The _Rhetoric_ follows, not disconnected with the logical treatises. Then
may be named the _Metaphysics_, and then the writings devoted to Nature,
to wit, the _Physics_, _Concerning the Heavens_, _Concerning Genesis and
Decay_, the _Meteorology_, the _Mechanical Problems_, the _History of
Animals_, the _Anatomical descriptions_, the _Psychology_, the _Parts of
Animals_, the _Generation of Animals_. There was a Botany, which is lost.
Finally, one names the great works on Ethics, Politics, and Poetry.
Every one is overwhelmed by the compass of the achievement of this
intellect. As to the transcendent value of the works on Logic,
Metaphysics, Psychology, Rhetoric, Ethics, Politics, and Poetry, the world
of scholarship has long been practically at one. There is a difference of
opinion as to the quantity and quality of actual investigation represented
by the writings on Natural History. But Aristotle is commonly regarded as
the founder of systematic Zoology. On the whole, perhaps one will not err
in repeating what has been said hundreds of times, that the works ascribed
to Aristotle, and which undoubtedly were produced by him or his
co-labourers under his direction, represent the most prodigious
intellectual achievement ever connected with any single name.
In the school of Aristotle, one phase or another of the master’s activity
would be likely to absorb the student’s energy and fasten his entire
attention. Aristotle’s own pupil and successor was the admirable
Theophrastus, a man of comprehensive attainment, who nevertheless devoted
himself principally to carrying on his master’s labours in botany, and
other branches of natural science. A History of Physics was one of the
most important of his works. Another pupil of Aristotle was Eudemus of
Rhodes, who became a physicist and a historian of the three sciences of
Geometry, Arithmetic, and Astronomy. He exhibits the learned activities
thenceforth to characterize the Peripatetics. It would have been difficult
to carry further the logic or metaphysics of the master. But his work in
natural science might be supplemented, while the body of his writings
offered a vast field for the labours of the commentator. And so, in fact,
Peripatetic energies in the succeeding generations were divided between
science and learning, the latter centring chiefly in historical and
grammatical labours and the exposition of the master’s writing.[35]
Aristotelianism was not to be the philosophy of the closing pre-Christian
centuries, any more than it was to be the philosophy of the thousand years
and more following the Crucifixion. During all that time, its logic held
its own, and a number of its metaphysical principles were absorbed in
other systems. But Aristotelianism as a system soon ceased to be in vogue,
and by the sixth century was no longer known.
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