Note 8, p. 22. In the treatises "upon philosophy," &c.]
These books are said to have been expositions of the
teaching of Plato and the Pythagoreans upon ideas and
the nature of the sovereign good, or philosophy, and to
have been gathered by Aristotle from the oral teaching of
his great preceptor. It is generally believed that they have
not come down to us; but a more modern commentator
seems to have been persuaded that they are still pre-
served in the Metaphysics, (that store-house, where lie
scattered the fragments of every system of philosophy
that ever had any authority,) and yet there is no passage[1]
in that work, in which Aristotle alludes directly to the
topics here cited by him. If a digest of Plato's[2] doctrine
of the elements may be offered, he makes fire and earth
to have been the first of created elements, because what-
ever is produced must be visible and tangible and corpo-
real, and nothing can be visible without fire, or tangible
without solidity, whence the body of the universe was, in
the beginning, constituted out of fire and earth; but
since it is scarcely possible for two elements so to coalesce
as to form bodies without the intervention of other
combining elements, the Creator placed water and air
between fire and earth, and made them to be in the same
relation to the first elements which they are to each
other and thus fire is to air as air is to water, and air
is to water as water is to earth. The Pythagoreans[3] were
Page:Aristotelous peri psuxes.djvu/229
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
This page has been validated.
CH. II.]
NOTES.
219