THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
self. 40 Poor Aristotelian God! he is a rot faineant, a do-nothing king;
"the king reigns, but he does not rule." No wonder the British like
Aristotle; his God is obviously copied from their king.
Or from Aristotle himself. Our philosopher so loved contemplation that
he sacrificed to it his conception of divinity. His God is of the quiet
Aristotelian type, nothing romantic, withdrawn to his ivory tower from
the strife and stain of things; all the world away from the philosopherkings
of Plato, or from the stern nesh-and-blood reality of Yahveh, or thp
gentle and solicitous fatherhood of the Christian God.
VI. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NATURE OF ART
Aristotle's is psychology marred with similar obscurity and vacillation,
There are many interesting passages : the power of habit is emphasized,
and is for the first time called "second nature" ; and the laws of associa-
tion, though not developed, find here a definite formulation. But both
the crucial problems of philosophical psychology the freedom of the
will and the immortality of the soul are left in haze and doubt. Aristotle
talks at times like a determinist "We cannot directly will to be different
from what we are"; but he goes on to argue, against determinism, that
we can choose what we shall be, by choosing now the environment that
shall mould us; so we are free in the sense that we mould our own char-
and amusements.41
acters by our choice of friends, books, occupations,
He does not anticipate the determinisms ready reply that these formative
choices are themselves determined by our antecedent character, and this
at last by unchosen heredity and early environment. He presses the point
that our persistent use of praise and blame presupposes moral responsibility
and free will; it does not occur to him that the determinist might
reach from the same premisses a precisely opposite conclusion that
praise and blame are given that they may be part of the factors determining
subsequent action.
Aristotle's theory of the soul begins with an interesting definition. The
soul is the entire vital principle of any organism, the sum of its powers
and processes. In plants the soul is merely a nutritive and reproductive
power; in animals it is also a sensitive and locomotor power; in man it is
as well the 42
power of reason and thought. The soul, as the sum of the
powers of the body, cannot exist without it; the two are as form and
wax, separable only in thought, but in reality one organic whole; the soul
is not put into the body like the quick-silver inserted by Daedalus into the
images of Venus to make "stand-ups" of them. A personal and particular
soul can exist only in its own body. Nevertheless the soul is not material,
as Democritus would have it; nor does it all die. Part of the rational
power of the human soul is passive: it is bound up with memory, and dies
a, xii, 8; Ethics, x, 8. ^Ethics, iii, J.