Aristotle/Chapter 9

by Alexander Grant

CHAPTER IX.

THE METAPHYSICS OF ARISTOTLE.

Some of Aristotle’s earliest attempts at writing were on a strictly metaphysical subject, when he attacked the Platonic doctrine of “Ideas.” He doubtless went on from this beginning, and thought of metaphysical questions all his life, till he had framed for himself a more or less complete metaphysical system, traces of which show themselves in many forms of expression and leading thoughts in all his various scientific works. But it seems as if he had put off to the last the undertaking of a direct and complete exposition of that system; and hence arose the name “Metaphysics,” which is a mere title signifying “the things which follow after physics”—a title given by Aristotle’s school to a mass of papers which they edited after his death, and with regard to which they wished to indicate that chronologically these papers were composed after the physical treatises, and also, perhaps, that the subject of which they treated was above^[1] and beyond the mere physical conditions of things. The word “Metaphysics,” starting from this fortuitous origin, has come to be generally understood in modern times as denoting the most abstract of the sciences—the science of the forms of thought and the forms of things, the science of knowing and being, the science that answers the questions, How can we know anything? how can anything exist? Aristotle, who, of course, was himself unconscious of the word “Metaphysics,” had three names which he used indifferently for this science. Sometimes he called it simply “Wisdom;” sometimes “First Philosophy,” as treating of primary substances and the origin of things; sometimes “Theology,” because all things have their root in the divine nature.

We have already had some specimens of Aristotle’s metaphysical doctrines, put forward as a foundation for natural philosophy (see above, p. 132). In his biological treatises also, especially in that ‘On the Soul,’ Aristotle does not confine himself to the physical principle of life and the functions of the animal soul, but enters upon the mode of our acquiring knowledge, on perception, memory, reason, and the relation of the mind to external objects—all being questions which encroach upon the province of metaphysical inquiry. The substantive treatise, bearing the name ‘Metaphysics,’ has come down to us in the shape of a posthumous fragment, which has been edited and eked out by the addition of other papers. The whole work, as it stands, consists of thirteen books. Of these, seven books were written by Aristotle as the setting forth of his ontology, or science of existence; Books IX., XII., and XIII. (on the Pythagorean and Platonic systems of numbers and ideas) seem to have been intended to come in as part of the same treatise, but to have been left by Aristotle in the condition of mere notes or materials; Book XI. is thought to be a separate, though very valuable and interesting, essay on the nature of the Deity; while Books IV. and X., and the appendix to Book I., are un-Aristotelian,^[2] and should never have had a place assigned to them in the ‘Metaphysics.’

To turn to this work from the ‘Researches about Animals’ is like turning from White’s ‘Selborne’ to Kant’s 'Critic of the Pure Reason.’ Metaphysical questions are necessarily abstruse, dry, and difficult; but the attempt has sometimes been made—as, for instance, by Plato, Berkeley, Hume, and Ferrier—to discuss them in clear, pointed language, as little as possible removed from the ordinary language of literature. Aristotle, on the other hand, at all events in later life, aimed only at scientific precision; and his ‘Metaphysics’ is the forerunner of those German philosophies which from beginning to end exhibit a jargon of technical phraseology. In another respect, also, Aristotle here sets an example which has been much followed by the Germans during the present century; for in Book I. he gives a "history of philosophy" from Thales down to himself. This is a very interesting little sketch, disclosing for the first time the fact that human thought has a history, and that there was a time when the word “cause,” for instance, had never been heard, and pointing to the conclusion that every abstract word which we use is the result of the theories, and perhaps the controversies, of former ages. Aristotle traces the thoughts of successive Grecian thinkers, advancing under a law, while each stage at which they arrived forced them on to the next (see ‘Met.,’ I, iii. 11), from about 600 B.C. to about 330 B.C. And this task had never been again so well accomplished until Hegel gave his first set of lectures on the History of Philosophy, at Jena, in 1805. Hegel was followed in the same field by Brandis, Schwegler, Ueberweg, Cousin, Renouvier, Ferrier, Zeller, and many others, to whose works we must refer for information as to the Greek philosophers. Suffice it to say, that Aristotle’s method of procedure is to take his own doctrine of the Four Causes (see above, p. 72), and to show how at first philosophers only got hold of the idea of a Material Cause, and that afterwards they gradually arrived at the idea of Motive Power, Form, and End, or Final Cause. On the whole, his brief and masterly sketch, while full of points of light, is open to the charge of not doing sufficient justice to the views of his predecessors. Among them all, he seems most highly to appreciate Anaxagoras, of whom he says that, by introducing the idea of Reason among the causes of the existence of the world, he was “like a sober man beginning to speak amidst a party of drunkards.” Aristotle repeats here his old polemic against what he calls the system of Plato, though it is doubtful whether Plato would himself have acknowledged it. One would almost say that Aristotle misstated Plato in order to refute him.

The same fate, as if by way of reprisal, has often in modern times befallen the Stagirite, who has repeatedly been misstated, and then censured for what he never had maintained. At the risk, however, of committing fresh injustices of this sort, we will endeavour briefly to sum up his views upon some of the greatest questions which have occupied modern philosophers. First, then, we may ask how would Aristotle have dealt with those problems concerning the existence of Matter, and the reality of the External World, which have been a "shibboleth" in the philosophic world from Bishop Berkeley, through the days of Hume and the Scotch psychologists, down to Kant and Hegel and the extreme idealists of Germany? His utterances on this subject are perhaps chiefly to be found in the third book of his treatise 'On the Soul,' beginning with the fourth chapter. On turning to them we see that he never separates existence from knowledge. "A thing in actual existence," he says, "is identical with the knowledge of that thing." Again—"The possible existence of a thing is identical with the possibility in us of perceiving or knowing it." Thus, until a thing is perceived or known, it can only be said to have a potential or possible existence. And from this a doctrine very similar to that of Ferrier might be deduced, that "nothing exists except plus me"—that is to say, in relation to some mind perceiving it. Aristotle indicates, without fully explaining, his doctrine of the relation of the mind to external things in a celebrated passage (‘Soul,’ iii. v.), where he says that there are two kinds of Reason in the soul—the one passive, the other constructive. “The passive Reason becomes all things by receiving their impress; the constructive Reason creates all things, just as light brings colours into actual existence, while without light they would have remained mere possibilities.” Aristotle, then, appears to be removed from the “common-sense” doctrine of “natural realism,” which believes that the world would be just what we perceive to be, even if there were no one to perceive it; for, by his analogy, the mind contributes as much to the existence of things as light does to colour; and he is equally removed from that extreme idealism which would represent things to be merely the thoughts of a mind, for he evidently considers that there is a “not-me”—a factor in all existence and knowledge—which is outside of the mind, and which may be taken to be symbolised by all the constituents of colour, except light: the mind, according to him, contributes only what light does to colour; all else is external to the mind, though without the mind nothing could attain to actuality. The external world, then, according to Aristotle, is a perfectly real existence, but it is the product of two sets of factors—the one being the rich and varied constituents of the universe, the other being Reason manifested in perceiving minds; and, without the presence and co-operation of this perceptive Reason, all things would be at once condemned to virtual annihilation.

As to Matter, Aristotle called it “timber,” or “the underlying,” to indicate that it is to existence as wood is to a table, and that it is something which is implied in all existence. Nothing can exist without Matter, which is one of the four causes of the existence of everything; but, on the other hand, it may be said that Matter itself has no existence. Things can only be realised by the mind, and so come into actual existence, if they be endowed with Form; pure Matter denuded of form cannot be perceived or known, and therefore cannot be actual. Suppose we take marble as the matter or material of which a statue is composed,—if we think of the marble we attribute to it qualities—colour, brilliancy, hardness, and so on, and these qualities constitute Form, and the marble is no longer pure Matter. We have to ask, then, what is the matter "underlying" the marble? and again, if we figure to ourselves anything possessing definite qualities—as, for instance, any of the simple substances of chemistry—we at once have not only matter, but form. Matter, thus, in the theory of Aristotle, is something which must always be presupposed, and which yet always eludes us, and flies back from the region of the actual into that of the possible. Ultimate matter, or "first timber," necessarily exists as the condition of all things, but it remains as one of those possibilities which can never be realised (see above, p. 56), and thus forms the antithesis to God, the ever-actual. From all this it may be inferred that Aristotle would have considered it very unphilosophical to represent Matter, as some philosophers of the present day appear to do, as having had an independent existence, and as having contained the germs, not only of all other things, but even of Reason itself, so that out of Matter Reason was developed. According to Aristotle, it is impossible to conceive Matter at all as actually existing, far less as the one independent antecedent cause of all things; and it is equally impossible to think of Reason as non-existent, or as having had a late and derivative origin.

Subsidiary to his theory of knowledge, Aristotle discourses at some length, both in his treatise ‘On the Soul’ and in his ‘Physiological Tracts,’ on the Five Senses. He affirms that the sentient soul of man is able to discriminate between the properties of things, “because it is itself a mean or middle term between the two sensible extremes of which it takes cognisance,—hot and cold, hard and soft, wet and dry, white and black, acute and grave, bitter and sweet, light and darkness, &c. We feel no sensation at all when the object touched is exactly of the same temperature with ourselves, neither hotter nor colder.”^[3] This doctrine, which is obviously true, points to the relativity of the qualities of things; it shows that all qualities—e.g., “great” and “small,” and all the rest—are named from the human stand-point, and that, in short, “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras, indeed, had used this dictum in order to throw doubt on all knowledge and truth, for he said that everything was relative to the individual percipient, and that what appeared sweet to one man might seem bitter to another man; thus, that there could be no truth beyond “what any one troweth;” any assertion might be true for the individual who made it, and not for any one besides. Aristotle argues against this sceptical theory, (‘Metaphys.’ III. iv.); in spite of minor fluctuations in the subjective perceptions of individuals he finds ground for truth and certainty in the consensus of the human race, and in science which deals with universal propositions obtained by reason out of particular perceptions.

As usual, there is a great contrast between the correctness of his general philosophy of the senses and that of his particular scientific theory of the operation of each sense. While the world has made no advance upon the one—which was arrived at by mere force of thought—the other, lacking the aid of instruments and accumulated experience, has been wholly left behind, and appears infantile when compared with the discoveries of a Helmholtz. The following is a specimen of Aristotle’s physiology of the senses: “Do sensations travel to us?” he asks. “Certainly,” is the reply; “the nearest person will catch an odour first. Sound is perceived after the blow which caused it. The letters of which words are composed get disarranged by being carried in the air (!), and hence people fail to hear what has been said at a distance. Each sense has its own proper vehicle. Water is the vehicle of sight, air of sound, fire of smell, earth of touch and taste. Sensations are not bodies, but motions or affections of the vehicle or medium along which they travel to us. Light,^[4] however, is an exception to this rule; it is an existence, not a motion; it produces alteration, and alteration of a whole mass may be instantaneous and simultaneous, as in a mass of water freezing. Thus Empedocles was mistaken (!) when he said that light travels from the sun to the earth, and that there is a moment when each ray is not yet seen, but is being borne midway.”—(‘Phys. Tracts.’ ‘On Sensation.’ vi,)

Among the permanent contributions to mental science which were made by Aristotle, none is more famous than his doctrine of the “Law of Association,” which he throws out while discussing Memory and Recollection in his ‘Physiological Tracts.’ He says, “Recollection is the recalling of knowledge. It implies the existence in the mind of certain starting-points, or clues, so that when you get hold of one you will be led to the rest. It depends on the law of association: we recollect when such and such a motion naturally follows such and such; we feel the latter motion, and that produces the former. In trying to recollect, we search after something that is in sequence, or similarity, or contrast, or proximity, to the thing which we want to recollect. Milk will suggest whiteness, whiteness the air, the air moisture, and this the rainy season, which was what we were trying to think of. No animal but man has the power of recollection, though many animals have memory. Recollection implies consideration and a train of reasoning, and yet it is a bodily affection—a physical movement and presentation,” Aristotle adds that “persons with large heads are bad at recollecting, on account of the weight upon their perceptive organ(!), and that the very young and very old are so, on account of the state of movement they are in — the one in the movement of growth, the other in that of decay.”

These considerations, however, whether correct or erroneous, all belong rather to psychology than to metaphysics. Let us conclude by endeavouring to gather Aristotle’s opinions on three great metaphysical problems: The destiny of the human soul, free will, and the nature of God. His opinions on these subjects have to be “gathered,” because, as said above (p. 6), he had no great taste for such speculations, and was in this respect very unlike Plato. Over the mind of Plato the idea of a future life had exercised an absorbing influence. Rising to an almost Christian hope and faith, he had held out, as a consolation in the hour of death, the promise of an immortality to be spent in the fruition of truth; and, as a motive for human actions and a basis for morals, he had enunciated a system of future rewards and punishments, closely corresponding with Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. What had been so prominent with Plato was by Aristotle put away into the extreme background. In early life, indeed, he had written a dialogue, called ‘Eudemus,’ which turned on the story that an exile had been told by the oracle that within a certain time he should be “restored to his home,” and that within that time he had died, and thus in another sense had “gone home.” It is conjectured that this youthful production may have treated of the survival of the individual Reason into another state of existence. But in Aristotle’s maturer works, so far from such a doctrine being laid down, and deductions made from it, passages occur which would seem to render it untenable. “The Soul,” says Aristotle, “is the function of the body, as sight is of the eye. Some of its parts, however, may be separable from the body, as not arising out of the material organisation. This is the case with the Reason, which cannot be regarded as the result of bodily conditions, but which is divine, and enters into each of us from without. Reason, as manifested in the individual mind, is twofold, constructive and passive (see above, p. 166). The passive Reason, which receives the impressions of external things, is the seat of memory, but it perishes with the body; while the constructive Reason transcends the body, being capable of separation from it and from all things, It is an everlasting existence, incapable of being mingled with matter, or affected by it; it is prior and subsequent to the individual mind; but though immortal, it carries no memory with it.”^[5]

This last sentence would seem logically to exclude the possibility of a future life for the individual, for memory is requisite to individuality; and if all that is immortal in us is incapable of memory, it would seem that the only immortality possible would be that of a Buddhist nirvâna, all the actions of this life and all individual distinctions having been erased. Thus, it would appear that the same dictum might be applied to the human race that is applied (‘Soul,’ II. iv. 4) to the works of Nature: “Perpetuity, for which all things long, is attained not by the individual, for that is impossible, but by the species.” These logical deductions are, however, never drawn by Aristotle himself, who in his ‘Ethics’ (I. xi. 1) protests against any rude contradiction of the popular opinion that the dead retain their consciousness, and even their interest in what passes in this world. Thus, whether he did or did not believe in a future life has been a matter for controversy in modern times. On the whole, while we have hardly sufficient data for pronouncing one way or the other, it seems certain that no part of his philosophy, so far as we possess it, shows any trace of the influence of this doctrine.

As to Free Will: That is a question which has arisen out of theology, out of the ideas of the infinite power and knowledge of a personal God, which caused the question to be asked, Can man do anything except what he has been predestined to do? But such a difficulty implies two conditions, both of which were absent from the mind of Aristotle—namely, a strong apprehension of the personality and will of God, and a strong apprehension of the importance of human acts and of the eternal consequences attached to them. Aristotle, as we shall see, can hardly be said to have attributed personality to the Deity; he thought human actions to be of comparatively small importance; and he thought freedom to be, in a certain sense, valueless. Hence, we only mention the problem of Free Will in connection with him in order to show how his ideas contrast with those of the modern world. By a curious metaphor (‘Metaphys.’ XI. x.), he figured the universe as a household, in which the sun and stars and all the heavens are the masters, whose high aims and important positions prevent any of their time being left to a merely arbitrary disposal, for all is taken up with a round of the noblest duties and occupations. Other parts of the universe are like the inferior members of the family—the slaves and domestic animals—who can to a great extent pursue their own devices. Under the last category man would be ranked. Aristotle does not regard the unchanging and perpetual motion of the heavenly bodies as a bondage, nor what is arbitrary in the human will as a privilege. His cosmical views tended to disparage the dignity of man. He would say with the Psalmist, “What is man in comparison with the heavens?” But he failed to reach the counterbalancing thought of Kant, that “There are two things which strike the mind with awe—the starry heavens and the moral nature of man.”

Within an eternal and immutable circumference of the heavens, Aristotle placed a comparatively narrow sphere of the changeable, and in this, Nature, Chance, and Human Will were the causes at work. He admitted a certain amount of determinism as controlling the human will, but he did not care to trace out the exact proportions of this; he merely maintained that the individual was a “joint cause,” if not the sole cause, of his own character and actions (‘Eth.’ III. vii. 20). He thought that mankind had existed from all eternity, and that there had been over and over again a constant process of development going on, till the sciences, and arts, and society had been brought to perfection; and then that by some great deluge, or other natural convulsion, the race had invariably been destroyed—all but a few individuals who had escaped, and who had had to commence anew the first steps towards civilisation!

To us, in the present day, it seems absolutely clear that when we speak of a person we do not mean a thing, and that when we speak of a thing we do not mean a person. In Grecian philosophy, however, this was not the case, for by both Plato^[6] and Aristotle, God was spoken of both as personal and as impersonal, without any reconciliation between the two points of view, or any remark on the subject. In the same way they both pass from the plural to the singular, and speak of “the gods” or “God” as if it hardly mattered which term was used. This seems at first surprising, but when we look into the matter (confining our inquiry to the views of Aristotle), certain explanations offer themselves. When he speaks of “the gods,” he is partly accommodating himself to the ordinary language of Greece, and partly he is indicating the heavenly bodies, as conscious, happy existences, worthy to be reckoned with that Supreme God, Who inhabits the outside of the universe, and imparts their everlasting motion to the heavens. When he speaks of “God,” he has in his mind that Supreme Being, Who, unmoved Himself, is the cause of motion to all things, being the object of reason and of desire—being, in short, the Good. Here the transition from a person to an abstract idea is obvious; but if God is the object of desire to the universe and to Nature, who or what is it that desires Him? Clearly, reason or divine instinct is placed by this theory within Nature itself. In other words, this is Pantheism; it represents Nature as instinct with God, and God in Nature desiring God as the Idea of Good. But Aristotle passes on from this view to describe God as “Thought”—that is, as rather more personal than impersonal—and he asks, on what does that thought think? Thought must have an object, and it will be determined in its character by that object; it will be elevated or deteriorated according as the object on which it thinks is high or low. But this cannot be the case with God, who cannot be subject to these alterations. "God, therefore, must think upon Himself; the thought of God is the thinking upon thought.” Only for a moment (‘Metaphys.’ XI. x. 1) does Aristotle seem to take up something like our point of view, when he says that God may be to the world as the general is to an army. This seems like the modern view, because it would imply something like will in the nature of God. But it is a mere passing metaphor, and none of the other utterances of the Stagirite would attribute anything like will, providence, or ordering of affairs to the Deity. We are told (‘Eth.’ X. viii. 7) that it would be absurd to attribute to Him moral qualities or virtues, or any human function except philosophic thought. He enjoys, however, happiness of the most exalted kind, such as we can frame but an indistinct notion of by the analogy of our own highest and most blessed moods. This happiness is everlasting, and God “has, or rather is,” continuous and eternal life and duration.^[7]

We have been unavoidably launched upon a solemn subject, because any account of Aristotle which did not sketch his theories of the Deity would have been incomplete. It will be seen that, on the whole, his tendency is to what we should call Pantheism. “Reason is divine, and Reason is everywhere, desiring the Good and moving the world:” that is a summary of Aristotle’s philosophy. Of all modern speculators, the one who most nearly approaches him is John Stuart Mill, who represents God as benevolent, but not omnipotent. Aristotle also would say that the desire for the Good which runs through Nature is baffled by the imperfections of matter and the irregularities of chance. The great defect in Aristotle’s conception of God is, that he denies that God can be a moral Being. This, in fact, entirely separates God from man; it leaves only Theology possible, but not Religion; it takes away from morality all divine sanctions. Plato’s view was different; but even he fell short of that deep idea of God, as the Righteous One, which was revealed to the Hebrew nation through their lawgivers and prophets, and afterwards through our Saviour.

1. Thus Shakespeare speaks of “Fate and metaphysical aid,” meaning “supernatural.”
2. Book IV. consists of a list of philosophical terms and their definitions, perhaps jotted down by some scholar. Book X. is a paraphrase of part of the ‘Physical Discourse.’ The appendix to Book I. is a little essay on First Principles, of which tradition attributes the authorship to one Pasides.
3. Grote’s ‘Aristotle,’ vol. ii. p. 197. See ‘On the Soul,’ II. x.
4. The theory of light here given seems to be not only erroneous in itself, but also inconsistent with Aristotle’s explanation of the twinkling of the stars.—(See above, p. 136.)
5. Collected from ‘Soul,’ II. i. 7-12; III. v. 2. ‘Generation,’ II. iii. 10.
6. See Professor Jowett’s ‘Dialogues of Plato Translated,’ vol. iv. p. 11.
7. The above statement of Aristotle’s views of the Deity is collected from ‘Metaphysics,’ XI. vi.-x.