Topics. The intellectual tendencies of Athenian society Lad given scope to a class, which gradually arose, of professional and paid disputants, or professors and teachers of the art of controversy. This professional class, under the name " Sophists," got a bad name in antiquity, 1 and Aristotle treats them disparagingly as mere charlatans. Thus, while Eristic is arguing for victory, he describes Sophistry as arguing for gain. The Sophist, according to Aristotle, tried to refute by means of fallacy, in order that ha might be thought clever, and so get pupils and make money. Aristotle collects, classifies, and exposes these fallacious refutations; and so exhaustive is he in one short book, that the human mind has hardly invented any fallacious argument since which may not be brought under some head of the Sophistical Refutations. The theory of fallacy was a proper wind up to the Organon, as containing the theory of reasoning in all its branches. Aristotle concludes this part of his system with words full of a just pride in his achievements. It is almost 2 the only place in his writings in which any reference to his own personality can be traced. He says, 3 " In regard to the process of syllogising I found positively nothing said before me; I had to work it out for myself by long and laborious research."
Greece at this time was full of Dialectic and Rhetoric, and the two were closely connected; and it was quite natural for Aristotle (whose aim was to take up and carry out to perfection all that the intellect of his countrymen Lad assayed), next in order after Logic and Dialectic, to deal with Rhetoric. We have already seen (p. 515) that I13 probably wrote his Rhetoric immediately after the main books of the Organon, but before the Sophistical Refutations. But a distinction must here be added, for it seems pretty j>lain that, after he had written the two first books of his Rhetoric, there was an interval, and that he did not add on the third book 4 for some time afterwards. Many treatises on the same subject had previously been composed, an account of which has been given by Spengel in his Artium Scriptores, 5 or Writers of Arts of Rhetoric, a work professing to replace, as far as might be, the lost book called Swaywyr) T^XVUV, attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Aristotle. It is a curious fact that one of these earlier systems of Rhetoric has been preserved for us among the works of Aristotle, having been long attributed to him on account of a spurious letter prefixed to it, and purporting to be from Aristotle to his former pupil, Alexander the Great. Hence the treatise got its name of Rhetoric, addressed to Alexander. But the investigations of scholars 6 show conclusively that this work could not luive been written by Aristotle, that with great probability it may be attributed to Anaximenes, the historian and rhetorician, and that it was written between 340 and 330 B.C., only a few years before the composition of Aristotle's treatise. The -work itself is representative of the school of the Sophistical Rhetoricians, and abounds in those tricks of procedure 7 which gained their bad name for the Sophists, and which drew forth the reprobation both of Plato and Aristotle. Plato, 8 indeed, identified rhetoric with trickery, and refused to countenance the study of it. Aristotle, who often exhibits less moral earnestness, but greater intellectual breadth than Plato, thought it necessary that this, like other intellectual fields, should be exploited. He thought, 9 amongst other reasons, that unless this were done, truth and justice would sometimes be left deprived of proper representation and support. He repudiates the practice of the earlier rhetoricians, who had based their " Arts " entirely on appeals to the passions; and in a large and manly way he proceeds to develop all the various points which an orator must keep in view, and to indicate all the kinds of knowledge which he must acquire in order to be master of his profession. In so doing, Aristotle has displayed his extraordinary power of exhausting any subject to which he gave his mind. Hardly anything of importance on the subject of Rhetoric has been added to what he wrote. Take the most powerful and subtle specimens of modern oratory, for instance, Shakspeare's speech of Mark Antony over the body of Caesar, and you will find the rationale of every telling point set forth by anticipation in the Rhetoric of Aristotle. His work contains some few Greek technicalities, for instance, the doctrine of the Enthymeme, 10 or rhetorical syllogism, on the precise nature of which commentators are not agreed. But the main bulk of the treatise consists of a rich collection of remarks on human nature and life, applicable to all periods. In the wisdom and knowledge of the world which it exhibits, Aristotle's Rhetoric might be compared with tha Essays of Lord Bacon. And it might be compared with them also in this respect, that a bad and Machiavelian use might certainly be made of some of the suggestions which it contains, though Aristotle professes only to give them to be employed in the interest of truth and justice. The third book, on Style, is excellent so far as it goes, but it is less exhaustive and universally applicable than the former books, which treat of the matter of speeches.
Rhetoric was said by Aristotle n to be allied, on the one hand to Dialectic, on the other hand to Ethics; and, accordingly, he seems to have gone next to the exploration of the latter subject. At all events he wrote the Nicomachean Ethics later than the Rhetoric. When we compare the two treatises together we are struck with the growth of mind which has taken place between them. The Rhetoric is full of ethical definitions of happiness, pleasure, virtue, friend ship, and the. like. But in the Ethics these are all remodelled, and made far deeper and more exact.
The Nicomachean Ethics was, perhaps, the first of Aristotle's extant works which entered upon the matter of know ledge, as distinct from the theory of the reasonings by which knowledge is obtained, and from the theory of the statement by which knowledge may be best set forth. The moral system herein contained differs from the ethics of Plato, first, in its more accurate psychological analysis, in distinguishing the will from the intellect, and in making virtue to consist in a formed state of the will, rather than
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- ↑ 1 A controversy on the justice of the reproaches of Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, &c., against the Sophists, was initiated by Grote in vol. viii. of his History of Greece, and continued in his subsequent works on Plato and Aristotle. On the other side, see Prof. Jowett's Dialogues of Plato translated (vol. iii. p. 449, sqq.)
- ↑ * Another exception is in Eth. Nic. i. 6, where he refers to the fact of Plato having been his friend.
- ↑ 3, Mr . Poste in his Aristotle on Fallacies, p. 95, translates the words, trtpl TOV a-vo-yl<-<r6a.t, as if they meant "on dialectic" generally. But the general opinion is, that Aristotle was here referring to his having worked out the forms of the syllogism.
- ↑ * Book iii. opens with the same words with which book ii. had concluded. This looks as if Aristotle had returned to the subject after tin interval, having forgotten the exact form of what he had before written. This book (c. i. 10) quotes the treatise On Poetry, which must have been written in the meantime.
- ↑ * L. Spengel, Zwaiuy^Ttx*, sive Artium Scriptores, &c. (Stutt gart, 1823).
- ↑ 6 See An Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric, by E. M. Cope, &c. (London, ] 367), pp. 401-414, where the evidence on this point is briefly EUUllLCd up.
- ↑ 7 75., p. 457, sqq.
- ↑ 8 Goryias, p. 465, &c
- ↑ 9 KhcL, i. 1, 12.
- ↑ nexpressed. See Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Logic, vol. i. p. 3 qq.; Mr Cope's Introduction, p. 103, sqq.; and Crete's Ar., voL i. 91, sqq.
- ↑ 11 Rhet., I. 2, 7.
