The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy
The Greek Philosophers, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Benn, Alfred William
Philosophy, Ancient
The systematising power of Aristotle, his faculty for bringing the
isolated parts of a surface into co-ordination and continuity, is
apparent even in those sciences with whose material truths he was
utterly unacquainted. Apart from the falseness of their fundamental
assumptions, his scientific treatises are, for their time, masterpieces
of method. In this respect they far surpass his moral and metaphysical
works, and they are also written in a much more vigorous style,
occasionally even rising into eloquence. He evidently moves with much
more assurance on the solid ground of external nature than in the
cloudland of Platonic dialectics, or among the possibilities of an
ideal morality. If, for example, we open his _Physics_, we shall find
such notions as Causation, Infinity, Matter, Space, Time, Motion, and
Force, for the first time in history separately discussed, defined,
and made the foundation of natural philosophy. The treatise _On the
Heavens_ very properly regards the celestial movements as a purely
mechanical problem, and strives throughout to bring theory and
practice into complete agreement. While directly contradicting the
truths of modern astronomy, it stands on the same ground with them;
and anyone who had mastered it would be far better prepared to receive
those truths than if he were only acquainted with such a work as
Plato’s _Timaeus_. The remaining portions of Aristotle’s scientific
encyclopaedia follow in perfect logical order, and correspond very
nearly to Auguste Comte’s classification, if, indeed, they did not
directly or indirectly suggest it. We cannot, however, view the
labours of Aristotle with unmixed satisfaction until he comes on to
deal with the provinces of natural history, comparative anatomy, and
comparative psychology. Here, as we have shown, the subject exactly
suited the comprehensive observation and systematising formalism in
which he excelled. Here, accordingly, not only the method but the
matter of his teaching is good. In theorising about the causes of
phenomena he was behind the best science of his age; in dissecting
the phenomena themselves he was far before it. Of course very much
of what he tells was learned at second-hand, and some of it is not
authentic. But to collect such masses of information from the reports
of uneducated hunters, fishermen, grooms, shepherds, beemasters,
and the like, required an extraordinary power of putting pertinent
questions, such as could only be acquired in the school of Socratic
dialectic. Nor should we omit to notice the vivid intelligence which
enabled even ordinary Greeks to supply him with the facts required for
his generalisations. But some of his most important researches must be
entirely original. For instance, he must have traced the development
of the embryo chicken with his own eyes; and, here, we have it on good
authority that his observations are remarkable for their accuracy, in
a field where accuracy, according to Caspar Friedrich Wolff, is almost
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