THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

ARISTOTLE 7I
IX. CRITICISM
What shall we say of this philosophy? Perhaps nothing rapturous. It
is difficult to be enthusiastic about Aristotle, because it was difficult for
him to be enthusiastic about anything; and si vis me ftere, primum tib\
ftendum^ His motto is nil admirari to admire or marvel at nothing;
and we hesitate to violate his motto in his case. We miss in him the re-
forming zeal of Plato, the angry love of humanity which made the great
idealist denounce his fellow-men. We miss the daring originality of his
teacher, the lofty imagination, the capacity for generous delusion. And
yet, after reading Plato, nothing could be so salutary for us as Aristotle's
sceptic calm.
Let us summarize our disagreement. We are bothered, at the outset,
with his insistence on logic. He thinks the syllogism a description of man's
way of reasoning, whereas it merely describes man's way of dressing up
his reasoning for the persuasion of another mind; he supposes thai:
thought begins with premisses and seeks their conclusions, when actually
thought begins with hypothetical conclusions and seeks their
justifying
premisses, and seeks them best by the observation of particular events
under the controlled and isolated conditions of experiment. Yet how
foolish we should be to forget that two thousand years have changed
merely the incidentals of Aristotle's logic, that Occam and Bacon and
Whewell and Mill and a hundred others have but found spots in hia
sun, and that Aristotle's creation of this new discipline of thought, and
his firm establishment of its essential lines, remain among the lasting
achievements of the human mind.
It is again the absence of experiment and fruitful hypothesis that
leaves Aristotle's natural science a mass of undigested observations. His
specialty is the collection and classification of data; in every field he
wields his categories and produces catalogues. But side by side with this
bent and talent for observation goes a Platonic addiction to metaphysics;
this trips him up in every science, and inveigles him into the wildest presuppositions.
Here indeed was the great defect of the Greek mind: it was
not disciplined; it lacked limiting and steadying traditions; it moved
freely in an uncharted field, and ran too readily to theories and conclusions.
So Greek philosophy leaped on to heights unreached again,
while Greek science limped behind. Our modern danger is precisely opposite;
inductive data fall upon us from all sides like the lava of Vesuvius;
we suffocate with uncoordinated facts; our minds are overwhelmed with
sciences breeding and multiplying into specialistic chaos for want of
synthetic thought and a unifying philosophy. We are all mere fragments
of what a man might be.
94
"If you wish me to weep you must weep first" Horace (Ars Poetica) to actors
and writers.