things physical, such as even our own advancement in science cannot deliver us from. He saw, what was of graver moment, an incertitude and a recklessness about moral truth, such as happily we can hardly imagine. The universe-material, moral, intellectual-was reeling around him. He had to prove the very existence of a moral sense at all. If he was sure of anything he was sure of this: that every man is himself a microcosm; that to know this little world well and thoroughly, even in one instance only, is the most precious of all kinds of knowledge; that there is in man something which stands apart from and above the changes for ever going on in the material universethe concourse of atoms, the perpetual flux of generation and decay. His aim was not to teach, but to enable men to teach themselves. Just as a child once having been taught to read holds a key in its hand wherewith to unlock all knowledge that is to be got out of books, so Socrates taught his hearers that they must know themselves, if they would know anything really worth knowing. Plato, treading in the steps of his master, starting from the same point of departure, was not satisfied merely to distinguish man from the external world. He longed for a system comprehensive enough to contain and explain all things. His was one of those minds which are essentially synthetic; very quick to detect a hidden resemblance; very strong in the poetic faculty of tracing analogy between things which seem to others very different. Planting himself in imagination at the source and origin of all things, he painted to himself the universe spread like a plain below. To take things as we find them, to see things as they strike our senses, was not enough. The most realistic of idealizers, he would know them as they are, as they exist in the mind of a creative intelligence, as they ever were and ever will be-untouched by change. Can we wonder that here, as always,

"Vaulting ambition doth o'erleap itself

And fall on the other side'?

1

Plato's transcendental Dialectic, with its pinnacles lost in a splendid haze of mysticism,

'Rose like an exhalation with the sound

Of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet.'

It stands, to this day, a magnificent ruin; a palatial structure, never to be completed; a warning to the transcendentalists of every age against attempting impossibilities.

Aristotle was not altogether free from this idealism. He

The new reading, its sell,' is hardly an improvement.

6

protests against it whenever he has a good opportunity, with the politeness indeed which is due to a preceptor, but uncompromisingly withal, and yet he cannot altogether divest himself of these ideas. For in default of a God, the mind seeks something to which it may attribute finality of causation. Without saying, with Bishop Hampden, that Aristotle makes ideas the cause of our cognition,—a notion contradicted by Aristotle's preference for reasoning upwards from things with which we are actually conversant-it must at all events be admitted that Aristotle is much too fond of arguing from a presumed intention in nature. This it is which, as well as the inadequacy of his observation, vitiates his physical philosophy. Socrates had put physics aside as irrelevant to his subject and comparatively unimportant: Plato had an instinctive antipathy to physics, save so far as he could generalise about them at pleasure. Aristotle alone of the three had in himself the requisite capacity. But his data,' whether acquired from others or from his own observation, were ludicrously insufficient. This deficiency, and at the same time the craving for something in place of a creative and over-ruling Providence, he endeavoured to satisfy by the notion of an 'Anima Mundi,' as if nature were a machine working by itself. Deceived by an apparent uniformity in nature, which a wider range of experiment might have disproved, and predisposed, through narrowing his philological researches to his own language, to attach an intrinsic power to words which is out of all proportion with the proper functions of language, he was only too ready in physics to invert the legitimate process of reasoning which he usually followed, and to say, 'This is, because it ought so to be.' This perverted application of logic to physics is the rock on which his mediæval disciples foundered in their physical speculations. It is as if the teeth were expected to masticate without any food, the mill set to work without any grist, the spinning jenny without any cotton. Aristotle's physical philosophy need not detain us from those other branches of philosophy in which he is a far more competent teacher. Yet even here it is remarkable and indicative of his acuteness, that he is said to have anticipated not a few of what are called modern discoveries.

In Metaphysic, as it is now the fashion to call it after the example of our French neighbours, Greek Philosophy was more at home, and is more competent to speak authoritatively. For it is not easy to see what new facts bearing upon this subject have been brought to light since the days of Aristotle. But our readers need not fear that they are about to undergo an infliction of Ontology. In truth, Ontology, pure and simple, cannot find much for itself in Aristotle. He asserts plainly that only particulars have a real existence, and that universals, or to speak

more exactly, generals, are nothing more than an arrangement which the mind finds convenient in sorting and grouping its perceptions; that he controverts rather than countenances the theories of transcendentalism. To him the conception of an universal is only a bundle of particular instances, tied together and labelled, so as to be carried about ready for use. He speaks indeed of substance; but not in the sense which came to be attached to that much-disputed word by his disciples in the Middle Ages. Under their heavier manipulation, the subtle and impalpable idea was stereotyped in rigid outlines. The very idiosyncrasies of the two languages presented an insuperable difficulty. The Greek term refused to be translated adequately by a Latin synonym.

But it is more interesting to turn to the Aristotelian Psychology. Here again his native shrewdness and common sense protest against transcendentalism. Instead of bewildering himself with ideal phantasies, he regards the senses as the foundation, the starting-point of knowledge. He does not favour the doctrine of innate ideas. Like our own philosopher, Locke, he traces back the processes of the mind to sensation in the first instance. Even mathematical science may be cited as a witness in favour of this theory. No study is more purely abstract; and yet it would not be easy to prove that the primary principles of notation are really derived from any other source than the senses. The idea of numbers, what is it but the perception through the senses of two or more objects, which are felt to be distinct? All the senses, he teaches, anticipating here the discoveries of a later generation, are only various forms or modifications of one sense, and that is touch. Natural talent,

by which one man has an advantage over his competitors in the race which all have to run, he attributes to a superior delicacy in the organization of the senses. For example, though the instance is not his, the circulation of the blood, its rapidity or sluggishness, seems to have much to do with quickness or slowness of apprehension. The madman thinks too fast, the idiot too slowly. Similarly it cannot be questioned that certain persons begin life with constitutional propensities towards good or evil, which form a very important item in their responsibility. It seems probable that the continual progress of physical science will tend more and more to confirm all this. Possibly in time we may learn that even force can be resolved into matter. But in all this there is nothing which need alarm a religious man. There is a sound and healthy materialism, which must not be confounded with the materialism which denies the existence of will, human or divine.

Aristotle himself certainly recognises a something in man.

which is distinct from the organization of the senses. In the act of seeing, he says, there is something besides the exquisite mechanism of the eye, without which the mechanism of the eye does not, cannot operate. He compares this immaterial something to a monarch acting through the instrumentality of servants and officers in the government of a great nation. We may not be able to assent unreservedly to Aristotle when he seems to exalt the intellect beyond what is due. But we cannot wonder at it. Everything tended in his day to drive philosophical minds back upon themselves. The world without them was in too unsatisfactory a state to attract them into participating willingly in its active employments. The world within them needed, in default of legislation from heaven, the strong restraint which the intellect alone could then supply, to curb its passions, and quell their turbulency. We can see that the organization of the brain, as well as of the heart, the machinery by which the mind forms its conceptions, as well as that by which the desires whisper their promptings, is in a sense material. We can see, indeed, as one of our greatest modern psychologists has argued, that the emotive part in man, rather than the intellectual, is that which gives a direction to his powers. We need not fear, even though science demonstrates more and more convincingly every day that the finer qualities in man's nature may be resolved into the action of material elements. For, whatever else can be proved to be material, the will cannot. The will of man, like the Divine Will, of which it is the emanation, remains supreme, guiding and governing-but, alas! not always like its divine prototype, wisely-the powerful agencies subjected to its sway. The reasoning faculty in man, like his emotive nature, may be shown to differ in degree rather than in kind from that of the inferior creation. But the consciousness of will, the conscious choice between good and evil, stamps his responsibility as altogether different from theirs.

Before quitting this part of our subject, it is important to observe that we owe great thanks to Aristotle for two most important, most characteristic distinctions. First, that of which mention has been made already, between the particular instances which the mind perceives and the general rule or principle which it gathers from them, a distinction not indeed originated by Aristotle, but enforced by him with peculiar directness and emphasis. Next, and this is a yet more valuable contribution to a sound philosophy, the distinction between things as they are essentially, and things as they are in relation to ourselves at any particular time, in any particular conjuncture of circumstances. It is the neglect of this distinction which leads men,

whether positivists or transcendentalists, to aim in vain at a certainty of knowledge which is utterly hopeless to man in this life. It is through careful regard to this great distinction that minds naturally most eager and inquisitive have been enabled to content themselves with probability as a help to faith, where a more certain knowledge is simply unattainable.

In logic, again, it is almost impossible to overestimate what the world owes to Aristotle. He has been called the inventor of logic. But the epithet is only true so far as he may claim the credit of having taught clearly and explicitly what had hitherto been involved in wild confusion and overlaid by other subjects. Aristotle himself is not always proof against this temptation. When he discourses on categories and predicaments he mixes up the various applications of the principles of his art with the principles themselves; he speaks of the subdivisions of his subject as if equally important with its fundamental laws. But it may be allowed that Aristotle invented the syllogism, in the sense in which it is true that the greatest effort of genius is to give new life to old truths, to clothe with distinctness and reality truths which have been lying dormant, familiar to every one, and yet not consciously expressed in so many words. Every human being is a syllogiser. Whenever we think at all, at least whenever we think consecutively, we are syllogising. All that logic can do is to put us on our guard against errors in the working of the machine. So the man in Molière's comedy was astonished to learn that he had been talking prose all his life without knowing it.

In a similar sense it may be allowed that Aristotle is the founder of the inductive method. Of course, even before his time, philosophy had been attempting to make its inductions; in other words, to form a collection of facts from which to elicit laws of general application. This, again, is not a method peculiar to philosophers, but common to every mind. We are all so constituted as to perceive a resemblance, and to classify instinctively the objects which we perceive according to their resemblance. By the same law of association we go on to infer, by what is called the deductive syllogism, that, wherever there is resemblance, there what we have already ascertained about one thing may safely be predicated or asserted of the other. The only difference is in the manner of collecting our particular instances, and drawing from them our general conclusion. These operations may be performed loosely or exactly, partially or with true comprehensiveness. Our analysis may be misled by a false resemblance, our induction by an imperfect collection of instances, our deduction by an erroneous manner of connecting the two propositions from which we argue. Plato,