on which a modest student will not undertake to judge.[1] We may at all events be sure that Aristotle is the spiritual author of all these books that bear his name: that the hand may be in some cases another's hand, but that the head and the heart are his.[2]
The first great distinction of Aristotle is that almost with- out predecessors, almost entirely by his own hard thinking, he created a new science-Logic. Renan[3] speaks of "the ill training of every mind that has not, directly or indirectly, come under Greek discipline"; but in truth the Greek intellect itself was undisciplined and chaotic till the ruthless formulas of Aristotle provided a ready method for the test and correc- tion of thought. Even Plato (if a lover may so far presume) was an unruly and irregular soul, caught up too frequently in a cloud of myth, and letting beauty too richly veil the face of truth. Aristotle himself, as we shall sec, violated his own can- ons plentifully; but then he was the product of his past, and not of that future which his thought would build. The polit- ical and economic decay of Greece brought a weakening of the Hellenic mind and character after Aristotle; but when a new race, after a millennium of barbaric darkness, found again the leisure and ability for speculation, it was Aristotle's "Or- ganon" of logic, translated by Boethius (470-525 A. D.), that became the very mould of medieval thought, the strict mother of that scholastic philosophy which, though rendered sterile by encircling dogmas, nevertheless trained the intellect of ado-
- ↑ Cf. Zeller, ii, 204, note; and Shule: History of the Aristotelian Writings.
- ↑ The reader who wishes to go to the philosopher himself will find the Meteorology an interesting example of Aristotle's scientific work; he will derive much practical instruction from the Rhetoric; and he will find Aristotle at his best in books i–ii of the Ethics, and books i–iv of the Politics. The best translation of the Ethics is Welldon's; of the Politics, Jowett's. Sir Alexander Grant's Aristotle is a simple book; Zeller's Aristotle (vols. iii–iv in his Greek Philosophy), is scholarly but dry; Gomperz's Greek Thinkers (vol. iv) is masterly but difficult.
- ↑ History of the People of Israel, vol. v, p. 338.
