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 treat ment 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. AVe 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 men tions, 1 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 ex tant works), and his adherence " to essential naked truth," induced Wilhelm vonHumboldt 2 to say that Aristotle was un-Greek in the character of his mind; that he was deeper and more earnest than the Greeks, but was wanting in Greek fancy and grace, and spiritual freedom of treatment. This may be so; but in point of descent Aristotle was purely Hellenic. 3 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, 4 a Greek colony, on the Strymonic gulf. This place was not far from Pella, the residence of the Macedonian king, Amyntas, whose physician Nicomachus, the father of Aris totle, became. Intercourse with the Macedonians may have, to some extent, influenced the manners of this family. Bat it is to be remembered that they belonged to the race of the Asclepiads, or supposed descendants of ^Esculapius, 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 5 to- have been one, that "from father to son they 1 See Bonitz s Index to Aristotle, in the 5th vol. of the edition of the Prussian Royal Academy (Berlin, 1870), under the words <pvffiK6s, 4>v<rioyos, Philosophus Incertus, TttpioSoi (books of travels), Iffropia, liriroKpd.Tris, &c., where the references to passages are given. s Iii a letter to F. A. Wolf, dated 15th June 1795. See his works, v. 125.
- See Aristotle, by George Grote, kc. (1872), vol. i. p. 3, note.
Hence his frequent appellation by the Greek commentators of 6 STcryeipiTTjy. This in English is often mis-spelt as " Stagyrite." 5 Gaien, De Anatomicis Administr., ii. 1. It is a doubtful and inter esting question whether Aristotle ever dissected the human subject. Tins would have been much opposed to Greek prejudices. See A ristotle: a Chapter from the History of Science, &c., by George Henry Lewes (London, 1864), pp. 159-170. We know that the school of Galen contented themselves with dissecting the lower animals ; the same may generally have been the case with Aristotle. But he appears to have dissected the human fcetus, and in one place, at all events, he seem s to indicate acquaintance with dissections of the adult human subject (De 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 6 and anecdote- monger, perhaps of the 3d or 4th century A.D. His life of Aristotle contains, amid many worthless, gossiping state ments, two fragments of antiquity which are of the greatest value. One of these is an extract from the chronology (xpoviKa) of Apollodorus (140 B.C.), giving the dates of the chief events of Aristotle s career; the other is a cata logue 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 Herineas, 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; 7 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 Mityleue, 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 8 which still remain. In rivalry to the Platonic school which had been established in the gar dens of the " Academia " on the west side of Athens, he set up his own school in the covered " walks " (TrfptVaroi) 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 nov/ 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 founda tion. He set himself simultaneously to writing and to teaching, and there is reason to believe that he employed Part. Animal, i. v. 7). But his knowledge of anatomy, as compared with that of modern times, was superficial. 6 See his Lives of the Philosophers, v. i. 7 Niebuhr considered Apollodorus to be a trustworthy chronologist. Valentine Hose, however, De Aristolelis Librorum Online et Auctoritate Commentatio (Berlin, 1854), pp. 112-119, thinks that the date of Aristotle s death can alone be relied on, and that all the other particulars are filled in, going backwards from this, on conjecture. Eose believes that the account of Aristotle s connection both with Plato and with Alexander is a mere fiction, and, in short, that we know nothing about the life of Aristotle. This is an extreme of scepticism. 8 These works all seem to belong to the same epoch of the author s mind. They all presuppose a certain generally completed system of philosophy aud a certain previously settled phraseology. But consider able development of particular thoughts can be traced as having occurred
during the actual writing of the books.
