VOLUME II SLICE V Arculf to Armour, Philip (continued 7)

Down then to their common definition of pleasure as activity the three treatises present a harmonious system of morals, consistently with one another, and with the general philosophy of Aristotle. In particular, the theory that pleasure is activity (ἐνέργεια) is the theory of two of his most authoritative works. In the De Anima (iii. 7, 431 a 10-12), being pleased and pained are defined by him as acting τὸ (ἐνεργεῖν) by a sensitive mean in relation to good or evil as such. In the Metaphysics (Λ 7, 1072 b 16), in discussing the occupation of God, he says “his pleasure is activity,” or “his activity is pleasure,” according to a difference of readings which makes no difference to the identification of pleasure and activity (ἐνέργεια). As then we find this identification of pleasure with activity in the Metaphysics and in the De Anima, as well as in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia, the only logical conclusion, from which there is no escape, is that, so far as the treatment of pleasure goes, any Aristotelian treatise which defines it as activity is genuine. There is no reason for doubting that the Nicomachean Ethics to the end of Book vii., the Eudemian Ethics to the end of Book Ζ, and the Magna Moralia as far as Book ii. chap. 7, were all three written by Aristotle.

Why then doubt at all? It is because the Nicomachean Ethics contains a second discourse on pleasure (x. 1-5), in which the author, while agreeing with the previous treatment of the subject that pleasure is not a bodily generation, even when accompanied by it, but something psychical, nevertheless defines it (x. 4, 1174 b 31-33) not as an activity, but as a supervening end (ἐπιγιγνόμενόν τι τέλος) perfecting an activity (τελειοῖ τὴν ἐνέργειαν). He allows indeed that activity and pleasure are very closely related; that a pleasure of sense or thought perfects an act of sensation or of thinking, depends on it, and is so inseparably conjoined with it as to raise a doubt whether pleasure is end of life or life end of pleasure, and even whether the activity is the same as the pleasure. But he disposes of this doubt in a very emphatic and significant manner. “Pleasure,” says he, “does not seem to be thinking or perceiving; for it is absurd: but on account of not being separated from them, it appears to some persons to be the same.” Now it is not likely that Aristotle either, after having so often identified pleasure with activity, would say that the identification is absurd though it appears true to some persons, of whom he would in that case be one, or, having once disengaged the pleasure of perceiving and thinking from the acts of perceiving and thinking, would go backwards and confuse them. It is more likely that Aristotle identified pleasure with activity in the De Anima, the Metaphysics and the three moral treatises, as we have seen; but that afterwards some subsequent Peripatetic, considering that the pleasure of perceiving or thinking is not the same as perceiving or thinking, declared the previous identification of pleasure with activity absurd. At any rate, if we are to choose, it is the identification that is Aristotle’s, and the distinction not Aristotle’s. Moreover, the distinction between activity and pleasure in the tenth book is really fatal to the consistency of the whole Nicomachean Ethics, which started in the first book with the identification of happiness and virtuous activity. For if the pleasure of virtuous activity is a supervening end beyond the activity, it becomes a supervening end beyond the happiness of virtuous activity, which thus ceases to be the final end. Nevertheless, the distinction between activity and pleasure is true. Some unknown Peripatetic detected a flaw in the Nicomachean Ethics when he said that pleasure is a supervening end beyond activity, and, if he had gone on to add that happiness is also a supervening end beyond the virtuous activities which are necessary to produce it, he would have destroyed the foundation of his own founder’s Ethics.

It is further remarkable that the Nicomachean Ethics proceeds to a different conclusion. After the intrusion of this second discourse on pleasure, it goes on (E.N. x. 6-fin.) to the famous theory that the highest happiness is the speculative life of intellect or wisdom as divine, but that happiness as human also includes the practical life of combining prudence and moral virtue; and that, while both lives need external goods as necessaries, the practical life also requires them as instruments of moral action. The treatise concludes with the means of making men virtuous; contending that virtue requires habituation, habituation law, law legislative art, and legislative art politics: Ethics thus passes into Politics. The Eudemian Ethics proceeds to its conclusion (E.E. Η 13-15) differently, with the consideration of (1) good fortune (εὐτυχία), and (2) gentlemanliness (καλοκἀγαθία). Good fortune it divides into two kinds, both irrational; one divine, according to impulse, and more continuous; the other contrary to impulse and not continuous. Gentlemanliness it regards as perfect virtue, containing all particular virtues, and all goods for the sake of the honourable. Finally, it concludes with the limit (ὅρος) of goods. First it finds the limit of goods of fortune in that desire and possession of them which will conduce to the contemplation of God, whereas that which prevents the service and contemplation of God is bad. Then it adds that the best limit of the soul is as little as possible to perceive the other part of the soul (i.e. desire). Finally, the treatise concludes with saying that the limit of gentlemanliness has thus been stated, meaning that its limit is the service and contemplation of God and the control of desire by reason. The Magna Moralia (M.M. ii. 8-10) on these points is unlike the Nicomachean, and like the Eudemian Ethics in discussing good fortune and gentlemanliness, but it discusses them in a more worldly way. On good fortune (ii. 8), after recognizing the necessity of external goods to happiness, it denies that fortune is due to divine grace, and simply defines it as irrational nature (ἄλογος φύσις). Gentlemanliness (ii. 9) it regards as perfect virtue, and defines the gentleman as the man to whom really good things are good and really honourable things honourable. It then adds (ii. 10) that acting according to right reason is when the irrational part of the soul does not hinder the rational part of intellect from doing its work. Thereupon it proceeds to a discourse on friendship, which in the Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics is discussed in an earlier position, but breaks off unfinished.

On the whole, the three moral treatises proceed on very similar lines down to the common identification of pleasure with activity, and then diverge. From this point the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia become more like one another than like the Nicomachean Ethics. They also become less like one another than before: for the treatment of good fortune, gentlemanliness, and their limit is more theological in the Eudemian Ethics than in the Magna Moralia.

How are the resemblances and differences of the three to be explained? By Aristotle’s gradual method of composition. All three are great works, contributing to the origin of the independent science of Ethics. But the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia are more rudimentary than the Nicomachean Ethics, which as it were seems to absorb them except in the conclusion. They are, in short, neither independent works, nor mere commentaries, but Aristotle’s first drafts of his Ethics.

In the Ethics to Eudemus, as Porphyry properly called the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle in the first four books successively investigates happiness, virtue, the voluntary and the particular moral virtues, in the same order and in the same letter and spirit as in his Ethics to Nicomachus. But the investigations are never so good. They are all such rudiments as Aristotle might well polish into the more developed expositions in the first four books of the Nicomachean Ethics. On the other hand, nobody would have gone back afterwards on his masterly treatment of happiness, in the first book, or of virtue in the second, or of the voluntary in the third, or of the particular virtues in the third and fourth, to write the sketchy accounts of the Eudemian Ethics.

Again, these sketches are rough preparations for the subsequent books common to the two treatises. It is true, as Dr Henry Jackson has pointed out, though with some exaggeration, that the Eudemian agrees in detail rather better than the Nicomachean treatment of the voluntary with the subsequent discussion of injury (E.E. Δ = E.N. v. 8); and, as Th. H. Fritzsche remarks, the distinction between politics, and economics, and prudence in the Eudemian Ethics (Α 8) is a closer anticipation of the subsequent triple distinction of practical science (E.E. Ε = E.N. vi 8). On the other hand, there are still more fundamental points in which the first three books of the Eudemian Ethics are a very inadequate preparation for the common books. Notably its treatment of prudence (φρόνησις) is a chaos. At first, prudence appears as the operation of the philosophical life and connected with the speculative philosophy of Anaxagoras (E.E. Α 1-5): then it is brought into connexion with the practical philosophy of Socrates (ib. 5) and co-ordinated with politics and economics (ib. 8); then it is intruded into the diagram of moral virtues as a mean between villainy (πανουργία) and simplicity ((εὐήθεια) (E.E. B 33, 1221 a 12); finally, a distinction between virtue by nature and virtue with prudence (μετὰ φρονήσεως) is promised (E.E. Τ 7, 1234 a 4). In addition to all this confusion of speculative and practical knowledge, prudence is absent when it ought to be present; e.g. from the division of virtues into moral and intellectual (E.E. Β 1, 1220 a 4-13), and from the definition of moral virtue (ib. 5, 10); while, in a passage (Β 11) anticipating the subsequent discussion of the relation between prudence and moral virtue (E.E. Ε = E.N. vi. 12-13), it is stated that in purpose the end is made right by moral virtue, the means by another power, reason, without this right reason being stated to be prudence. After this, it can never be said that the earlier books of the Eudemian Ethics are so good a preparation as those of the Nicomachean Ethics for the distinction between prudence (φρόνησις) and wisdom (σοφία), which is the main point of the common books, and one of Aristotle’s main points against Plato’s philosophy.

Curiously enough, although little is made of it, this distinction, absent from the earlier books, is present in the final book II of the Eudemian Ethics (cf. 1246 b 4 seq., 1248 a 35, 1249 b 14); and probably therefore this part was a separate discourse. Meanwhile, however, the truth about the Eudemian Ethics in general is that it was an earlier rudimentary sketch written by Aristotle, when he was still struggling, without quite succeeding, to get over Plato’s view that there is one philosophical knowledge of universal good, by which not only the dialectician and mathematician must explain the being and becoming of the world, but also the individual and the statesman guide the life of man. Indeed, the final proof that the Eudemian Ethics is earlier than the Nicomachean is the very fact that it is more under Platonic influence. In the first place, the reason why the account of prudence begins by confusing the speculative with the practical is that the Eudemian Ethics starts from Plato’s Philebus, where, without differentiating speculative and practical knowledge, Plato asks how far good is prudence (φρόνησις), how far pleasure (ἡδονή); and in the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle asks the same question, adding virtue (ἀρετή) in order to correct the Socratic confusion of virtue with prudence. Secondly, the Eudemian Ethics, while not agreeing with Plato’s Republic that the just can be happy by justice alone, does not assign to the external goods of good fortune (εὐτυχία) the prominence accorded to them in the Nicomachean Ethics as the necessary conditions of all virtue, and the instruments of moral virtue. Thirdly, the emphasis of the Eudemian Ethics on the perfect virtue of gentlemanliness (καλοκἀγαθία) is a decidedly old-fashioned trait, which descended to Aristotle from the Greek notion of a gentleman who does his duty to his state (cf. Herodotus i. 30, Thucydides iv. 40) and to his God (Xenophon, Symp. iv. 49) through Plato, who in the Gorgias (470 E) says that the gentleman is happy, and in the Republic (489 E) imputes to him the love of truth essential to philosophy. Moreover, when Plato goes on (ib. 505 B) to identify the form of good, without which nothing is good, with the gentlemanly thing (καλὸν καὶ ἀγαθόν), without which any possession is worthless, he inspired into the author of the Eudemian Ethics the very limit (ὅρος) of good fortune and gentlemanliness with which it concludes, only without Plato’s elevation of the good into the form of the good. In the Nicomachean Ethics the old notion, we gladly see, survives (cf. i. 8): virtuous actions are gentlemanly actions, and happiness accordingly is being at our best and noblest and pleasantest (ἄριστον καὶ κάλλιστον καὶ ἤδιστον). But gentlemanliness is no longer called perfect virtue, as in the Eudemian Ethics: its place has been taken by justice, which is perfect virtue to one’s neighbour, by prudence which unites all the moral virtues, and by wisdom which is the highest virtue. Accordingly, in the end the old ideal of gentlemanliness is displaced by the new ideal of the speculative and practical life.

Lastly, the Eudemian Ethics derives from Platonism a strong theological bias, especially in its conclusion (Η 14-15). The opposition of divine good fortune according to impulse to that which is contrary to impulse reminds us of Plato’s point in the Phaedrus that there is a divine as well as a diseased madness. The determination of the limit of good fortune and of gentlemanliness by looking to the ruler, God, who governs as the end for which prudence gives its orders, and the conclusion that the best limit is the most conducive to the service and contemplation of God, presents the Deity and man’s relation to him as a final and objective standard more definitely in the Eudemian than in the Nicomachean Ethics, which only goes so far as to say that man’s highest end is the speculative wisdom which is divine, like God, dearest to God.

Because, then, it is very like, but more rudimentary and more Platonic, we conclude that the Eudemian is an earlier draft of the Nicomachean Ethics, written by Aristotle when he was still in process of transition from Plato’s ethics to his own.

The Magna Moralia contains similar evidence of being earlier than the Nicomachean Ethics. It treats the same subjects, but always in a more rudimentary manner; and its remarks are always such as would precede rather than follow the masterly expositions of the Nicomachean Ethics. This inferiority applies also to its treatment not only of the early part (i. 1-33 corresponding to E.N. i.-iv.), but also of the middle part (i. 34-11. 7 corresponding to E.N. v.-vii. = E.E. Δ-Ζ). In dealing with justice, it does not make it clear, as the Nicomachean Ethics (Book v.) does, that even universal justice is virtue towards another (M.M. i. 34, 1193 b 1-15), and it omits altogether the division into distributive and corrective justice. In dealing with what the Nicomachean Ethics (Book vi.) calls intellectual virtues, but the Magna Moralia (i. 5, 35) virtues of the rational part of the soul, and right reason, it distinguishes (i. 35, 1196 b 34-36) science, prudence, intelligence, wisdom, apprehension (ὑπόληψις), in a rough manner very inferior to the classification of science, art, prudence, intelligence, wisdom, all of which are coordinate states of attaining truth, in the Nicomachean Ethics (vi. 3). It distinguishes prudence (φρόνησις) and wisdom (σοφία) as the respective virtues of deliberative and scientific reason; and on the whole its account of prudence (cf. M.M. i. 5) is more consistent than that of the Eudemian Ethics. In these points it is a better preparation for the Nicomachean Ethics. But it falls into the confusion of first saying that praise is for moral virtues, and not for virtues of the reason, whether prudence or wisdom (M.M. i. 5, 1185 b 8-12), and afterwards arguing that prudence is a virtue, precisely because it is praised (i. 35, 1197 a 16-18). In dealing with continence and incontinence, the same doubts and solutions occur as in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book vii. = E.E. Ζ), but sometimes confusing doubts and solutions together, instead of first proposing all the doubts and then supplying the solutions as in the Nicomachean Ethics. Such rudimentary and imperfect sketches would be quite excusable in a first draft, but inexcusable and incredible after the Nicomachean Ethics had been written.

It has another characteristic which points to its being an early work of Aristotle, when he was still under the influence of Plato’s style; namely its approximation to dialogue. It asks direct questions (e.g. διὰ τί; M.M. i. 1 repeatedly, 12; ii. 6, 7), incorporates direct statements of others (e.g. φησί, i. 12, 13; ii. 3, 6, 7), alternates direct objections and answers (i. 34), and introduces conversations between the author and others, expressed interrogatively, indicatively and even imperatively (ἀλλ᾽ ἐρεῖ μοι, τὰ ποῖα διασάφησον ὑγιεινά ἐστιν. i. 35, 1196 b 10; cf. ii. 10, 1208 a 20-22). The whole treatise inclines to run into dialogue. It is also Platonic, like the Endemian Ethics, in making little of external goods in the account of good fortune (ii. 8), and in emphasizing the perfect virtue of gentlemanliness (ii. 9). Indeed, in some respects it is more like the Eudemian, though in the main more like the Nicomachean Ethics. In the first book, it has the Eudemian distinction between prudence, virtue and pleasure (i. 3, 1184 b 5-6); but does not make so much of it as the distinction between prudence and wisdom blurred in the Eudemian but defined in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the second book, it runs parallel to the Eudemian Ethics in placing good fortune and gentlemanliness (ii. 8-9), where the Nicomachean Ethics places the speculative and the practical life; but it omits the theological element by denying that good fortune is divine grace, and by submitting gentlemanliness to no standard but that of right reason, when the irrational part of the soul does not hinder the rational part, or intellect (νοῦς), from doing its work.

Because, then, the Magna Moralia is very like the Nicomachean Ethics, but more rudimentary, nearer to the Platonic dialogues in style and. to a less degree in matter, and also like the Eudemian Ethics, we conclude that it is also like that treatise in having been written as an earlier draft of the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle himself.

The hypothesis that the Eudemian Ethics, and by consequence the Magna Moralia, are later than Aristotle has arisen from a simple misconception, continued in a Scholium attributed to Aspasius, who lived in the 2nd century A.D. Nicomachean means “addressed to Nicomachus,” and Eudemian “addressed to Eudemus”; but, as Cicero thought that the Nicomachean Ethics was written by Nicomachus, so the author of the Scholium thought that the Eudemian Ethics, at least so far as the first account of pleasure goes, was written by Eudemus. He only thought so, however, because Aristotle could not have written both accounts of pleasure; and, taking for granted that Aristotle had written the second account of pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book x.), he concluded that the first account (Book vii.) was not the work of Aristotle, but of Eudemus (Comm. in Ar. (Berlin) xix. p. 151). We have seen reason to reverse this argument: Aristotle did write the first account in Book vii., because it contains his usual theory; and, if we must choose, he did not write the second account in Book x. In this way, too, we get a historical development of the theory of pleasure: Plato and Speusippus said it is generation (cf. Plato’s Philebus): Aristotle said it is psychical activity sometimes requiring bodily generation, sometimes not (E.N. vii. = E.E.Z): Aristotle, or some Aristotelian, afterwards said that it is a supervening end completing an activity (E.N. x.). Secondly, some modern commentators, starting from the false conclusion that the definition of pleasure as activity (E.N. vii. = E.E.Z) is by Eudemus, and supposing without proof that he was also author of the first three books of the Eudemian Ethics, have further asserted that these are a better introduction than the first four books of the Nicomachean Ethics to the books common to both treatises (E.N. Books v.-vii. = E.E. Books Δ-Ζ), and have concluded that Eudemus wrote these common books. But we have seen that Aristotle wrote the first three books of the Eudemian as an earlier draft of the Nicomachean Ethics; so that, even so far as they form a better introduction, this will not prove the common books to be by Eudemus. Again, those first three books are a better introduction only in details; whereas in regard to the all-important subject of prudence as distinct from wisdom, they are so bad an introduction that the common book which discusses that subject at large (E.N. Book vi. = E.E. Book Ε) must be rather founded on the first four books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Further, as Aristotle wrote both the first three Eudemian and the first four Nicomachean books, there is no reason why sometimes one, sometimes the other, should not be the best introduction to the common books by the same author. Finally, the common books are so integral a part of the Aristotelian system of philosophy that they cannot be disengaged from it: the book on justice (E.N. v.) quotes and is quoted in the Politics (cf. 1130 b 28, 1280 a 16, 1261 a 30); the book on intellectual virtues (E.N. vi.) quotes (vi. 3) the Posterior Analytics, i. 2, and is quoted in the Metaphysics (Α 1); and we have seen that the book (E.N. vii.) which defines pleasure as activity is simply stating an Aristotelian commonplace. Thirdly, in order to prove that the Eudemian Ethics was by Eudemus, it is said that in its first part it contemplates that there must be a limit (ὄρος) for virtue as a mean (E.E. Β 5, 1222 b 7-8), in its middle part it criticizes the Nicomackean Ethics for not being clear about this limit (E.E. Ε 1), and in the end it alone assigns this limit, in the service and contemplation of God (E.E. Η 15, 1249 b 16 seq.). This argument is subtle, but over-subtle. The Eudemian and the Nicomachean treatments of this subject do not really differ. In the Nicomachean as in the Eudemian Ethics the limit above moral virtue is right reason, or prudence, which is right reason on such matters; and above prudence wisdom, for which prudence gives its orders; while wisdom is the intelligence and science of the most venerable objects, of the most divine, and of God. After this agreement, there is a shade of difference. While the Eudemian Ethics in a more theological vein emphasizes God, the object of wisdom as the end for which prudence gives its orders, the Nicomachean Ethics in a more humanizing spirit emphasizes wisdom itself, the speculative activity, as that end, and afterwards as the highest happiness, because activity of the divine power of intellect, because an imitation of the activity of God, because most dear to God. This is too fine a distinction to found a difference of authorship. Beneath it, and behind the curious hesitation which in dealing with mysteries Aristotle shows between the divine and the human, his three moral treatises agree that wisdom is a science of things divine, which the Nicomachean Ethics (vi. 7) defines as science and intelligence of the most venerable things, the Magna Moralia (i. 35) regards as that which is concerned with the eternal and the divine, and the Eudemian Ethics (Η 15) elevates into the service and contemplation of God.

Aristotle then wrote three moral treatises, which agree in the fundamental doctrines that happiness requires external fortune, but is activity of soul according to virtue, rising from morality through prudence to wisdom, or that science of the divine which constitutes the theology of his Metaphysics. Surely, the harmony of these three moral gospels proves that Aristotle wrote them, and wrote the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia as preludes to the Nicomachean Ethics. When did he begin? We do not know; but there is a pathetic suggestiveness in a passage in the Magna Moralia (i. 35), where he says, “Clever even a bad man is called; as Mentor was thought clever, but prudent he was not.” Mentor was the treacherous contriver of the death of Hermias (345-344 B.C.). Was this passage written when Aristotle was mourning for his friend?

4. The Rhetoric to Alexander.—This is one of a series of works emanating from Aristotle’s early studies in rhetoric, beginning with the Gryllus, continuing in the Theodectea and the Collection of Arts, all of which are lost except some fragments; while among the extant Aristotelian writings as they stand we still possess the Rhetoric to Alexander (Ῥητορικὴ πρὸς Άλέξανδρον) and the Rhetoric (Τἐχνη Ῥητορική). But the Rhetoric to Alexander was considered spurious by Erasmus, for the inadequate reasons that it has a preface and is not mentioned in the list of Diogenes Laertius, and was assigned by Petrus Victorius, in his preface to the Rhetoric, to Anaximenes. It remained for Spengel to entitle the work Anaximenis Ars Rhetorica in his edition of 1847, and thus substitute for the name of the philosopher Aristotle that of the sophist Anaximenes on his title-page. We have therefore to ask, first who was the author, and secondly what is the relation of the Rhetoric to Alexander to the Rhetoric, which nowadays alone passes for genuine.

After a dedicatory epistle to Alexander (chap, 1) the opening of the treatise itself (chap. 2) is as follows:—“There are three genera of political speeches; one deliberative, one declamatory, one forensic: their species are seven; hortative, dissuasive, laudatory, vituperative, accusatory, defensive, critical.” This brief sentence is enough to prove the work genuine, because it was Aristotle who first distinguished the three genera (cf. Rhet. i. 3; Quintilian iii. 4, 1. 7, 1), by separating the declamatory (ἐπιδεικτικόν) from the deliberative (δημηγορικόν, συμβουλευτικόν) and judicial (δικανικόν); whereas his rival Isocrates had considered that laudation and vituperation, which Aristotle elevated into species of declamation, run through every kind (Quintilian iv. 4), and Anaximenes recognized only the deliberative and the judicial (Dionys. H. de Isaeo, 19). In order, however, to impute the whole work to Anaximenes, Spengel took one of the most inexcusable steps ever taken in the history of scholarship. Without any manuscript authority he altered the very first words “three genera” (τρία γένη) into “two genera” (δύο γένη), and omitted the words “one declamatory” (τὸ δὲ ἐπιδεικτικόν). Quintilian (iii. 4) imputes to Anaximenes two genera, deliberative and judicial, and seven species, “hortandi, dehortandi, laudandi, vituperandi, accusandi, defendendi, exquirendi, quod ἐξεταστικὸν dicit.” But the author of this rhetoric most certainly recognized three genera (τρία γένη), since, besides the deliberative and judicial, the declamatory genus constantly appears in the work (chaps. 2 init., 4, 7, 18, 36, cf. οὐκ ἀγῶνος ἀλλ᾽ ἐπιδείξεως ἓνεκα 1440 b 13); and, if the terms for it are not always the same, this is just what one would expect in a new discovery. Moreover, he could recognize seven species in the Rhetoric to Alexander, though he recognized only six in the Rhetoric, provided the two works were not written at the same time; and as a matter of fact even in the Rhetoric to Alexander the seventh or critical species (ἐξεταστικόν) is in process of disappearing (cf. chap. 37). As then Anaximenes did not, but Aristotle did, recognize three genera, and as Aristotle could as well as Anaximenes recognize seven species, the evidence is overwhelming that the Rhetoric to Alexander is the work not of Anaximenes, but of Aristotle; on the condition that its date is not that of Aristotle’s confessedly genuine Rhetoric.

There is a second and even stronger evidence that the Rhetoric to Alexander is a genuine work of Aristotle. It divides (chap. 8) evidences (πίστεις) into two kinds (1) evidence from arguments, actions and men (αἱ μὲν ἐξ αὐτῶν τῶν λόγων καὶ τῶν πράξεων καὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων); (2) adventitious evidences (αἱ δ᾽ ἐπίθετοι τοῖς λεγομένοις καὶ τοῖς πραττομένοις). The former are immediately enumerated as probabilities (εἰκότα), examples (παραδείγματα), proofs (τεκμήρια), considerations (ἐνθυμήματα), maxims (γνῶμαι), signs (σημεῖα), refutations (ἔλεγχοι); the latter as opinion of the speaker (δόξα τοῦ λεγοντος), witnesses (μαρτυρίαι), tortures (βάσανοι), oaths (ὄρκοι). It is confessed by Spengel himself that these two kinds of evidences are the two kinds recognized in Aristotle’s Rhetoric as (1) artificial (ἐντέχνοι πίστεις) and (2) inartificial (ἀτέχνοι πίστεις). Now, from the outset of his Rhetoric Aristotle himself claims to be the first to distinguish between artificial evidences from arguments and other evidences which he regards as mere additions; and he complains that the composers of arts of speaking had neglected the former for the latter. In particular, rhetoricians appeared to him to have neglected argument in comparison with passion. No doubt, rational evidences had appeared in books of rhetoric, as we see from Plato’s Phaedrus, 266-267,where we find proofs, probabilities, refutation and maxim, but mixed up with other evidences. The point of Aristotle was to draw a line between rational and other evidences, to insist on the former, and in fact to found a logic of rhetoric. But if in the Rhetoric to Alexander, not he, but Anaximenes, had already performed this great achievement, Aristotle would have been the meanest of mankind; for the logic of rhetoric would have been really the work of Anaximenes the sophist, but falsely claimed by Aristotle the philosopher. As we cannot without a tittle of evidence accept such a consequence, we conclude that Aristotle formulated the distinction between argumentative and adventitious, artificial and inartificial evidences, both in the Rhetoric to Alexander and in the Rhetoric; and that the former as well as the latter is a genuine work of Aristotle, the founder of the logic of rhetoric.

What is the relation between these two genuine Rhetorics? The last event mentioned in the Rhetoric to Alexander occurred in 340, the last in the Rhetoric is the common peace (κοινὴ εἰρἠνη) made between Alexander and the Greeks in 336 (Rhet. ii. 23, 1399 b 12). The former treatise (chap. 9), under the head of examples (παραδείγματα), gives historical examples of the unexpected in war for the years 403, 371, 358, concluding with the year 340, in which the Corinthians, coming with nine triremes to the assistance of the Syracusans, defeated the Carthaginians who were blockading Syracuse with 150 ships. Spengel, indeed, tries to bring the latest date in the book down to 330; but it is by absurdly supposing that the author could not have got the commonplace, “one ought to criticize not bitterly but gently,” except from Demosthenes, De Corona (§ 265). We may take it then that the last date in the Rhetoric to Alexander is 340; and by a curious coincidence 340 was the year when, on Philip’s marching against Byzantium, Alexander was left behind as regent and keeper of the seal, and distinguished himself so greatly that Philip was only too glad that the Macedonians called Alexander king (Plutarch, Alexander, 9). It is possible then that Aristotle may have written the dedication to Alexander about 340 and treated him as if he were king in the dedicatory epistle. At the same time, as such prefaces are often forgeries, not prejudicing the body of the treatise, it does not really matter whether Aristotle actually dedicated his work to Alexander in that epistle about that year or not. If he did, then the Rhetoric to Alexander in 340 was at least four years prior to the Rhetoric, which was as late as 336. If he did not, the question still remains, what is the internal relation between these two genuine Rhetorics? It will turn out most important.

The relation between the two Rhetorics turns on their treatment of rational, argumentative, artificial evidences. Each of them, the probability (chap. 8), the example (chap. 9), the proof (chap. 10), the consideration (chap, 11), the maxim (chap. 12), the sign (chap. 13), the refutation (chap. 14), though very like what it is in the Rhetoric, receives in the Rhetoric to Alexander a definition slightly different from the definition in the Rhetoric, which it must be remembered is also the definition in the Prior Analytics. Strange as this point is, it is still stranger that not one of these internal evidences is brought into relation with induction and deduction. Example (παράδειγμα) is not called rhetorical induction, and consideration (ἐνθύμημα) is not called rhetorical syllogism, as they are in the Rhetoric, and in the Analytics. Induction (ἐπαγωγή) and syllogism (συλλογισμός), the general forms of inference, do not occur in the Rhetoric to Alexander. In fact, this interesting treatise contains a rudimentary treatment of rational evidences in rhetoric and is therefore earlier than the Rhetoric, which exhibits a developed analysis of these rational evidences as special logical forms. Together, the earlier and the later Rhetoric show us the logic of rhetoric in the making, going on about 340, the last date of the Rhetoric to Alexander, and more developed in or after 336 B.C., the last date of the Rhetoric.

Nor is this all: the earlier Rhetoric to Alexander and the later Rhetoric show us logic itself in the making. We have already said that Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician. He gradually became a logician out of his previous studies: out of metaphysics, for with him being is always the basis of thinking, and common principles, such as that of contradiction, are axioms of things before axioms of thought, while categories are primarily things signified by names; out of the mathematics of the Pythagoreans and the Platonists, which taught him the nature of demonstration; out of the physics, of which he imbibed the first draughts from his father, which taught him induction from sense and the modification of strict demonstration to suit facts; out of the dialectic between man and man which provided him with beautiful examples of inference in the Socratic dialogues of Xenophon and Plato; out of the rhetoric addressed to large audiences, which with dialectic called his attention to probable inferences; out of the grammar taught with rhetoric and poetics which led him to the logic of the proposition. We cannot write a history of the varied origin of logic, beyond putting the rudimentary logic of the proposition in the De Interpretatione before the less rudimentary theory of categories as significant names capable of becoming predicates in the Categories, and before the maturer analysis of the syllogism in the Analytics. But at any rate the process was gradual; and Aristotle was advanced in metaphysics, mathematics, physics, dialectics, rhetoric and poetics, before he became the founder of logic.

V. Order of the Philosophical Writings

Some of Aristotle’s philosophical writings then are earlier than others; because they show more Platonic influence, and are more rudimentary; e.g. the Categories earlier than some parts of the Metaphysics, because under the influence of Platonic forms it talks of inherent attributes, and allows secondary substances which are universal; the De Interpretatione earlier than the Analytics, because in it the Platonic analysis of the sentence into noun and verb is retained for the proposition; the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia earlier than the Nicomachean Ethics, because they are rudimentary sketches of it, and the one written rather in the theological spirit, the other rather in the dialectical style, of Plato; and the Rhetoric to Alexander earlier than the Rhetoric, because it contains a rudimentary theory of the rational evidences afterwards developed into a logic of rhetoric in the Rhetoric and Analytics.

It is tempting to think that we can carry out the chronological order of the philosophical writings in detail. But in the gradual process of composition, by which a work once begun was kept going with the rest, although a work such as the Politics (begun in 357) was begun early, and some works more rudimentary came earlier than others, the general body of writings was so kept together in Aristotle’s library, and so simultaneously elaborated and consolidated into a system that it soon becomes impossible to put one before another.

Zeller, indeed, has attempted an exact order of succession:—

1. The logical treatises.

2. The Physics, De Coelo, De Generatione et Corruptione, Meteorologica.

3. Historia Animalium, De Anima, Parva Naturalia, De Partibus Animalium, De Animalium Incessu, De Generatione Animalium.

4. Ethics and Politics.

5. Poetics and Rhetoric.

6. Metaphysics (unfinished).

But Zeller does not give enough weight either to the evidence of early composition contained in the Politics and Meteorology, or to the evidence of subsequent contemporaneous composition contained in the cross-references, e.g. between the Physics and the Metaphysics. On the other hand he gives too much weight to the references from one book to another, which Aristotle could have entered into his manuscripts at any time before his death. Moreover, the arrangement sometimes breaks down: for example, though on the whole the logical books are quoted without quoting the rest, the De Interpretatione (chap. 1) quotes the De Anima, and therefore is falsely taken by Zeller against its own internal evidence to be subsequent to it and consequently to the other logical books. Again, the Meteorologica (iii. 2, 372 b 9) quotes the De Sensu (c. 3), and therefore, on Zeller’s arguments, ought to follow one of the Parva Naturalia. Lastly, though the Metaphysics often quotes the Physics, and is therefore regarded as being subsequent, it is itself quoted in the Physics (i. 8, 191 b 29), and therefore ought to be regarded as antecedent. Zeller tries to get over this difficulty of cross-reference by detaching Metaphysics, Book Δ, from the rest and placing it before the Physics. But this violent and arbitrary remedy is only partial. The truth is that the Metaphysics both precedes and follows the Physics, because it had been all along occupying Aristotle ever since he began to differ from Plato’s metaphysical views and indeed forms a kind of presupposed basis of his whole system. So generally, the references backwards and forwards, and the cross-references, are really evidences that Aristotle mainly wrote his works not successively but simultaneously, and entered references as and when he pleased, because he had not published them.

There are two kinds of quotations in Aristotle’s extant works, the quotation of another book, and the quotation of a historical fact. While the former is useless to determine the sequence of books written simultaneously, the latter is insufficient to determine a complete chronological order. When Aristotle, e.g. in the Politics, quotes an event as now (νῦν), he was writing about it at that time; and when he quotes another event as lately (νεωστί) he was writing about it shortly after that time; but he might have been writing the rest of the Politics both before and after either event. When he quotes the last event mentioned in the book, e.g. in the Rhetoric (ii. 23, 1399 b 12) the “common peace” of Greece under Alexander in 336, he was writing as late as that date, but he might also have been writing the Rhetoric both before it and after it. When he quotes what persons used to say in the past, e.g. Plato and Speusippus in the Ethics, Eudoxus and Callippus in the Metaphysics, he was writing these passages after the deaths of these persons; but he might have been also writing the Ethics and the Metaphysics both beforehand and afterwards. Lastly, when he is silent about a historical fact, the argument from silence is evidence only when he could not have failed to mention it; as, for example, in the Constitution of Athens, when he could not have failed to mention quinqueremes and other facts after 325-324. But this is in a historical work; whereas the argument from silence about historical facts in a philosophical work can seldom apply.

The chronological order therefore is not sufficiently detailed to be the real order of Aristotelian writings. Secondly, the traditional order, which for nearly 2000 years has descended from the edition of Andronicus to the Berlin edition, is satisfactory in details, but unsatisfactory in system. It gives too much weight to Aristotle’s logic, and too little to his metaphysics, on account of two prejudices of the commentators which led them to place both logic and physics before metaphysics. Aristotle rightly used all the sciences of his day, and especially his own physics, as a basis of his metaphysics. For example, at the very outset he refers to the Physics (ii. 2)for his use of the four causes, material, efficient, formal and final, in the Metaphysics (Α 2). This and other applications of the science of nature to the science of all being induced the commentators to adopt this order, and entitle the science of being the Sequel to the Physics (τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά). But Aristotle knew nothing of this title, the first known use of which was by Nicolaus Damascenus, a younger contemporary of Andronicus, the editor of the Aristotelian writings, and Andronicus was probably the originator of the title, and of the order. On the other hand, Aristotle entitles the science of all being “Primary Philosophy” (πρώτη φιλοσοφία), and the science of physical being “Secondary Philosophy” (δεύτερα φιλοσοφία), which suggests that his order is from Metaphysics to Physics, the reverse of his editor’s order from Physics to Metaphysics. Thus the traditional order puts Physics before Metaphysics without Aristotle’s authority. With some more show of authority it puts Logic before Metaphysics. Aristotle, on introducing the principle of contradiction (Met. Γ 3), which belongs to Metaphysics as an axiom of being, says that those who attempt to discuss the question of accepting this axiom, do so on account of their ignorance of Analytics, which they ought to know beforehand (προεπισταμένους). He means that the logical analysis of demonstration in the Analytics would teach them beforehand that there cannot be demonstration, though there must be induction, of an axiom, or any other principle; whereas, if they are not logically prepared for metaphysics, they will expect a demonstration of the axiom, as Heraclitus, the Heraclitean Cratylus and the Sophist Protagoras actually did,—and in vain. Acting on this hint, not Aristotle but the Peripatetics inferred that all logic is an instrument (ὄργανον) of all sciences; and by the time of Andronicus, who was one of them and sometimes called “the eleventh from Aristotle,” the order, Logic-Physics-Metaphysics, had become established pretty much as we have it now. It is, however, not the real order for studying the philosophy of Aristotle, because there is more Metaphysics in his Physics than Physics in his Metaphysics, and more Metaphysics in his Logic than Logic in his Metaphysics. The commentators themselves were doubtful about the order: Boethus proposed to begin with Physics, and some of the Platonists with Ethics or Mathematics; while Andronicus preferred to put Logic first as Organon (Scholia, 25 b 34 seq.). None of the parties to the dispute had the authority of Aristotle. What do we find in his works? Primary philosophy, Metaphysics, the science of being, is the solid foundation of all parts of his philosophical system; not only in the Physics, but also in the De Coelo (i. 8, 277 b 10), in the De Generatione (i. 3, 318 a 6; ii. 10, 336 b 29), in the De Anima (i. 1, 403 a 28, cf. b 16), in the De Partibus Animalium (i. 1, 641 a 35), in the Nicomachean Ethics (i. 6, 1096 b 30), in the De Interpretatione (5, 17 a 14); and in short throughout his extant works. The reason is that Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician half for and half against Plato, occupied himself with metaphysics all his philosophical life, made the science of things the universal basis of all sciences without destroying their independence, and so gradually brought round philosophy from universal forms to individual substances. The traditional order of the Aristotelian writings, still continued in the Berlin edition, beginning with the logical writings on page 1, proceeding to the physical writings on page 184, and postponing the Metaphysics to page 980, is not the real order of Aristotle’s philosophy.

The real order of Aristotle’s philosophy is that of Aristotle’s mind, revealed in his writings, and by the general view of thinking, science, philosophy and all learning therein contained. He classified thinking (Met. Ε 1) and science (Topics, vi. 6) by the three operations of speculation (θεωρία), practice (πρᾶξις) and production (ποίησις), and made the following subdivisions:—

I. Speculative: about things; subdivided (Met. Ε 1; De An. i. 1) into:—

i. Primary Philosophy, Theology, also called Wisdom, about things as things.

ii. Mathematical Philosophy, about quantitative things in the abstract.

iii. Physical Philosophy, about things as changing, and therefore about natural substances or bodies, composed of matter and essence.

II. Practical or Political Philosophy, or philosophy of things human (cf. E.N. x. 9-fin.): about human good; subdivided (E.N. vi. 8, cf. E.E. Α 8, 1218 b 13) into:—

i. Ethics, about the good of the individual.

ii. Economics, about the good of the family.

iii. Politics, about the general good of the state.

III. Productive, or Art (τέχνη): about works produced; subdivided (Met. Α. 1, 981 b 17-20) into:—

i. Necessary (πρὸς τάναγκαῖα), e.g. medicine.

ii. Fine (πρὸβ διαγωγήν), e.g. poetry.

Aristotle calls all these investigations sciences (ἐπιστῆμαι): but he also uses the term “sciences” in a narrower sense in consequence of a classification of their objects, which pervades his writings, into things necessary and things contingent, as follows.—

(A) The necessary (τὸ μὴ ἐνδεχόμενον ἄλλως ἔχειν), what must be; subdivided into:—

(1) Absolutely (ἁπλῶς), e.g. the mathematical.

(2) Hypothetically (ἐξ ὑποθέσεως), e.g. matter necessary as means to an end.

(B) The contingent (τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον ἄλλως ἔχειν), what may be; subdivided into:—

(1) The usual (τὸ ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ) or natural (τὸ φυσικόν), e.g. a man grows grey.

(2) The accidental (τὸ κατὰ συμβεβηκός), e.g. a man sits or not.

Now, according to Aristotle, science in the narrow sense is concerned only with the absolutely necessary (E.N. iii. 3), and in the classification would stop at mathematics, which we still call exact science: in the wide sense, on the other hand, it extends to the whole of the necessary and to the usual contingent, but excludes the accidental (Met. Ε 2), and would in the classification include not only metaphysics and mathematics, but also physics, ethics, economics, politics, necessary and fine art; or in short all speculative, practical and productive thinking of a systematic kind. Hence the Posterior Analytics, which is Aristotle’s authoritative logic of science, is of peculiar interest because, after beginning by defining science as investigating necessary objects from necessary principles (i. 4), it proceeds to say that it is either of the necessary or of the usual though not of the accidental (i. 29), and to admit that its principles are some necessary and some contingent (i. 32, 88 b 7). Philosophy (φιλοςοφία) also is used by him in a similar manner. Though occasionally he means by it primary philosophy (Met. Γ 2-3, Κ 3), more frequently he extends it to all three speculative philosophies (Ε 1, 1026 a 18, τρεῖς ἂν εἶεν φιλοσοφίαι θεωρητικαί, μαθηματική, φυσική, θεολογική), and to all three practical philosophies, as we see from the constant use of the phrase “political philosopher” in the Ethics; and in short applies it to all sciences except productive science or art. With him, as with the Greeks generally, the problems of philosophy are the nature and origin of being and of good: it is not as with too many of us a mere science of mind.

Aristotle’s view of thinking in science and philosophy is essentially comprehensive; but it is not so wide as to become indefinite. According to him, science at its widest selects a special subject, e.g. number in arithmetic, magnitude in geometry, stars in astronomy, a man’s good in ethics; concentrates itself on the causes and appropriate principles of its subject, especially the definition of the subject and its species by their essences or formal causes; and after an inductive intelligence of those principles proceeds by a deductive demonstration from definitions to consequences: philosophy is simply a desire of this definite knowledge of causes and effects. Beyond philosophy, not beyond science, there is art; and beyond philosophy and science there is history, the description of facts preparatory to philosophy, the investigation of causes (cf. Pr. An. i. 30); and this may be natural history, preparatory to natural philosophy, as in the History of Animals preparatory to the De Partibus Animalium, or what we call civil history, preparatory to political philosophy, as in the 158 Constitutions more or less preparatory to the Politics.

Wide as is all his knowledge of facts and causes, it does not appear to Aristotle to be the whole of learning and the show of it. Beyond knowledge lies opinion, beyond discovery disputation, beyond philosophy and science dialectic between man and man, which was much practised by the Greeks in the dialogues of Socrates, Plato, the Megarians and Aristotle himself in his early manhood. With Plato, who thought that the interrogation of man is the best instrument of truth, dialectic was exaggerated into a universal science of everything that is. Aristotle, on the other hand, learnt to distinguish dialectic (διαλεκτική) from science (ἐπιστήμη); in that it has no definite subject, else it would not ask questions (Post. An. i. 11, 77 a 31-33); in that for appropriate principles it substitutes the probabilities of authority (τὰ ἔνδοξα) which are the opinions of all, or of the majority, or of the wise (Top. i. 1, 100 b 21-23); and in that it is not like science a deduction from true and primary principles of a definite subject to true consequences, but a deduction from opinion to opinion, which may be true or false. Sophistry appeared to him to be like it, except that it is a fallacious deduction either from merely apparent probabilities in its matter or itself merely apparently syllogistic in its form (cf. Topics, i. 1). Moreover, he compared dialectic and sophistry, on account of their generality, with primary philosophy in the Metaphysics (Γ 2, 1004 b 17-26); to the effect that all three concern themselves with all things, but that about everything metaphysics is scientific, dialectic tentative, sophistry apparent, not real. He means that a sophist like Protagoras will teach superficially anything as wisdom for money; and that even a dialectician like Plato will write a dialogue, such as the Republic, nominally about justice, but really about all things from the generality of the form of good, instead of from appropriate moral principles; but that a primary philosopher selects as a definite subject all things as such without interfering with the special sciences of different things each in its kind (Met. Γ 1), and investigates the axioms or common principles of things as things (ib. 3), without pretending, like Plato, to deduce from any common principle the special principles of each science (Post. An. i. 9, 32). Aristotle at once maintains the primacy of metaphysics and vindicates the independence of the special sciences. He is at the same time the only Greek philosopher who clearly discriminated discovery and disputation, science and dialectic, the knowledge of a definite subject from its appropriate principles and the discussion of anything whatever from opinions and authority. On one side he places science and philosophy, on the other dialectic and sophistry.

Such is the great mind of Aristotle manifested in the large map of learning, by which we have now to determine the order of his extant philosophical writings, with a view to studying them in their real order, which is neither chronological nor traditional, but philosophical and scientific. Turning over the pages of the Berlin edition, but passing over works which are perhaps spurious, we should put first and foremost speculative philosophy, and therein the primary philosophy of his Metaphysics (980 a 21-1093 b 29); then the secondary philosophy of his Physics, followed by his other physical works, general and biological, including among the latter the Historia Animalium as preparatory to the De Partibus Animalium, and the De Anima and Parva Naturalia, which he called “physical” but we call “psychological” (184 a 10-967 b 27); next, the practical philosophy of the Ethics, including the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia as earlier and the Nicomachean Ethics as later (1094-1249 b 25), and of the Politics (1252-1342), with the addition of the newly discovered Athenian Constitution as ancillary to it; finally, the productive science, or art, of the Rhetoric, including the earlier Rhetoric to Alexander and the later Rhetorical Art, and of the Poetics, which was unfinished (1354-end). This is the real order of Aristotle’s system, based on his own theory and classification of sciences.

But what has become of Logic, with which the traditional order of Andronicus begins Aristotle’s works (1-148 b 8)? So far from coming first, Logic comes nowhere in his classification of science. Aristotle was the founder of Logic; because, though others, and especially Plato, had made occasional remarks about reason (λόγος), Aristotle was the first to conceive it as a definite subject of investigation. As he says at the end of the Sophistical Elenchi on the syllogism, he had no predecessor, but took pains and laboured a long time in investigating it. Nobody, not even Plato, had discovered that the process of deduction is a combination of premisses (συλλογισμός) to produce a new conclusion. Aristotle, who made this great discovery, must have had great difficulty in developing the new investigation of reasoning processes out of dialectic, rhetoric, poetics, grammar, metaphysics, mathematics, physics and ethics; and in disengaging it from other kinds of learning. He got so far as gradually to write short discourses and long treatises, which we, not he, now arrange in the order of the Categories or names; the De Interpretatione on propositions; the Analytics, Prior on syllogism, Posterior on scientific syllogism; the Topics on dialectical syllogism; the Sophistici Elenchi on eristical or sophistical syllogism; and, except that he had hardly a logic of induction, he covered the ground. But after all this original research he got no further. First, he did not combine all these works into a system. He may have laid out the sequence of syllogisms from the Analytics onwards; but how about the Categories and the De Interpretatione? Secondly, he made no division of logic. In the Categories he distinguished names and propositions for the sake of the classification of names; in the De Interpretatione he distinguished nouns and verbs from sentences with a view to the enunciative sentence: in the Analytics he analysed the syllogism into premisses and premisses into terms and copula, for the purpose of syllogism. But he never called any of these a division of all logic. Thirdly, he had no one name for logic. In the Posterior Analytics (i. 22, 84 a 7-8) he distinguishes two modes of investigation, analytically (ἀναλυτικῶς) and logically (λογικῶς). But “analytical” means scientific inference from appropriate principles, and “logical” means dialectical inference from general considerations; and the former gives its name to the Analytics, the latter suits the Topics, while neither analytic nor logic is a name for all the works afterwards called logic. Fourthly, and consequently, he gave no place to any science embracing the whole of those works in his classification of science, but merely threw out the hint that we should know analytics before questioning the acceptance of the axioms of being (Met. Γ 3).

It is a commentator’s blunder to suppose that the founder of logic elaborated it into a system, and then applied it to the sciences. He really left the Peripatetics to combine his scattered discourses and treatises into a system, to call it logic, and logic Organon, and to put it first as the instrument of sciences; and it was the Stoics who first called logic a science, and assigned it the first place in their triple classification of science into logic, physics, ethics. Would Aristotle have consented? Would he not rather have given the first place to primary philosophy?

Dialectic was distinguished from science by Aristotle. Is logic, then, according to him, not science but dialectic? The word logically (λογικῶς) means the same as dialectically (διαλεκτικῶς). But the general discussion of opinions, signified by both words, is only a subordinate part of Aristotle’s profound investigation of the whole process of reasoning. The Analytics, the most important part, so far from being dialectic or logic in that narrow sense, is called by him not logic but analytic science (ἀναλυτικὴ ἐπιστήμη, Rhet. i. 4, 1359 b 10; cf, 1356 b 9, 1357 a 30, b 25); and in the Metaphysics he evidently refers to it as “the science which considers demonstration and science,” which he distinguishes from the three speculative sciences, mathematics, physics and primary philosophy (Met. Κ 1, 1059 b 9-21). The Analytics then, which from the beginning claims to deal with science, is a science of sciences, without however forming any part of the classification. On the other hand, it does not follow that Aristotle would have regarded the Topics, which he calls “the investigation” and “the investigation of dialectic” (ἡ πραγματεία, Top, i. 1, ἡ πραγματεία ἡ περὶ τὴν διαλεκτικήν, Pr. An. i. 30, 46 a 30), or the De Interpretatione, which he calls “the present theory” (τῆς νῦν θεωρίας, De Int. 6, 17 a 7), as science. In fact, as to the Categories as well as the De Interpretatione, we are at a complete loss. But about the Topics we may venture to make the suggestion that, as in describing consciousness Aristotle says we perceive that we perceive, and understand that we understand, and as he calls Analytics a science of sciences, so he might have called the Topics a dialectical investigation of dialectic. Now, this suggestion derives support from his own description of the allied art of Rhetoric. “Rhetoric is counterpart to dialectic” is the first sentence of the Rhetoric; and the reason is that both are concerned with common objects of no definite science. Afterwards dialectic and rhetoric are said to differ from other arts in taking either side of a question (i. 1, 1355 a 33-35); rhetoric, since its artificial evidences involve characters, passions and reasoning, is called a kind of offshoot of dialectic and morals, and a copy of dialectic, because neither is a science of anything definite, but both faculties (δυνάμεις) of providing arguments (i. 2, 1356 a 33); and, since rhetorical arguments are examples and enthymemes analysed in the Analytics, rhetoric is finally regarded as a compound of analytic science and of morals, while it is like dialectical and sophistic arguments (i. 4, 1359 b 2-17).

As then Aristotle himself regarded rhetoric as partly science and partly dialectic, perhaps he would have said that his works on reasoning are some science and others not, and that, while the investigation of syllogism with a view to scientific syllogism in the Analytics is analytic science, the investigation of dialectical syllogism, in the Topics, with its abuse, eristical syllogism, in the Sophistici Elenchi, is dialectic. At any rate, these miscellaneous works on reasoning have no right to stand first in Aristotle’s writings under any one name, logic or Organon. As he neither put them together, nor on any one definite plan, we are left to convenience; and the most convenient place is with the psychology of the De Anima.

As for dialectic itself, it would have been represented by Aristotle’s early dialogues, had they not been lost except a few fragments. But none of his extant writings is so much dialectic, like a Platonic dialogue. They contain however many relics of dialectic. The Rhetoric is declared by him to be partly dialectic. The Topics is at least an investigation of dialectic, which has had an immense influence on the method of argument. The Magna Moralia almost runs into dialogue. Besides, all the extant works, though apparently didactic, are full of dialectical matter in the way of opinions (λεγόμενα), difficulties and doubts (ἀπορήματα, ἀπορίαι), solutions (λύσεις), and of dialectical style in the way of conversational expressions. It is probable also that the “extraneous discourses” (οἱ ἐξωτερικοὶ λόγοι) sometimes mentioned in them here mean dialectical discussions of a subject from opinions extraneous to its nature, as opposed to scientific deduction from its appropriate principles. From the eight passages, which refer to the extraneous discourses, we find (1) that Platonic forms were made by them matters of common talk (τεθρύληται, Met. Μ 1, 1076a 28); (2) that time was made by them matter of doubts, which in this case are Aristotle’s own doubts (Phys. iv. 10, 217 b 31-218 a 30); (3) that the discussions of Platonic forms in them and in philosophical discourses were different (E.E. i. 8, 1217 b 22); (4) that the ordinary distinction between goods of mind, body and estate is one which we make (διαιρούμεθα) in them (E.E. ii. 1, 1218 b 34); (5) that in them appeared the division of soul into irrational and rational, used by Aristotle (E.N. i. 13, 1102 a 26), and attributed to Plato; (6) that the distinction between action and production accepted by Aristotle appeared in them (E.N. vi. 4, 1140 a 3); (7) that a distinction between certain kinds of rule is one which we make often (διοριζόμεθα ... πολλάκις) in them (Pol. 16, 1278 b 31); (8) that a discussion about the best life, used by Aristotle, was made in them (Pol. Η 1, 1323 a 22). On the whole, the interpretation which best suits all the passages is that extraneous discourses mean any extra-scientific dialectical discussions, oral or written, occurring in dialogues by Plato, or by Aristotle, or by anybody else, or in ordinary conversation, on any subject under the sun.

Among all the eight passages mentioned above, the most valuable is that from the Eudemian Ethics (Α 8), which discriminates extraneous discourses and philosophical (καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἐξωτερικοῖς λόγοις καὶ ἐν τοῖς κατὰ φιλοσοφίαν, 1217 b 22-23); and it is preceded (Α 6, 1216 b 35-37 a 17), by a similar distinction between foreign discourses (ἀλλοτρίοι λόγοι) and discourses appropriate to the thing (οἰκεῖοι λόγοι τοῦ πράγματος), which marks even better the opposition intended between dialectic and philosophy. Now, as in all eight passages Aristotle speaks, somewhat disparagingly, of “even (καί) extraneous discourses,” and as these include his own early dialogues, they must be taken to mean that though he might quote them, he no longer wished to be judged by his early views, and therefore drew a strong line of demarcation between his early dialogues and the mature treatises of his later philosophical system. Now, both were in the hands of his readers in the time of Andronicus. Therefore his contemporary, Cicero, who knew the early dialogues on Philosophy, the Eudemus and the Protrepticus, and also among the mature scientific writings the Topics, Rhetoric, Politics, Physics and De Coelo, to some extent, was justified by Aristotle’s example and precept in drawing the line between two kinds of books, one written popularly, called exoteric, the other more accurately (Cic. De Finibus, v. 5). But there was no doubt a tendency to extend the term “exoteric” from the dialectical to the more popular of the scientific writings of Aristotle, to make a new distinction between exoteric and acroamatic or esoteric, and even to make out that Aristotle was in the habit of teaching both exoterically and acroamatically day by day as head of the Peripatetic school at Athens. Aulus Gellius in the 2nd century A.D. supplies the best proof of this growth of tradition in his Noctes Atticae (xx. 5). He says that Aristotle (1) divided his commentationes and arts taught to his pupils into ἐξωτερικά and ἀκροατικά; (2) taught the latter in the morning walk (ἐωθινὸν περίπατον), the former in the evening walk (δειλινὸν περίπατον); (3) divided his books in the same manner; (4) defended himself against Alexander’s letter, complaining that it was not right to his pupils to have published his acroamatic works, by replying in a letter that they were published and not published, because they are intelligible only to those who heard them. Gellius then quotes this correspondence, also given by Plutarch, and quotes it ex Andronici philosophi libro. The answer to the first three points is that Aristotle did not make any distinction between exoteric and acroamatic, and was not likely to have any longer taught his exoteric dialogues when he was teaching his mature philosophy at Athens, but may have alternated the teaching of the latter between the more abstruse and the more popular parts which had gradually come to be called “exoteric.” As regards the last point, the authority of Andronicus proves that he at all events did not exaggerate his own share in publishing Aristotle’s works; but it does not prove either that this correspondence between Alexander and Aristotle took place, or that Aristotle called his philosophical writings acroamatic, or that he had published them wholesale to the world.

The literary career of Aristotle falls into three periods, (1) The early period; when he was writing and publishing exoteric dialogues, but also tending to write didactic works, and beginning his scientific writings, e.g. the Politics in 357, the Meteorologica in 356. (2) The immature period; when he was continuing his didactic and scientific works, and composing first drafts, e.g. the Categories, the Eudemian Ethics, the Magna Moralia, the Rhetoric to Alexander. (3) The mature period; when he was finishing his scientific works, completing his system, and not publishing it but teaching it in the Peripatetic school; when he would teach not his early dialogues, nor his immature writings and first drafts, but mature works, e.g. the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, the Rhetoric; and above all teach his whole system as far as possible in the real order of his classification of science.

VI. The Aristotelian Philosophy

We have now (1) sketched the life of Aristotle as a reader and a writer from early manhood; (2) have watched him as a Platonist, partly imitating but gradually emancipating himself from his master to form a philosophy of his own; (3) have traced the gradual composition of his writings from Plato’s time onwards; (4) have distinguished earlier, more Platonic and rudimentary, from later, more independent and mature, writings; (5) have founded the real order of his writings, not on chronology, nor on tradition, but on his classification of science and learning. It remains to answer the final question:—What is the Aristotelian philosophy, which its author gradually formed with so much labour? Here we have only room for its spirit, which we shall try to give as if he were himself speaking to us, as head of the Peripatetic school at Athens, and holding no longer the early views of his dialogues, or the immature views of such treatises as the Categories, but only his mature views, such as he expresses in the Metaphysics. Aristotle was primarily a metaphysician, a philosopher of things, who uses the objective method of proceeding from being to thinking. We shall begin therefore with that primary philosophy which is the real basis of his philosophy, and proceed in the order of his classification of science to give his chief doctrines on:—

(1) Speculative philosophy, metaphysical and physical, including his psychology, and with it his logic.

(2) Practical philosophy, ethics and politics.

(3) Productive science, or art.

Things are substances (οὐσίαι), each of which is a separate individual (χωριστόν, τόδε τι, καθ᾽ ἕκαστον) and is variously affected as quantified, qualified, related, active, passive and so forth, in categories of things which are attributes (συμβεβηκότα), different from the category of substance, but real only as predicates belonging to some substance, and are in fact only the substance itself affected (αὐϔὸ πεπονθός). The essence of each substance, being what it is (τὸ τί ἐστι, τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι), is that substance; e.g. this rational animal, Socrates. Substances are so similar that the individuals of a species are even the same in essence or substance, e.g. Callias and Socrates differ in matter but are the same in essence, as rational animals. The universal (τὸ καθόλου) is real only as one predicate belonging to many individual substances: it is therefore not a substance. There are then no separate universal forms, as Plato supposed. There are attributes and universals, real as belonging to individual substances, whose being is their being. The mind, especially in mathematics, abstracts numbers, motions, relations, causes, essences, ends, kinds; and it over-abstracts things mentally separate into things really separate. But reality consists only of individual substances, numerous, moving, related, active as efficient causes, passive as material causes, essences as formal causes, ends as final causes, and in classes which are real universals only as real predicates of individual substances. Such is Aristotle’s realism of individuals and universals, contained in his primary philosophy, as expressed in the Metaphysics, especially in Book Ζ, his authoritative pronouncement on being and substance.

The individual substances, of which the universe is composed, fall into three great irreducible kinds: nature, God, man.

I. Nature.—The obvious substances are natural substances or bodies (φυσικαὶ οὐσίαι, σώματα), e.g. animals, plants, water, earth, moon, sun, stars. Each natural substance is a compound (σύνθετον, συνθέτη οὐσία) of essence and matter; its essence (εἰδος, μορφή, τὸ τί ἐστι, τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) being its actual substance, its matter (ὕλη) not; its essence being determinate, its matter not; its essence being immateriate, its matter conjoined with the essence; its essence being one in all individuals of a species, its matter different in each individual; its essence being cause of uniformity, its matter cause of accident. At the same time, matter is not nothing, but something, which, though not substance, is potentially substance; and it is either proximate to the substance, or primary; proximate, as a substance which is potentially different, e.g. wood potentially a table; primary, as an indeterminate something which is a substratum capable of becoming natural substances, of which it is always one; and it is primarily the matter of earth, water, air, fire, the four simple bodies (ἁπλᾶ σώματα) with natural rectilineal motions in the terrestrial world (De Gen. et Cor. ii. I seq.); while aether (αἰθήρ) is a fifth simple body, with natural circular motion, being the element of the stars (τὸ τῶν ἄστρων στοιχεῖον) in the celestial world. Each natural substance is a formal cause, as being what it is; a material cause, as having passive power to be changed; an efficient cause, as having active power to change, by communicating the selfsame essence into different matter so as to produce therein a homogeneous effect in the same species; and a final cause, as an end to be realized. Moreover, though each natural substance is corruptible (φθαρτόν), species is eternal (ἀἲδιον), because there was always some individual of it to continue its original essence (expressed by the imperfect tense in τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι), which is ungenerated and incorruptible; the natural world therefore is eternal; and nature is for ever aiming at an eternal propagation, by efficient acting on matter, of essence as end. For even nature does nothing in vain, but aims at final causes, which she uniformly realizes, except so far as matter by its spontaneity (ἀπὸ τοῦ αὐτομάτου) causes accidental effects; and the ends of nature are no form of good, nor even the good of man, but the essences of natural substances themselves, and, above them all, the good God Himself. Such is Aristotle’s natural realism, pervading his metaphysical and physical writings.

II. God.—Nature is but one kind of being (ἓν γάρ τι γένος τοῦ ὄντος ἡ φύσις, Met. Γ 3, 1005 a 34). Above all natural substances, the objects of natural science, there stands a supernatural substance, the object of metaphysics as theology. Nature’s boundary is the outer sphere of the fixed stars, which is eternally moved day after day in a uniform circle round the earth. Now, an actual cause is required for an actual effect. Therefore, there must be a prime mover of that prime movable, and equally eternal and uniform. That prime mover is God, who is not the creator, but the mover directly of the heavens, and indirectly through the planets of sublunary substances. But God is no mechanical mover. He moves as motive (κινεῖ δὲ ὡς ἐρώμενον, Met. Λ 7, 1072 b 3); He is the efficient only as the final cause of nature. For God is a living being, eternal, very good (ζῷον ἀἴδιον ἄριστον, ib. 1072 b 29). While nature aims at Him as design, as an end, a motive, a final cause, God’s occupation (διαγωγή) is intelligence (νόησις); and since essence, not indeed in all being, but in being understood, becomes identical with intelligence, God in understanding essence is understanding Himself; and in short, God’s intelligence is at once intelligence of Himself, of essence and of intelligence,—καὶ ἔστιν ἡ νόησις νοήσεως νόησις (Met. Λ 7, 1074 b 34). But at the same time the essence of good exists not only in God and God’s intelligence on the one hand, but also on the other hand on a declining scale in nature, as both in a general and in his army; but rather in God, and more in some parts of nature than in others. Thus even God is a substance, a separate individual, whose differentiating essence is to be a living being, eternal and very good; He is however the only substance whose essence is entirely without matter and unconjoined with matter; and therefore He is a substance, not because He has or is a substratum beneath attributes, but wholly because He is a separate individual, different both from nature and men, yet the final good of the whole universe. Such is Aristotle’s theological realism without materialism and the origin of all spiritualistic realism, contained in his Metaphysics (Λ 6-end).

III. Man.—There is a third kind of substance, combining something both of the natural and of the divine: we men are that privileged species. Each man is a substance, like any other, only because he is a separate individual. Like any natural substance, he is composed of matter and immateriate essence. But natural substances are inorganic and organic; and a man is an organic substance composed of an organic body (ὀργανικὸν σῶμα) as matter, and a soul (ψυχή) as essence, which is the primary actuality of an organic body capable of life (ζωή). Still a man is not the only organism; and every organism has a soul, whose immediate organ is the spirit (πνεῦμα), a body which—analogous to a body diviner than the four so-called elements, namely the aether, the element of the stars—gives to the organism its non-terrestrial vital heat, whether it be a plant or an animal. In an ascending scale, a plant is an organism with a nutritive soul; an animal is a higher organism with a nutritive, sensitive, orectic and locomotive soul; a man is the highest organism with a nutritive, sensitive, orectic, locomotive and rational soul. What differentiates man from other natural and organic substances, and approximates him to a supernatural substance, God, is reason (λόγος), or intellect (νοῦς). Now, though only one of the powers of the soul, intellect alone of these powers has no bodily organ; it alone is immortal: it alone is divine. While the soul is propagated, like any other essence, by the efficient, which is the seed, to the matter, which is the germ, of the embryo man, intellect alone enters from without (θύραθεν), and is alone divine (θεῖον, not θεός), because its activity communicates with no bodily activity (De Gen. ii. 3, 736-737). A man then is a third kind of substance, like a natural substance in bodily matter, like a supernatural substance in divine reason or intellect. Such is Aristotle’s dual, or rather triple, realism, continued in his De Anima and other biological writings, especially De Generatione Animalium, ii.

There are three points about a man’s life which both connect him with, and distinguish him from, God. God’s occupation is speculative; man’s is speculation, practice and production.

I. Speculation (θεωρία).—Since things are individuals, and there is nothing, and nothing universal, beyond them, there are two kinds of knowledge (γνῶσις), sense (αἴσθησις) of individuals, intellect (νοῦς) of universals. Both powers know by being passively receptive of essence propagated by an efficient cause; but, while in sense the efficient cause is an external object (ἔξωθεν), in intelligence it is active intellect (νοῦς τῷ ποιεῖν) propagating its essence in passive intellect (νοῦς παθητικός). Nevertheless, without sense there is no knowledge. Sense receives from the external world an essence, e.g. of white, which is really universal as well as individual, but apprehends it only as individual, e.g. this white substance: intellect thereupon discovers the universal essence but only in the individuals of sense. This intellectual discovery requires sensation and retention of sensation; so that sense (αἴσθησις) receives impressions, imagination (φαντασία) retains them as images, intellect (νοῦς) generalizes the universal, and, when it is intelligence of essence, is always true.

This is the origin of knowledge, psychologically regarded (in the De Anima). Logically regarded, the origin of all teaching and learning of an intellectual kind is a process of induction (ἐπαγωγή) from particulars to universal, and of syllogism (συλλογισμός) from universal to further particulars; induction, whenever it starts from sense, becomes the origin of scientific knowledge (ἐπιστήμη); while there is also a third process of example (παράδειγμα) from particular to particular, which produces only persuasion. In acquiring scientific knowledge, syllogism cannot start from universals without induction, nor induction acquire universals without sense. At the same time, there are three species of syllogism, scientific, dialectical and eristical or sophistical; and in consequence there are different ways of acquiring premisses. In order to acquire the knowledge of the true and primary principles of scientific knowledge, and especially the intelligence of the universal essence of the subject, which is always true, the process of knowledge consists of (1) sense (αἴσθησις), which receives the essence as individual, (2) memory (μνήμη), which is a retention of sensible impression, (3) experience (ἐμπειρία), which consists of a number of similar memories, (4) induction (ἐπαγωγή), which infers the universal as a fact (τὸ ὅτι), (5) intellect (νοῦς), which apprehends the principle (ἀρχή); because it is a true apprehension that the universal induced is the very essence and formal cause of the subject: thereupon, scientific syllogism (ἐπιστημονικὸς συλλογισμός), making the definition (ὁρισμος) of this essence the middle term (τὸ μέσον), becomes a demonstration (ὁρισμος) of the consequences which follow from the essence in the conclusion. Such then is science. In order to acquire the probabilities (τὰ ἔνδοξα) of opinion (δόξα), which are the premisses of dialectical syllogism, the process is still induction, as in science, but dialectical induction by interrogation from the opinions of the answerers until the universal is conceded: thereupon the dialectical syllogism (διαλεκτικὸς συλλογισμός) deduces consequent opinions in the conclusion. Nor does the process of acquiring the premisses of eristical syllogism, which is fallacious either in its premisses or in its process, differ, except that, when the premisses are fallacious, the dialectical interrogations must be such as to cause this fallacy. Hence, as science and dialectic are different, so scientific induction and syllogism must be distinguished from dialectical induction and syllogism. Dialectic is useful, for exercise, for conversation and for philosophical sciences, where by being critical it has a road to principles. But it is by a different process of sense, memory, experience, induction, intelligence, syllogism, that science becomes knowledge of real causes, of real effects, and especially of real essences from which follow real consequences, not beyond, but belonging to real substances. So can we men, not, as Plato thought, by having in our souls universal principles innate but forgotten, but by acquiring universal principles from sense, which is the origin of knowledge, arrive at judgments which are true, and true because they agree with the things which we know by sense, by inference and by science. Such is Aristotle’s psychological and logical realism, contained in the De Anima and logical treatises.

2. Practice (πρᾶξις).—In this natural world of real substances, human good is not an imitation of a supernatural universal form of the good, but is human happiness; and this good is the same both of the individual as a part and of the state as a whole. Ethics then is a kind of Politics. But in Ethics a man’s individual good is his own happiness; and his happiness is no mere state, but an activity of soul according to virtue in a mature life, requiring as conditions moderate bodily and external goods of fortune; his virtue is (1) moral virtue, which is acquired by habituation, and is a purposive habit of performing actions in the mean determined by right reason or prudence; requiring him, not to exclude, but to moderate his desires; and (2) intellectual virtue, which is either prudence of practical, or wisdom of speculative intellect; and his happiness is a kind of ascending scale of virtuous activities, in which moral virtue is limited by prudence, and prudence by wisdom; so that the speculative life of wisdom is the happiest and most divine, and the practical life of prudence and moral virtue secondary and human. Good fortune in moderation is also required as a condition of his happiness. Must we then, on account of misfortunes, look with Solon at the end, and call no man happy till he is dead? Or is this altogether absurd for us who say that happiness is an activity? Virtuous activities determine happiness, and a virtuous man is happy in this life, in spite of misfortunes unless they be too great; while after death he will not feel the misfortunes of the living so much as to change his happiness. Still, for perfect happiness a man should prefer the speculative life of divine intellect, and immortalize (ἀθανατίζειν) as far as possible. For intellect is what mainly makes a man what he is, and is divine and immortal.

To turn from Ethics to Politics, the good of the individual on a small scale becomes on a large scale the good of the citizen and the state, whose end should be no far-off form of good, and no mere guarantee of rights, but the happiness of virtuous action, the life according to virtue, which is the general good of the citizen. Hence, the citizen of the best state is he who has the power and the purpose to be governed and govern for the sake of the life according to virtue.

A right government is one which aims at the general good, whereas any government which aims at its own good is a deviation. Hence governments are to be arranged from best to worst in the following order:—

I. Right governments (ὀρθαὶ πολιτείαι), aiming at the general good:—

i. Monarchy, of one excelling in virtue:

ii. Aristocracy, of a class excelling in virtue:

iii. Commonwealth, of the majority excelling in virtue.

II. Deviations (παρεκβάσεις), aiming at the good of the government:—

i. Democracy, aiming at the good of the majority:

ii. Oligarchy, aiming at the good of the few:

iii. Tyranny, aiming at the good of one.

Such is Aristotle’s practical philosophy, contained in his matured Nicomachean Ethics, and his unfinished Politics.

3. Production (ποίησις).—Production differs from practice in being an activity (ἐνέργεια; e.g. building) which is always a means to a work (ἔργον; e.g. a house) beyond itself. Productive science, or art, is an intellectual habit of true reasoning from appropriate principles, acquired from experiences, and applied to the production of the work which is the end of the art. All the arts are therefore at once rational and productive. They are either for necessity (e.g. medicine) or for occupation (e.g. poetry), the former being inferior to the latter. Rhetoric is a faculty on any subject of investigating what may be persuasive (πιθανόν), which is the work of no other art; its means are artificial and inartificial evidences (πίστεις), and, among artificial evidences, especially the logical arguments of example and enthymeme. Poetry is the art of producing representations; (1) in words, rhythm and harmony (ἁρμονία, “harmony” in the original sense); (2) of men like ourselves, or better as in tragedy, or worse as in comedy; (3) by means of narrative as in epic, or by action as in the drama. The cause of poetry is man’s instinct of representation and his love of representations caused by the pleasure of learning. Comedy is representation of men inferior in being ludicrous: epic is like tragedy a representation of superior men, but by means of narrative and unlimited in time: tragedy is a representation of an action superior and complete, in a day if possible, by means of action, and accomplishing by pity and fear the purgation of such passions (Poetics, 1449 b 24). Music is a part of moral education; and for this end we should use the most moral harmonies. But music has also other ends and uses, and on the whole four; namely amusement, virtue, occupation and purgation of the affections; for some men are liable more than others to pity and fear and enthusiasm, but from sacred melodies we see them, when they have heard those which act orgiastically on the soul, becoming settled by a kind of medicine and purgation (κάθαρσις), and being relieved with pleasure. Finally, art is not morality, because its end is always a work of art, not virtuous action: on the other hand, art is subordinate to morality, because all the ends of art are but means to the end of life, and therefore a work of art which offends against morality is opposed to the happiness and the good of man. Such is Aristotle’s productive science or art, contained in his Rhetoric and Poetics, compared with his Ethics and Politics.

Aristotle, even in this sketch of his system, shows himself to be the philosopher of facts, who can best of all men bear criticism; and indeed it must be confessed that he retained many errors of Platonism and laid himself open to the following objections. Two substances, being individuals, e.g. Socrates and Callias, are in no way the same, but only similar, even in essence, e.g. Socrates is one rational animal, Callias another. A universal, e.g. the species man, is not predicate of many individuals (ἓν κατὰ πολλῶν, Post. An. i. II), but a whole number of similar individuals, e.g. all men; and not a whole species, but only an individual, is a predicate of such individual, e.g. Socrates is a man, not all men, and one white thing, not all white things. Consequently, a species or genus is not a substance, as Aristotle says it is in the Categories (inconsistently with his own doctrine of substances), but a whole number of substances, e.g. all men, all animals. Similarly, the universal essence of a species is not one and the same as each individual essence, but is the whole number of similar individual essences of the similar individuals of the species, e.g. all rational animals. Consequently, the universal essence of a species of substances is not one and the same eternal essence in all the individuals of a species but only similar, and is not substance as Aristotle calls it in the Metaphysics, inconsistently with his own doctrine of substance, but is a whole number of similar substances, e.g. all rational animals which are what all men are. Hence again, the natural world of species and essences is not eternal, but only endures as long as there are individual substances. Hence, moreover, a natural substance or body as an efficient cause or force causes an effect on another, not by propagating one eternal essence of a species into the matter of the other, but so far as we really understand force, by their reciprocally preventing one another from occupying the same place at the same moment on account of the mutual resistance of any two bodies. The essence of a natural substance, e.g. wood, is not immateriate, but is the whole body as what it is. The matter of a natural substance is not a primary matter which is one indeterminate substratum of all natural substances, but is only one body as able to be changed by a force which is another substance able to change it, e.g. a seed becoming wood, wood becoming coal, &c. A natural substance or body, therefore, is not a heterogeneous compound of essence and matter, but is essence as what it is, matter as able passively to be changed, force as able actively to change. The simple bodies which are the matter of the rest are not terrestrial earth, water, air, fire, and a different celestial aether, but whatever elementary bodies natural science, starting anew from mechanics and chemistry, may determine to be the matter of all other bodies whatever. Nature does not aim at God as end, but God, thinking and willing ends, produces and acts on nature. Soul is not an immateriate essence of an organic body capable, but an immateriate conscious substance within an organic body. Sensation is not the reception of the selfsame essence of an external body, but one’s perception of one’s sentient organism as affected, and especially of its organs resisting one another, e.g. one’s lips, hands, &c., preventing one another from occupying the same place at the same moment within one’s organism. Intelligence does not differ from sense by having no bodily organ, but the nervous system is the bodily organ of both. Intelligence is not active intellect propagating universal essence in passive intellect, but only logical inference starting from sense, and both requiring nervous body and conscious soul. It is not always a true apprehension of essence, but often, especially in physical matter, such as sound or heat or light, takes superficial effects to be the essence of the thing. Aristotle did not altogether solve the question, What is, and scarcely solved at all the question, How do we know the external world?

We might continue to object. But at bottom there remains the fundamental position of Aristotelianism, that all things are substances, individuals separate though related; that some things are attributes, real only as being some individual substance somehow affected, or, as we should say, modified or determined; and that without individual substances there is nothing, and nothing universal apart from individuals. There remains too the consequence that there are different substances, separate from but related to one another; and these substances of three irreducible kinds, natural, supernatural, human. Aristotelianism has to be considered against the philosophy which preceded it and against the philosophy which has since followed it. Platonism preceded it, and was the metaphysical doctrine that all things are supernatural—forms, gods, souls. Idealism has since followed it, and is the metaphysical doctrine that all things are mind and states of mind. Aristotelianism intervenes between ancient Platonism and modern Idealism, and is the metaphysical doctrine that all things are substances, natural and supernatural and human. It is a philosophy of substantial things, standing as a via media between a philosophy of the supernatural and a philosophy of mind. There are three alternatives, which may be put as questions which every thinker must ask himself. Are the things which surround me in what I call the environment,—the men, the animals, the plants, the ground, the stones, the water, the air, the moon, the sun, the stars and God—are they shadows, unsubstantial things, as formerly Platonism made all things to be except the supernatural world of forms, gods and souls? Or are they, as modern Idealism says, mind and states of mind? Or are they really substances separate from, though related to, myself, who am also a substance? The Aristotelian answer is—“Yes, all things are substances, but not all supernatural, nor all mental; for some are natural substances, or bodies”; and by that answer Aristotelianism stands or falls.

Literature.—The Aristotelian philosophy is to be studied first in Aristotle’s works, which are the best commentaries on one another; the best complete edition is the Berlin edition (1831-1870), by Bekker and Brandis, in which also are the fragments collected by V. Rose, the scholia collected by Brandis, and the index compiled by Bonitz. After reading the remains of the Peripatetic school, the Greek commentators should be further studied in this edition. The Latin commentators, the Arabians and the schoolmen show how Aristotle has been the chief author of modern culture; while the vindication of modern independence comes out in his critics, the greatest of whom were Roger and Francis Bacon. Since the modern discovery of the science of motion by Galileo which changed natural science, and the modern revolution of philosophy by Descartes which changed metaphysics, the study of Aristotle has become less universal; but it did not die out, and received a fresh stimulus especially from Julius Pacius, who going back through G. Zabarella to the Arabians, and himself gifted with great logical powers, always deserves study in his editions of the Organon and the Physics and in his Doctrinae Peripateticae. In more recent times, as part of the growing conviction of the essentiality of everything Greek, Aristotle has received marked attention. In France there are the works of Cousin (1835), Félix Ravaisson, who wrote on the Metaphysics (1837-1846), and Barthélemy St Hilaire, who translated the Organon and other works (1844 seq.). In Germany there has been a host of commentaries, among which we may mention the Organon edited (1844-1846) by F. Th. Waitz (not so well as by Pacius), the De Anima edited (1833) by F.A. Trendelenburg and later by A. Torstrik, the Historia Animalium by H. Aubert and F. Wimmer (1868), the Ethics by K.L. Michelet (1827), the Metaphysics by A. Schwegler (1847) and (best of all) by H. Bonitz (1848), who is the most faithful of all commentators, because to great industry and acumen he adds the rare gift of confessing when he does not understand, and when he does not know what Aristotle might have thought. With Aristotle’s works before one, with the Index Aristotelicus, and the edition and translation of the Metaphysics by Bonitz on one side, and Zeller’s Die Philosophie der Griechen, ii. 2, “Aristoteles” (trans. by Costelloe and Muirhead), on the other side, one can go a considerable way towards understanding the foundations of Aristotelianism.

In England scholars tend to take up certain parts of Aristotle’s philosophy. Grote indeed intended to write a general account of Aristotle like that of Plato; but his Aristotle went little further than the logical writings. From Cambridge we have J.W. Blakesley’s Life of Aristotle, E.M. Cope’s Rhetoric, Dr Henry Jackson’s Nicomachean Ethics, v., S.H. Butcher’s Poetics, Hicks’s De Anima, J.E. Sandys’s Athenian Constitution, Jebb’s Rhetoric (ed. Sandys). Oxford in particular, since the beginning of the 19th century, has kept alive the study of Aristotle. E. Cardwell in his edition of the Nicomachean Ethics (1828) had the wisdom to found his text on the Laurentian Manuscript (Kb); E. Poste wrote translations of the Posterior Analytics and Sophistici Elenchi; R. Congreve edited the Politics; A. Grant edited the Nicomachean Ethics; E. Wallace translated and annotated the De Anima; B. Jowett translated the Politics; W.L. Newman has edited the Politics in four volumes; Dr Ogle has translated the De Partibus Animalium, with notes; R. Shute wrote a History of the Aristotelian Writings; Professor J.A. Stewart has written Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics; Professor J. Burnet has issued an annotated edition of the Nicomachean Ethics, and W.D. Ross has translated the Metaphysics. All these are, or were, Oxford men; and it remains to mention two others: I. Bywater, who as an Aristotelian scholar has done much for the improvement of Bekker’s text, especially of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Poetics; and F.G. Kenyon, who has the proud distinction of having been the first modern editor of the Ἀθηναίων πολιτεία.