Note 1 — Chapter I · THE INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL STATE OF GREECE AT THE CLOSE OF THE FOURTH CENTURY.

B. Connection between the theories of Aristotle and Greek character. Granting that the Socratic philosophy of conceptions is the source from which these peculiarities are derived, still that philosophy is itself only the expression of the character of the nation which produced it. In an earlier work it has been shown1 that the most distinctive feature of Greek life lay in confounding the outer and the inner worlds, in ingenuously assuming that the two originally corresponded, and are still in perfect harmony with one another. When the whole mental life of a people bears this impress, it is sure to be reflected in its philosophy also. Together with the advantages which accrue from the confusion of the two, philosophy shares also the disadvantages which unavoidably attend any theory which ignores the real distinction between them. The mind only gradually and imperfectly becomes aware of the distinctive peculiarity of mental life, of the notion of personality, of the fact that moral rights and duties are independent of external circumstances, of the share of the individual will in creating ideas. It has also less hesitation in transferring phases of consciousness directly to things themselves, in regarding the world from ideal points of view borrowed from the sphere of mind, in accepting its own notions of things as realities without testing their actual truth, and even treating them as more real than the reality of the senses, and in confounding the critical analysis of a notion with the experimental investigation of a thing. If the philosophy of Greece in the time of its greatest perfection was not free from these defects; if, further, these defects were the cause of all the important faults in the systems of Plato and Aristotle; the creators of these systems and their immediate successors are not the only ones to blame; but the whole mental peculiarity of the people is at fault of which within the province of science these men were the greatest representatives.