In making these changes, Plato believed that he was falling from a lofty, but unrealizable, ideal, and making concessions to human weakness; in reality, he was approaching truth and right. BOOK III ARISTOTLE (B.C. 384-322) CHAPTER I ARISTOTLE--LIFE AND WORKS Aristotle, in my opinion, stands almost alone in philosophy.--Cicero. Aristotle, Nature's private secretary, dipping his pen in intellect.--Eusebius. Wherever the divine wisdom of Aristotle has opened its mouth, the wisdom of others, it seems to me, is to be disregarded.--Dante. I could soon get over Aristotle's _prestige_, if I could only get over his reasons.--Lessing. If, now in my quiet days, I had youthful faculties at my command, I should devote myself to Greek, in spite of all the difficulties I know. Nature and Aristotle should be my sole study. It is beyond all conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, observed. To be sure he was sometimes hasty in his explanations; but are we not so, even to the present day?--Goethe (at 78). If the proper earnestness prevailed in philosophy, nothing would be more worthy of establishing than a foundation for a special lectureship on Aristotle; for he is, of all the ancients, the most worthy of study.--Hegel. Aristotle was one of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses that ever appeared--a man beside whom no age has an equal to place.--_Id._ Physical philosophy occupies itself with the general qualities of matter. It is an abstraction from the dynamic manifestations of the different kinds of matter; and even where its foundations were first laid, in the eight books of Aristotle's _Physical Lectures_, all the phenomena of nature are represented as the motive vital activity of a universal world-force.--Alexander von Humboldt. It was characteristic of this extraordinary genius to work at both ends of the scientific process. He was alike a devotee to facts and a master of the highest abstractions.--Alexander Bain. Aristotle is the _Father of the Inductive Method_, and he is so for two reasons: First, he theoretically recognized its essential principles with a clearness, and exhibited them with a conviction, which strike the modern man with amazement; and then he made the first comprehensive attempt to apply them to all the science of the Greeks.--Wilhelm Oncken. Aristotle, for whose political philosophy our admiration rises, the more we consider the work of his successors, is less guided by imagination than Plato, examines reality more carefully, and recognizes more acutely, the needs of man.--Bluntschli. It appears to me that there can be no question, that Aristotle stands forth, not only as the greatest figure in antiquity, but as the greatest intellect that has ever appeared upon the face of this earth.--George J. Romanes.