Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/16

 pressure after truth, but they seek the truth under different aspects. Plato was ever aspiring to intuitions of a truth which in this world could never be wholly revealed,—a truth of which glimpses only could be obtained, partly by the most abstract powers of thought, partly by the imagination. While richly endowed with humour and the dramatic faculty, and the most trenchant insight into the fallacies of mankind, Plato was not content with aiming at those demonstrations which could be stated once for all, but he rather sought analogies and hints of a truth which can never be definitely expressed. Eternity, the life of the gods, the supra-sensible world of “pure ideas,” were of more reality and importance to him than the affairs of this life. While he was the greatest and most original of metaphysical philosophers, he never ceased to be a poet, and, to some extent, a mystic.

The intellectual characteristics of Aristotle, as known to us from his works, present a great contrast to all this. He was too much in earnest, and at the same time too matter-of-fact, to allow poetry and the imagination any share in the quest for truth. He had no taste for half-lights; and with regard to such great questions as the immortality of the soul, the nature of God, the operation of Providence, and the like, it is evident that so far from preferring these, he rather kept aloof from them, and only gave cautious and grudging utterances upon them. His passion was for definite knowledge, especially knowledge so methodised that it could be stated in the form of a general principle, or law. He thought that to obtain a general principle in which