IN the history of European thought and knowledge, down to the period of the revival of letters,, the name of Aristotle was, without a rival, supreme; and this supremacy arose from no false estimate or unwarranted preference. Aristotle, speaking generally, treated of every subject which came within the range of ancient thought, and if we regard matter, and not form or literary style, he treated of each of these subjects better than any one else. He also initiated many new branches of inquiry, dependent on observation and induction, and thus not only represented in himself the culmination of Greek speculative philosophy, but was also, as far as possible, the forerunner of modern science. Therefore, the sense of mankind recognised him gradually (after many vicissitudes of appreciation) as the strongest of the ancients. It even came to pass that, for a long period, all secular writings but those of Aristotle had dropped out of notice in Europe. His works may almost have the credit of having saved men from relapsing into barbarism. All sought in Aristotle the basis of knowledge. Universities and grammar schools were founded in Aristotle. Dante only justly expresses this predominance, when he speaks of Aristotle as “the master of those that know,” and depicts him as centre and head of the philosophic family. Of the influence which he has exercised over the minds of men we have evidence, not only in the vast literatures connected with his system, which exist in all great libraries, but also in the traces which that system has left in all the modern languages of Europe. The number of Aristotelian “fossils” existing in our everyday language is quite remarkable. If it had not been for the system of Aristotle, we should have had to express many of our ordinary thoughts differently.

The thought of Aristotle takes its start out of two separate sets of elements previously existing in Greece: the one purely philosophical, the other scientific. In Plato were summed up and remoulded all the former results of logical, metaphysical, psychological, ethical, and political speculation in Greece. And Aristotle was, in the first place, thoroughly imbued with Plato, and all the purely philosophical side of his writings was conceived in close relation to Plato’s works, the results of which he may be said to have codified, reducing into expository form what Plato had left scattered up and down, rather as hints and suggestions, in his brilliant dramatic dialogues. Partly, then, Aristotle adopted the results of Plato, and made them available for the world in general; partly he dissented from some of the Platonic doctrines, and carried on a polemic against them. To compare the Platonic dialogues with the works of Aristotle, and to trace the agreements and disagreements between them, forms an interesting study in the history of philosophy. But on the whole, the difference between Aristotle and Plato is one of aims rather than of doctrines. Aristotle’s aim, almost from first to last, is to be scientific, and to reduce even philosophy to science. He wishes to deal with what can be known for certain, and to express this in exact language. Plato’s aim was, in one sense, greater than this; in another sense it was inferior to it. Plato stood apart from dogmatic systematising; he seems to have regarded truth as too great and many-sided to be capable of being submitted to such a process; he was content to develop various aspects of the truth, on all the highest questions, as they appeared to different minds, or to the same mind at different periods. To do this he chose the vehicle of the dramatic dialogue, in which nothing was positively announced beyond the views arrived at for the moment by the particular speakers. He was a poet at the same time that he was a philosopher, and his works exhibit that true note of poetry which consists in constant attention to form, so that no part is a mere means to a final result; but each part is treated as an end in itself, and contains its own beauty and perfection. His dialogues are thus masterpieces of consummate literary art, though somewhat indefinite in their conclusions, and not without a tinge of imaginative mysticism. To all these Platonic tendencies in the treatment of philosophy Aristotle was totally opposed. He disregarded form in all his extant works; he thought of matter alone, and his main care was to be definite and exhaustive. In adopting results from Plato he first stripped them of the poetry with which they had been surrounded. We shall revert below to some of the points on which he controverts Plato, but the real contrast between them is in their attitude; the one is essentially a dialectician, though of the highest and noblest type, the other more and more tends to be a man of science. Following out his proper bent, Aristotle, in many of his works, strikes on a path in which Plato had not been his precursor. In these works he lays the foundation for the sciences of Natural Philosophy, Mechanics, Physiology, and Natural History. In these branches of thought he stands related, not to Plato, but to the early Greek writers on physical subjects, the inquirers on special questions, the medical writers, and the travellers, whose works he often mentions, though they are all now lost. If we possessed them, we should probably only see how meagre had been these beginnings of science, and what great things Aristotle achieved in the accumulation and systematising of knowledge, and in preparing the way for its future development.

Aristotle’s complete neglect of artistic form (in his extant works), and his adherence “to essential naked truth,” induced Wilhelm von Humboldt to say that Aristotle was un-Greek in the character of his mind; that he was deeper and more earnest than the Greeks, but wa3 wanting in Greek fancy and grace, and spiritual freedom of treatment. This may be so; but in point of descent Aristotle was purely Hellenic. His family, however, had been settled for some generations on the Macedonian frontier, and it was there that Aristotle was born, at the town of Stageira, a Greek colony, on the Strymonie gulf. This place was not far from Pella, the residence of the Macedonian king, Amyntas, whose physician Nicomachus, the father of Aristotle, became. Intercourse with the Macedonians may have, to some extent, influenced the manners of this family. But it is to be remembered that they belonged to the race of the Asclepiads, or supposed descendants of Aesculapius, and it is more natural to attribute the scientific tendencies of Aristotle’s mind to the inherited character and traditions of this race than to any influence which he can have received from the Macedonians. Among those traditions it is said to· have been one, that “from father to son they learned the art of dissection, as regularly as others learn to read and write.” The best biography of Aristotle, hitherto written, is that given by Grote in his posthumous work referred to in note 3. The chief ancient authority on the subject is Diogenes Laertius, a compiler ® and anecdotemonger, perhaps of the 3d or 4th century a.d. His life of Aristotle contains, amid many worthless, gossiping statements, two fragments of antiquity which are of the greatest value. One of these is an extract from the chronology (χρονικά) of Apollodorus (140 b.c.), giving the dates of the chief events of Aristotle’s career; the other is a catalogue of “the books which he left behind him,” to the number of 146. The following are the statements of Apollodorus:—That Aristotle was born 384 b.c. That he joined Plato and passed twenty years with him, thirteen of them consecutively, and that he came to Mitylene 345 b.c. That in the first year after the death of Plato he went to Hermeas, and abode with him three years; that he came to Philip 343 B.C., when Alexander was fifteen years old; that he came to Athens 335 b.c. That he held a school in the Lyceum thirteen years, and then went to Chalcis 322 b.c., where he died of a disease, about sixty-three years old. This skeleton of the life of Aristotle is probably authentic; and if so, we know as much about him as could possibly be expected. It is easy to fill up, to some extent, the details: he must have been in his seventeenth year when he came to Athens to put himself under Plato; twenty years afterwards, when Plato died, he was, on account of his great divergencies of mind from Plato, not appointed head of the school, and he, therefore, retreated to the court of his philosophical friend, Hermeas, ruler of Atarneas, in Asia Minor; he married the niece of Hermeas, who was a eunuch, and had been a slave. On his death Aristotle went to live in retirement in Mitylene, whence, in his forty-second year, he was summoned by Philip of Macedon to undertake the tuition of Alexander the Great, then fifteen years old. Seven years later Philip was assassinated and Alexander became king of Macedonia, and was immediately absorbed in plans for the conquest of the East. Aristotle now came to Athens and spent the last thirteen years of his life there, and it is these years which have the most interest for us, for in them, in all probability, he composed all those of his works which still remain. In rivalry to the Platonic school which had been established in the gardens of the “Academia” on the west side of Athens, he set up his own school in the covered “walks” (περίπατοι) round the temple of the Lycean Apollo, on the east side of the city, and from this circumstance his philosophy got the appellation of “Peripatetic.” His mind and the general features of his system were now mature; he had before him the task, on the one hand, of reducing to writing for the world the results of his reflections in philosophy, on the other hand, of accumulating fresh materials for those sciences of observation of which he was laying the foundation. He set himself simultaneously to writing and to teaching, and there is reason to believe that he employed his school to some extent, in co-operation with himself, to work out details, and to assist in a subordinate way in the construction of the great philosophical and scientific edifice which he had in view. The period of the zenith of Aristotle was coeval with the astonishing career of his pupil, Alexander. There is a tradition that Alexander furnished him with funds for his physical and zoological researches. However this may have been, it appears certain that Aristotle was identified in Athens with the Macedonian cause, and that when, in the summer of 323 b.c., the startling news of the sudden death of Alexander was spread through Greece, Aristotle was involved in the temporary fall of a political party, and those who, from different causes, were his enemies, made an attack upon him which caused him to fly from Athens. Grote has well drawn out the various elements of enmity existing against Aristotle, and to his account we refer. Aristotle retired to Chalcis in Euboea, a place garrisoned by the Macedonians, and there shortly afterwards closed, in an illness, his life of unsurpassed activity and achievement. His will, preserved by Diogenes, would seem to indicate a kind, just, and generous disposition; of the genuineness of this document we cannot be sure, but there is nothing recorded of Aristotle with any certainty which would lead us to think of him personally otherwise than with respect.

After his death his works had a strange and remarkable history. His library, containing all his own autographs, many of them being MSS. of unpublished and unfinished treatises, was bequeathed to Theophrastus, his chie j f disciple, who, dying thirty-five years later, bequeathed them in turn, together with his own books and writings, to Neleus, a Peripatetic scholar. Neleus took the whole precious collection with him to his home at Scepsis, in Asia Minor, and his heirs concealed it in a vault to prevent its being seized by the king of Pergamus, who was then levying contributions for his royal library. The Aristotelian MSS. were thus lost to the world for 187 years. About the year 100 b.c. they were brought out of their hiding-place and sold to a wealthy book-collector, named Apellicon, who carried them back to Athens. In the year 86 B.C., on the taking of Athens by Sulla, the library of Apellicon was seized and brought to Rome. There some learned Greeks obtained access to it; Tyrannion, the friend of Cicero, arranged the MSS.; and Andronicus of Rhodes undertook the task of furnishing a correct text, and a complete edition of the philosophical works of Aristotle, out of the materials at his disposal. He arranged the different treatises and scattered fragments under their proper heads, and published what was henceforth received as the authorised edition of the works of Aristotle. It seems reasonable to believe with Grote that “our Aristotle,” that is, the collection of writings which under this name has come down to modern times, is none other than the edition of Andronicus, and thus dates from about the year 50 b.c. For the first generation after the death of Aristotle, his scholars, Theophrastus, Eudemus, Phanias, Straton, &c.,were engaged partly in editing, partly in paraphrasing, sometimes in endeavouring to improve upon his mostly unfinished works. But the Peripatetic school very rapidly declined; all the philosophic ability round the shores of the Aegean threw itself into one or other of the two new rival schools which had arisen, the Stoic and the Epicurean. The Peripatetics could not keep up to their master’s level; they soon lost interest in the higher parts of his system ; they took to writing monographs on small separate questions, and moral platitudes dressed up in rhetorical form. We may hesitate to affirm that, during 187 years, there were absolutely no copies of Aristotle’s greatest works extant besides those hidden in the vault of Scepsis, for the Stoical ethics and logic both bear traces of a knowledge of Aristotle. But, at all events, for the time, the world had lost its interest in all that we most prize in Aristotle’s thought. Strabo says expressly that “all his writings, except a few of a more popular character,” had been lost; and in accordance with this, Cicero says that “even philosophers know nothing of Aristotle, though they ought to have been attracted by the incredible sweetness of his diction.” The latter part of this remark may seem surprising, for it is not in the least applicable to any of the works of Aristotle which have come down to us. But Cicero is evidently referring to the Dialogues, which were read, admired, and attributed to Aristotle in the days before the edition of Andronicus became known. The question has been raised, especially by Valentine Rose, whether these dialogues, and other short, unsystematic works which passed under the name of Aristotle, were all forgeries, or were in any case genuine. On the one hand it is urged that the dialogic, or artistic, mode of exposition, was alien from Aristotle’s turn of mind. On the other hand, it may be said that Aristotle in his youth may very probably have tried his hand at imitating the Platonic dialogues. And, indeed, unless he had done so, it is difficult to understand how even the forgers could have ventured to publish dialogues bearing his name. Very likely, after his death and the loss of the main bulk of his works by their removal to a vault in Asia Minor, a crop of forged Aristotelian writings sprung up, and imitations of his earlier and more popular works were among the number. But still, it appears safest to believe that Aristotle did at one time endeavour to make the dialogue his vehicle for philosophy. In the years that followed the death of Plato, he probably felt within himself a reaction and repugnance against this mode of writing, and when he returned to Athens as the leader of a school, he utterly renounced it, and set himself henceforth to the statement of the naked truth in the directest and most scientific terms which ho could find. Whether the dialogues which Cicero and his contemporaries read and admired were early works of Aristotle himself, or were forgeries, there is no means of knowing. But the fragments of these works, which a search of all ancient literature has brought together, show us nothing worthy of Aristotle in his best days, nothing that contributes any light to his philosophy. And it is remarkable that all works of this kind seem to have been excluded from the edition of Andronicus. Owing to that exclusion they are all now lost, and thus the tables are turned, for whereas before the edition of Andronicus the world had forgotten all about Aristotle, except so far as he was represented by his own youthful and lighter productions, or by spurious imitations of these, it came to pass later that all except his solid and great philosophical treatises passed into oblivion.

Turning now to the catalogue of the works of Aristotle which has been preserved by Diogenes Laertius, we find that it contains 146 different names, not one of which seems to correspond with any of the forty works which make up “our Aristotle.” This is very striking, and suggests the question, Did Aristotle really write all these works enumerated in the catalogue, and if so, how is it that they are all lost! Did he really write over and over again on the same subject, as the catalogue, taken together with our edition, would indicate 1 Or is the catalogue virtually a list of forgeries, published under the name of Aristotle at the time when the unique MSS. of many of his greatest works were shut up underground and forgotten? Neither hypothesis can be accepted absolutely, but the last mentioned contains, probably, by far the nearest approximation to the truth. It seems credible that the catalogue in question was taken from the backs of rolls in the Alexandrian library, and that it was made by Hermippus, pupil of Callimachus, the chief librarian, between the years 240 and 210 b,c. It found its way into some biography, and was thence mechanically copied by Diogenes. If this be so, it represents the kind of books which were being received by the world as Aristotle’s at a time when the real Aristotle was buried out of sight. The books enumerated in the catalogue strike us at once as peculiar in character: first we meet with the names of several dialogues (such as “Nerinthus,” “Gryllus, or on Rhetoric,” “Menexenus,” “Symposium,” “the Lover,” &c.); afterwards there are the names of apparently short treatises or monographs on separate subjects, without any trace of that organic unity of each of the great branches of philosophy which we find in Aristotle as we know him. This organic unity has not been superinduced by the editorial labours of Andronicus, for we see by the openings of the Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and other existing works, taken in connection with their succeeding parts, that Aristotle conceived a grand and comprehensive plan for each main branch of philosophy and science; that he proposed to follow this out so as to produce in each case a complete whole, but that most of his multifarious designs were arrested by death, so that much that he has left bears the character of a mighty fragment. But the Peripatetic school seem to have abandoned his comprehensive views, and to have only followed him in that other side of his method which consisted in working out the details of special and subordinate questions. This tendency resulted in the production of small separate treatises and essays, and it is the names of such as these that are recorded in the catalogue. The Peripatetic school seem to have worked on a sort of co-operative principle. Aristotle, during his own lifetime, probably encouraged them to work up separate points for incorporation into his philosophy; and if so, they would have less scruple in affixing his name to works written after his death, but which they conceived to represent, or, perhaps, a little to improve upon, his views. Whatever may have been the literary morality of this procedure, we can hardly doubt that it existed as a fact. Even the works of Aristotle, as we possess them, show clear traces of it. Take, for instance, the four different ethical treatises which are found among these works. Of these the first is the Nicomachean Ethics, i the main bulk of which is the genuine -writing of Aristotle. It is conceived on a comprehensive plan, and the beginning and end are complete, but the middle part was probably never written. The name of this treatise was, perhaps, given to it for the sake of distinguishing...