To me it appears that this last explanation is untenable, and that the term _exoteric_ designates matter of a certain character, assignable to some extent by positive marks, but still more by negative; matter, in part, analogous to that defined by Cicero and other critics. But to conceive clearly or fully what its character is, we must turn to Aristotle himself, who is of course the final authority, wherever he can be found to speak in a decisive manner. His preserved works afford altogether eight passages (two of them indeed in the Eudemian Ethics, which, for the present at least, I shall assume to be his work), wherein the phrase "exoteric discourses" ([Greek: e)xôterikoi\ lo/goi]) occurs. Out of these eight passages, there are seven which present the phrase as designating some unknown matter, not farther specified, but distinct from the work in which the phrase occurs: "Enough has been said (or is said, Aristotle intimates) about this subject, even in the exoteric discourses." To what it is that he here alludes--whether to other writings of his own or oral discussions of his own, or writing and speech of a particular sort by others--we are left to interpret as we best may, by probable reason or conjecture. But there is one among the eight passages, in which Aristotle uses the term _exoteric_ as describing, not what is to be looked for elsewhere, but what he is himself about to give in the treatise in hand. In the fourth book of the Physica, he discusses the three high abstractions, Place, Vacuum, Time. After making an end of the first two, he enters upon the third, beginning with the following words:--"It follows naturally on what has been said, that we should treat respecting Time. But first it is convenient to advert to the difficulties involved in it, by _exoteric discourse also_--whether Time be included among entities or among non-entities; then afterwards, what is its nature. Now a man might suspect, from the following reasons, that Time either absolutely does not exist, or exists scarcely and dimly," &c. Aristotle then gives a string of dialectic reasons, lasting through one of the columns of the Berlin edition, for doubting whether Time really exists. He afterwards proceeds thus, through two farther columns:--"Let these be enumerated as the difficulties accompanying the attributes of Time. What Time is, and what is its nature, is obscure, as well from what has been handed down to us by others, as from what we ourselves have just gone through;"[39] and this question also he first discusses dialectically, and then brings to a solution.