors that mar these biological works, they form the greatest monument ever raised to the science by any one man.
Surely motion has a source, says Aristotle; and if we are not to plunge drearily into an infinite regress, putting back our problem step by step endlessly, we must posit a prime mover unmoved (primum mobile immotum), a being incorporeal, indivisible, spaceless, sexless, passionless, changeless, perfect and eternal. God does not create, but he moves, the world; and he moves it not as a mechanical force but as the total motive of all operations in the world;
Yet, with his usual inconsistency, Aristotle represents God as self-conscious spirit. A rather mysterious spirit; for Aristotle’s God never does anything; he has no desires, no will, no purpose; he is activity so pure that he never acts. He is absolutely perfect; therefore he cannot desire anything; therefore he does nothing. His only occupation is to contemplate the essence of things; and since he himself is the essence of all things, the form of all forms, his sole employment is the contemplation of himself. Poor Aristotelian God!—he is a roi fainéant, a do-nothing king; “the king reigns,
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Aristotle’s psychology is marred with similar obscurity and vacillation. There are many interesting passages: the power of habit is emphasized, and is for the first time called “second nature”; and the laws of association, though not developed, find here a definite formulation.
In short, Aristotle destroys the soul in order to give it immortality; the immortal soul is “pure thought,” undefiled with reality, just as Aristotle’s God is pure activity, undefiled with action.
Artistic creation, says Aristotle, springs from the formative impulse and the craving for emotional expression.
The noblest art appeals to the intellect as well as to the feelings (as a symphony appeals to us not only by its harmonies and sequences but by its structure and development);
But above all, the function of art is catharsis, purification: emotions accumulated in us under the pressure of social restraints, and liable to sudden issue in unsocial and destructive action, are touched off and sluiced away in the harmless form of theatrical excitement;
“For we choose happiness for itself, and never with a view to anything further; whereas we choose honor, pleasure, intellect... because we believe that through them we shall be made happy.” But he realizes that to call happiness the supreme good is a mere truism;
“these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”;
for “when men are friends, justice is unnecessary; but when men are just, friendship is still a boon.” “A friend is one soul in two bodies.” Yet friendship implies few friends rather than many; “he who has many friends has no friend”; and “to be a friend to many people in the way of perfect friendship is impossible.”
Of the two qualities which chiefly inspire regard and affection—that a thing is your own, and that it awakens real love in you—neither can exist in such a state” as Plato’s.
he who can foresee with his mind is by nature intended to be lord and master; and he who can work only with his body is by nature a slave.”
This philosophy typifies the Greek disdain for manual labor.
Money should not breed. Hence “the discussion of the theory of finance is not unworthy of philosophy; but to be engaged in finance, or in money-making, is unworthy of a free man.”
Woman is an unfinished man, left standing on a lower step in the scale of development.44 The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; the one rules and the other is ruled; and this principle extends, of necessity, to all mankind. Woman is weak of will, and therefore incapable of independence of character or position;
These matters should not be left to youthful caprice, they should be under state supervision and control: the state should determine the minimum and maximum ages of marriage for each sex, the best seasons for conception, and the rate of increase in population. If the natural rate of increase is too high, the cruel practice of infanticide may be replaced by abortion; and “let abortion be procured before sense and
life have begun.”
“To live alone;” then, “one must be either an animal or a god.”
Hence revolution is almost always unwise; it may achieve some good, but at the cost of many evils, the chief of which is the disturbance, and perhaps the dissolution, of that social order and structure on which every political good depends.
“Young men are easily deceived, for they are quick to hope.”
Homer is right: “Bad is the lordship of many; let one be your ruler and master.” For such a man law would be rather an instrument than a limit: “for men of eminent ability there is no law—they are themselves a law.”
Yet democracy is on the whole inferior to aristocracy. For it is based on a false assumption of equality; it “arises out of the notion that those who are equal in one respect (e.g., in respect of the law) are equal in all respects; because men are equally free they claim to be absolutely equal.”
Constitutional government offers this happy union. It is not the best conceivable government—that would be an aristocracy of education—but it is the best possible state.
Perhaps best in the middle class: here again we have the golden mean, just as constitutional government itself would be a mean between democracy and aristocracy.
It is difficult to be enthusiastic about Aristotle, because it was difficult for him to be enthusiastic about anything; and si vis me flere, primum tibi flendum.
We are bothered, at the outset, with his insistence on logic.
Here indeed was the great defect of the Greek mind: it was not disciplined; it lacked limiting and steadying traditions; it moved freely in an uncharted field, and ran too readily to theories and conclusions. So Greek philosophy leaped on to heights unreached again, while Greek science limped behind.
Our modern danger is precisely opposite; inductive data fall upon us from all sides like the lava of Vesuvius; we suffocate with uncoördinated facts; our minds are overwhelmed with science breeding and multiplying into specialistic chaos for want of synthetic thought and a unifying philosophy. We are all mere fragments of what a man might be.
We wonder if this Aristotelian ideal of immoderate moderation has had anything to do with the colorless virtue, the starched perfection, the expressionless good form, of the British aristocracy. Matthew Arnold tells us that in his time Oxford tutors looked upon the Ethics as infallible. For three hundred years this book and the Politics have formed the ruling British mind, perhaps to great and noble achievements, but certainly to a hard and cold efficiency.
He lacks that Heraclitean sense of flux which justifies the conservative in believing that all permanent change is gradual, and justifies the radical in believing that no changelessness
is permanent.
His Organon played a central rôle in shaping the minds of the medieval barbarians into disciplined and consistent thought.
The works of Aristotle came to be for European philosophy what the Bible was for theology—an almost infallible text, with solutions for every problem.
The Athenians, hungering for liberty, growled at Aristotle,
In this turmoil we get an impression of Aristotle quite contrary to that left upon us by his Ethics: here is a man not cold and inhumanly calm, but a fighter, pursuing his Titanic work in a circle of enemies on every side.
Aristotle saw himself fated to be tried by juries and crowds incomparably more hostile than those that had murdered Socrates. Very wisely, he left the city, saying that he would not give Athens a chance to win a second time against philosophy.
However induced, his illness proved fatal; and a few months after leaving Athens (322 B.C.) the lonely Aristotle died. In the same year, and at the same age, sixty-two, Demosthenes, greatest of Alexander’s enemies, drank poison.
Entelecheia—having (echo) its purpose (telos) within (entos); one of those magnificent Aristotelian terms which gather up into themselves a whole philosophy.
The word excellence is probably the fittest translation of the Greek arete, usually mistranslated virtue. The reader will avoid misunderstanding Plato and Aristotle if, where translators write virtue, he will substitute excellence, ability, or capacity. The Greek arete is the Roman virtus; both imply a masculine sort of excellence (Ares, god of war; vir, a male). Classical antiquity conceived virtue in terms of man, just as medieval Christianity conceived it in terms of woman.
