I.

We have considered the Aristotelian philosophy in relation to the great concrete interests of life, morals, politics, literature, and science. We have now to ask what it has to tell us about the deepest and gravest problems of any, the first principles of Being and Knowing, God and the soul, spirit and matter, metaphysics, psychology, and logic. We saw that very high claims were advanced on behalf of Aristotle in respect to his treatment of these topics; and had we begun with them, we should only have been following the usual example of his expositors. We have, however, preferred keeping them to the last, that our readers might acquire some familiarity with the Aristotelian method, by seeing it applied to subjects where the results were immediately intelligible, and could be tested by an appeal to the experience of twenty-two centuries. We know that there are some who will demur to this proceeding, who will say that Aristotle the metaphysician stands on quite different ground from Aristotle the man of science, because in the one capacity he had, and in the other capacity he had not, sufficient facts to warrant an authoritative conclusion. They will say, with Prof. St. George Mivart, that in accumulating natural knowledge men’s minds have become deadened to spiritual truth; or with Mr. Edwin Wallace, that the questions opened by Aristotle have not yet been closed, and that we may with advantage begin our study of them under his guidance. We, on the other hand, will endeavour to show that there is a unity of composition running through the Stagirite’s entire labours, that they everywhere manifest the same excellences and defects, which are those of an anatomising, critical, descriptive, classificatory genius; that his most important conclusions, however great their historical interest, are without any positive or even educational value for us, being almost entirely based on false physical assumptions; that his ontology and psychology are not what his admirers suppose them to be; and that his logic, though meriting our gratitude, is far too confused and incomplete to throw any light on the questions raised by modern thinkers.

Here, as elsewhere, we shall employ the genetic method of investigation. Aristotle’s writings do not, indeed, present that gradual development of ideas which makes the Platonic Dialogues so interesting. Still they exhibit traces of such a development, and the most important among them seems to have been compiled from notes taken by the philosopher before his conclusions were definitely reasoned out, or worked up into a consistent whole. It is this fragmentary collection which, from having been placed by some unknown editor after the _Physics_, has received a name still associated with every kind of speculation that cannot be tested by a direct or indirect appeal to the evidence of external sense.

Whether there exist any realities beyond what are revealed to us by this evidence, and what sensible evidence itself may be worth, were problems already actively canvassed in Aristotle’s time. His _Metaphysics_ at once takes us into the thick of the debate. The first question of that age was, What are the causes and principles of things? On one side stood the materialists—the old Ionian physicists and their living representatives. They said that all things came from water or air or fire, or from a mixture of the four elements, or from the interaction of opposites, such as wet and dry, hot and cold. Aristotle, following in the track of his master, Plato, blames them for ignoring the incorporeal substances, by which he does not mean what would now be understood—feelings or states of consciousness, or even the spiritual substratum of consciousness—but rather the general qualities or assemblages of qualities which remain constant amid the fluctuations of sensible phenomena; considered, let us observe, not as subjective thoughts, but as objective realities. Another deficiency in the older physical theories is that they either ignore the efficient cause of motion altogether (like Thales), or assign causes not adequate to the purpose (like Empedocles); or when they hit on the true cause do not make the right use of it (like Anaxagoras). Lastly, they have omitted to study the final cause of a thing—the good for which it exists.

The teleology of Aristotle requires a word of explanation, which may appropriately find its place in the present connexion. In speaking of a purpose in Nature, he does not mean that natural productions subserve an end lying outside themselves; as if, to use Goethe’s illustration, the bark of cork-trees was intended to be made into stoppers for ginger-beer bottles; but that in every perfect thing the parts are interdependent, and exist for the sake of the whole to which they belong. Nor does he, like so many theologians, both ancient and modern, argue from the evidence of design in Nature to the operation of a designing intelligence outside her. Not believing in any creation at all apart from works of art, he could not believe in a creative intelligence other than that of man. He does, indeed, constantly speak of Nature as if she were a personal providence, continually exerting herself for the good of her creatures. But, on looking a little closer, we find that the agency in question is completely unconscious, and may be identified with the constitution of each particular thing, or rather of the type to which it belongs. We have said that Aristotle’s intellect was essentially descriptive, and we have here another illustration of its characteristic quality. The teleology which he parades with so much pomp adds nothing to our knowledge of causes, implies nothing that a positivist need not readily accept. It is a mere study of functions, an analysis of statical relations. Of course, if there were really any philosophers who said that the connexion between teeth and mastication was entirely accidental, the Aristotelian doctrine was a useful protest against such an absurdity; but when we have established a fixed connexion between organ and function, we are bound to explain the association in some more satisfactory manner than by reaffirming it in general terms, which is all that Aristotle ever does. Again, whatever may be the relative justification of teleology as a study of functions in the living body, we have no grounds for interpreting the phenomena of inorganic nature on an analogous principle. Some Greek philosophers were acute enough to perceive the distinction. While admitting that plants and animals showed traces of design, they held that the heavenly bodies arose spontaneously from the movements of a vortex or some such cause;[222] just as certain religious savants of our own day reject the Darwinian theory while accepting the nebular hypothesis.[223] But to Aristotle the unbroken regularity of the celestial movements, which to us is the best proof of their purely mechanical nature, was, on the contrary, a proof that they were produced and directed by an absolutely reasonable purpose; much more so indeed than terrestrial organisms, marked as these are by occasional deviations and imperfections; and he concludes that each of those movements must be directed towards the attainment of some correspondingly consummate end;[224] while, again, in dealing with those precursors of Mr. Darwin, if such they can be called, who argued that the utility of an organ does not disprove its spontaneous origin, since only the creatures which, by a happy accident, came to possess it would survive—he answers that the constant reproduction of such organs is enough to vindicate them from being the work of chance;[225] thus displaying his inability to distinguish between the two ideas of uniform causation and design.

As a result of the foregoing criticism, Aristotle distinguishes four different causes or principles by which all things are determined to be what they are—Matter, Form, Agent, and Purpose.[226] If, for example, we take a saw, the matter is steel; the form, a toothed blade; the agent or cause of its assuming that shape, a smith; the purpose, to divide wood or stone. When we have enumerated these four principles, we have told everything that can be known about a saw. But Aristotle could not keep the last three separate; he gradually extended the definition of form until it absorbed, or became identified with, agent and purpose.[227] It was what we should call the idea of function that facilitated the transition. If the very essence or nature of a saw implies use, activity, movement, how can we define it without telling its purpose? The toothed blade is only intelligible as a cutting, dividing instrument. Again, how came the saw into being? What shaped the steel into that particular form? We have said that it was the smith. But surely that is too vague. The smith is a man, and may be able to exercise other trades as well. Suppose him to be a musician, did he make the saw in that capacity? No; and here comes in a distinction which plays an immense part in Aristotle’s metaphysics, whence it has passed into our every-day speech. He does not make the saw _quâ_ musician but _quâ_ smith. He can, however, in the exercise of his trade as smith make many other tools—knives, axes, and so forth. Nevertheless, had he only learned to make saws it would be enough. Therefore, he does not make the saw _quâ_ axe-maker, he makes it _quâ_ saw-maker. Nor, again, does he make it with his whole mind and body, but only with just those thoughts and movements required to give the steel that particular shape. Now, what are these thoughts but the idea of a saw present in his mind and passing through his eyes and hands, till it fixes itself on the steel? The immaterial form of a saw creates the real saw which we use. Let us apply the preceding analogies to a natural object; for example, a man. What is the Form, the definition of a man? Not a being possessing a certain outward shape, for then a marble statue would be a man, which it is not; nor yet a certain assemblage of organs, for then a corpse would be a man, which, according to Aristotle, criticising Democritus, it is not; but a living, feeling, and reasoning being, the end of whose existence is to fulfil all the functions involved in this definition. So, also, the creative cause of a man is another man, who directly impresses the human form on the material supplied by the female organism. In the same way, every definite individual aggregate becomes what it is through the agency of another individual representing the same type in its perfect manifestation.[228]

The substantial forms of Aristotle, combining as they do the notion of a definition with that of a moving cause and a fulfilled purpose, are evidently derived from the Platonic Ideas; a reflection which at once leads us to consider the relation in which he stands to the spiritualism of Plato and to the mathematical idealism of the Neo-Pythagoreans. He agrees with them in thinking that general conceptions are the sole object of knowledge—the sole enduring reality in a world of change. He differs from them in maintaining that such conceptions have no existence apart from the particulars in which they reside. It has been questioned whether Aristotle ever really understood his master’s teaching on the subject. Among recent critics, M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire asserts, with considerable vehemence, that he did not. It is certain that in some respects Aristotle is not just to the Platonic theory, that he exaggerates its absurdities, ignores its developments, and occasionally brings charges against it which might be retorted with at least equal effect against his own philosophy. But on the most important point of all, whether Plato did or did not ascribe a separate existence to his Ideas, we could hardly believe a disciple of twenty years’ standing[229] to be mistaken, even if the master had not left on record a decisive testimony to the affirmative side in his _Parmenides_, and one scarcely less decisive in his _Timaeus_.[230] And so far as the controversy reduces itself to this particular issue, Aristotle is entirely right. His most powerful arguments are not, indeed, original, having been anticipated by Plato himself; but as they were left unanswered he had a perfect right to repeat them, and his dialectical skill was great enough to make him independent of their support. The extreme minuteness of his criticism is wearisome to us, who can hardly conceive how another opinion could ever have been held. Yet such was the fascination exercised by Plato’s idealism, that not only was it upheld with considerable acrimony by his immediate followers,[231] but under one form or another it has been revived over and over again, in the long period which has elapsed since its first promulgation, and on every one of these occasions the arguments of Aristotle have been raised up again to meet it, each time with triumphant success. Ockham’s razor, _Entia non sunt sine necessitate multiplicanda_, is borrowed from the _Metaphysics_; Locke’s principal objection to innate ideas closely resembles the sarcastic observation in the last chapter of the _Posterior Analytics_, that, according to Plato’s theory, we must have some very wonderful knowledge of which we are not conscious.[232] And the weapons with which Trendelenburg and others have waged war on Hegel are avowedly drawn from the Aristotelian arsenal.[233]

In his criticism on the ideal theory, Aristotle argues that it is unproved; that the consequences to which it leads would be rejected by the idealists themselves; that it involves a needless addition to the sum of existence; that it neither explains the origin of things nor helps us to understand them, while taking away from them their substantial reality; that the Ideas are merely sensible objects hypostasised, like the anthropomorphic divinities of primitive men; that, to speak of them as patterns, in whose likeness the world was created, is a mere idle metaphor; that, even assuming the existence of such patterns, each individual must be made in the likeness, not of one, but of many ideas—a human being, for instance, must be modelled after the ideal biped and the ideal animal, as well as after the ideal man; while many of the ideas themselves, although all are supposed to exist absolutely, must be dependent on other and simpler types; finally, that, assuming an idea for every abstract relation, there must be ideas to represent the relation between every sensible object and its prototype, others for the new relations thus introduced, and so on to infinity.

Aristotle’s objections to the Neo-Pythagorean theory of ideal numbers need not delay us here. They are partly a repetition of those brought against the Platonic doctrine in its original form, partly derived from the impossibility of identifying qualitative with quantitative differences.[234]

Such arguments manifestly tell not only against Platonism, but against every kind of transcendental realism, from the natural theology of Paley to the dogmatic agnosticism of Mr. Herbert Spencer. A modern Aristotle might say that the hypothesis of a creative first cause, personal or otherwise, logically involves the assumption of as many original specific energies as there are qualities to be accounted for, and thus gives us the unnecessary trouble of counting everything twice over; that every difficulty and contradiction from which the transcendental assumption is intended to free us, must, on analysis, reappear in the assumption itself—for example, the God who is to deliver us from evil must be himself conceived as the creator of evil; that the infinite and absolute can neither cause, nor be apprehended by, the finite and relative; that to separate from Nature all the forces required for its perpetuation, and relegate them to a sphere apart, is a false antithesis and a sterile abstraction; lastly, that causation, whether efficient or final, once begun, cannot stop; that if this world is not self-existing, nothing is; that the mutual adaptation of thoughts in a designing intelligence requires to be accounted for just like any other adaptation; that if the relative involves the absolute, so also does the relation between the two involve another absolute, and so on to infinity.

* * * * *

These are difficulties which will continue to perplex us until every shred of the old metaphysics has been thrown off. To that task Aristotle was not equal. He was profoundly influenced by the very theory against which he contended; and, at the risk of being paradoxical, we may even say that it assumed a greater importance in his system than had ever been attributed to it by Plato himself. To prove this, we must resume the thread of our exposition, and follow the Stagirite still further in his analysis of the fundamental reality with which the highest philosophy is concerned.