A Man of Encyclopedic Learning; as Philosopher, more especially Moralist and Logician.

ARISTOTLE, PUPIL OF PLATO.—Aristotle of Stagira was a pupil of Plato, and he remembered it, as the best pupils do as a rule, in order to oppose him. For some years he was tutor to Alexander, son of Philip, the future Alexander the Great. He taught long at Athens. After the death of Alexander, being the target in his turn of the eternal accusation of impiety, he was forced to retire to Chalcis, where he died. Aristotle is, before all else, a learned man. He desired to embrace the whole of the knowledge of his time, which was then possible by dint of prodigious effort, and he succeeded. His works, countless in number, are the record of his knowledge. They are the summa of all the sciences of his epoch. Here we have only to occupy ourselves with his more especially philosophical ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more precisely, man is composed of soul and body. The body is composed of organs, a well-made piece of mechanism; the soul is its final purpose; the body, so to speak, results in the soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on the body, and is in it not its end but its means of acting upon things, and the whole forms a full and continuous harmony. The faculties of the soul are its divers aspects, and its divers methods of acting; for the soul is one and indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as being able to conceive what is most general, and in consequence it forms within us an intermediary between ourselves and God. God is unique; He is eternal; from all eternity He has given motion to matter. He is purely spiritual, but all is material save Him, and He has not, as Plato would have it, ideas—immaterial living personifications—residing in His bosom. Here may be perceived, in a certain sense, progress, from Plato to Aristotle, towards monotheism; the Olympus of ideas in Plato was still a polytheism, a spiritual polytheism certainly, yet none the less a polytheism; there is no longer any polytheism at all in Aristotle.

HIS THEORIES OF MORALS AND POLITICS.—The moral system of Aristotle sometimes approaches that of Plato, as when he deems that the supreme happiness is the supreme good, and that the supreme good is the contemplation of thought by thought—thought being self-sufficing; which is approximately the imitation of God which Plato recommended. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is very practical and almost mediocre, as when he makes it consist of a mean between the extremes, a just measure, a certain tact, art rather than science, and practical science rather than conscience, which will know how to distinguish which are the practices suitable for an honest and a well-born man. It is only just to add that in detail and when after all deductions he describes the just man, he invites us to contemplate virtues which if not sublime are none the less remarkably lofty.

His very confused political philosophy (the volume containing it, according to all appearance, having been composed, after his death, of passages and fragments and different portions of his lectures) is specially a review of the divergent political constitutions which existed throughout the Greek world. The tendencies, for there are no conclusions, are still very aristocratic, but less radically aristocratic than those of Plato.

THE AUTHORITY OF ARISTOTLE.—Aristotle, by reason of his universality, also because he is clearer than his master, and again because he dogmatises—not always, but very frequently—instead of discussing and collating, had throughout both antiquity and the Middle Ages an authority greater than that of Plato, an authority which became (except on matters of faith) despotic and well-nigh sacrosanct. Since the sixteenth century he has been relegated to his due rank—one which is still very distinguished, and he has been regarded as among the geniuses of the widest range, if not of the greatest power, that have appeared among men; even now he is very far from having lost his importance. For some he is a transition between the Greek genius—extremely subtle, but always poetic and always somewhat oriental—and the Roman genius: more positive, more bald, more practical, more attached to reality and to pure science.