THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

CHAPTER II
Aristotle and Greek Science
I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
ARISTOTLE was born at Stagira, a Macedonian city some two hundred
miles to the" north of Athens, in the year 384 B. c. His father was friend
and physician to Amyntas, King of Macedon and grandfather of Alexander.
Aristotle himself seems to
medical fraternity of Asclepiads.
have become a member of the great
He was brought up in the odor of
medicine as many later philosophers were brought up in the odor of
sanctity; he had every opportunity and encouragement to develop a
scientific bent of mind; he was prepared from the beginning to become
the founder of science.
We have a choice of stories for his youth. One narrative represents him
as squandering his patrimony in riotous living, joining the army to avoid
starvation, returning to Stagira to practice medicine, and going to Athens
at the age of thirty to study philosophy under Plato. A more dignified
story takes him to Athens at the age of eighteen, and puts him at once
under the tutelage of the great Master; but even in this likelier account
there is sufficient echo of a reckless and irregular youth, living xapicjly. x
The scandalized reader may console himself by observing that in either
story our philosopher anchors at last in the quiet groves of the Academy.
Under Plato he studied eight or twenty years ; and indeed the pervasive
Platonism of Aristotle's speculations even of those most anti-
Platonic suggests the longer period. One would like to imagine these as
very happy years; a brilliant pupil guided by an incomparable teacher,
walking like Greek lovers in the gardens of philosophy. But they were both
accord with one another as
geniuses; and it is notorious that geniuses
harmoniously as dynamite with fire. Almost half a century separated
them; it was difficult for understanding to bridge the gap of years and
cancel the incompatibility of souls. Plato recognized the greatness of this
strange new pupil from the supposedly barbarian north, and spoke of
him once as the Nous of the Academy, as if to say, Intelligence personi-
fied. Aristotle had spent money lavishly in the collection of books (that is,
in those printless days, manuscripts) ; he was the first, after Euripides, to
^Grote, Aristotle, London, 1872, p. 4; Zeller, Aristotl* and the Earlier Peripatetics,
London, 1897, vol. i, pp. 6 f.
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