Of the prodigious total of works composed by Aristotle, I have
already mentioned that the larger number have perished. But there
still remain about forty treatises, of authenticity not open to any
reasonable suspicion, which attest the grandeur of his intelligence,
in respect of speculative force, positive as well as negative,
systematizing patience, comprehensive curiosity as to matters of
fact, and diversified applications of detail. In taking account of
these treatises, we perceive some in which the order of sequence is
determined by assignable reasons; as regards others, no similar
grounds of preference appear. The works called 1. De Coelo; 2. De
Generatione et Corruptione; 3. Meteorologica,--are marked out as
intended to be studied in immediate succession, and the various
Zoological treatises after them. The cluster entitled Parva Naturalia
is complementary to the treatise De Animâ. The Physica Auscultatio is
referred to in the Metaphysica, and discusses many questions
identical or analogous, standing in the relation of prior to a
posterior, as the titles indicate; though the title 'Metaphysica' is
not affixed or recognized by Aristotle himself, and the treatise so
called includes much that goes beyond the reach of the Physica. As to
the treatises on Logic, Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics, Poetics,
Mechanics, &c., we are left to fix for ourselves the most convenient
order of study. Of no one among them can we assign the date of
composition or publication. There are indeed in the Rhetorica,
Politics, and Meteorologica, various allusions which must have been
written later than some given events of known date; but these
allusions may have been later additions, and cannot be considered as
conclusively proving, though they certainly raise a presumption, that
the entire work was written subsequently to those events.
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