human affairs. One name is central in the record of that first attempt at systematic knowledge, the name of Aristotle. We have noted also the brief phase of scientific work at Alexandria. From that time onward the complicated economic and political and religious conflicts of Europe and Western Asia impeded further intellectual progress. These regions, as we have seen, fell for long ages under the sway of the Oriental type of monarchy and of Oriental religious traditions. Rome tried and abandoned a slave-system of industry. The first great capitalistic system developed and fell into chaos through its own inherent rottenness. Europe relapsed into universal insecurity. The Semite rose against the Aryan, and replaced Hellenic civilization throughout Western Asia and Egypt by an Arabic culture. All Western Asia and half of Europe fell under Mongolian rule. It is only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that we find the Nordic intelligence struggling through again to expression.
We then find in the growing universities of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna an increasing amount of philosophical discussion going on. In form it is chiefly a discussion of logical questions. As the basis of this discussion we find part of the teachings of Aristotle, not the whole mass of writings he left behind him, but his logic only. Later on his work became better known through the Latin translations of the Arabic edition annotated by Averroes.[1]
- ↑ Aristotle's Organon, or logic, had always been in part known to the West and was known as a whole after about 1130. In the thirteenth century the rest of his writings became known, in two ways. One way was that of direct translation from the Greek into Latin: it was in this way that St. Thomas Aquinas knew the Ethics and the Politics (the latter translated about 1260 by William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth in the Latin Empire of Constantinople started under Baldwin of Flanders in 1204, and a Fleming himself). The other way was that of indirect translation, that is to say, of translations of Arabic paraphrases of, or commentaries on, the works of Aristotle, such as had been made by Averroes and by Avicenna before him. It was Aristotle's Physics and (I think) Metaphysics that first became known in this way. In this latter way the West received a version of Aristotle which, like Bottom the Weaver, was strangely "translated." Sometimes translations were made direct from Arabic into Latin; sometimes they were made first into Hebrew, and then new translations were made from Hebrew into Latin. As the Arabic version of Aristotle was not always itself direct, but sometimes made from Syriac versions of the Greek, confusion became confounded. The Latin translations of the Arabic Aristotle sometimes contained not translation, but transliteration of Arabic words or sentences; and Roger Bacon very naturally objected to their unintelligibility. What is more, Aristotle's views, as well as his
