Christian Thomas Kohl The Metaphysical Foundations of Buddhism and Modern Science

Christian scheme of salvation. Its overthrow, eighteen hundred years
later, was resisted equally by Luther and the Church of Rome. As an
example of a majestic inductive generalization, appealing to the obvious
facts, and neglecting the welter of minor differences, Aristotle’s general
conception of the physical universe remains unsurpassed. For every
feature in it, there is an appeal to observation; and for every observation
to which appeal is made, there is the possibility of its indefinite
repletion. With Aristotle and Epicurus, the science of modern civilization
reached adolescence.
Section II. There is a clear-cut obviousness about Aristotle’s doctrines
which is entirely lacking to Plato’s cosmology. Of course neither Plato, nor
Aristotle, originated his own particular line of thought. There was a
history behind them of three or four generations of thinkers, back to
the dim figures of Thales and Pythagoras, and even beyond them. Also
Aristotle worked for twenty years in the Academy of Plato, and derived
ideas from that active, speculative group of thinkers, to whom the
modern world owes its speculation, its criticism, its deductive and
inductive sciences, and the civilization of its religious concepts. They
were the narrow channel through which passed the confused traditions
of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Syria, and of the sea-borne Greek civilization.
From this Academy and its Aristotelian off-shoot, there emerged the
various lines of thought which the subsequent schools of Alexandria
turned into the first phase of modern science, natural and humane.