THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Aristotle so seldom appeals to experiment; the mechanisms of experiment
had not yet been made; and the best he could do was to achieve
an almost universal and continuous observation. Nevertheless the vast
body of data gathered by him and his assistants became the groundwork
of the progress of science, the text-book of knowledge for two thousand
years; one of the wonders of the work of man.
Aristotle's writings ran into the hundreds. Some ancient authors credit
him with four hundred volumes, others with a thousand. What remains
is but a part, and yet it is a library in itself conceive the scope and
grandeur of the whole. There are, first, the Logical works: "Categories,"
"Topics," "Prior" and "Posterior Analytics," "Propositions," and "Sophistical
Refutation"; these works were collected and edited by the later
Peripatetics under the general title of Aristotle's "Organon," that is, the
organ or instrument of correct thinking. Secondly, there are the Scientific
works: "Physics," "On the Heavens," "Growth and Decay," "Meteo-
rology," "Natural History," "On the Soul," "The Parts of Animals,"
"The Movements of Animals," and "The Generation of Animals." There
are, thirdly, the Esthetic works : "Rhetoric" and "Poetics." And fourthly
come the more strictly Philosophical works: "Ethics," "Politics," and
"Metaphysics." 9
Here, evidently, is the Encyclopedia Britannica of Greece: every problem
under the sun and about it finds a place; no wonder there are more
errors and absurdities in Aristotle than in any other philosopher who
ever wrote. Here is such a synthesis of knowledge and theory as no man
would ever achieve again till Spencer's day, and even then not half so
magnificently; here, better than Alexander's fitful and brutal victory, was
a conquest of the world. If philosophy is the quest of unity Aristotle de-
serves the high name that twenty centuries gave him Ille Philosophies:
The Philosopher.
Naturally, in a mind of such scientific turn, poesy was lacking. We
must not expect of Aristotle such literary brilliance as floods the pages
of the dramatist-philosopher Plato. Instead of giving us great literature,
in which philosophy is embodied (and obscured) in myth and imagery,
Aristotle gives us science, technical, abstract, concentrated; if we go to
him for entertainment we shall sue for the return of our money. Instead
of giving terms to literature, as Plato did, he built the terminology of
science and philosophy; we can hardly speak of any science today with-
out employing terms which he invented; they lie like fossils in the strata
of our speech: faculty., mean, maxim, (meaning, in Aristotle, the major
premiss of a syllogism), category, energy, actuality, motive, end, principle,
form these indispensable coins of philosophic thought were minted in
his mind. And perhaps this passage from delightful dialogue to precise
the chronological ^
order, so far as known (Zeller, i, 156 f). Our discussion
will follow this order except in the case of the "Metaphysics."