Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/183

 of a Buddhist nirvâna, all the actions of this life and all individual distinctions having been erased. Thus, it would appear that the same dictum might be applied to the human race that is applied (‘Soul,’ II. iv. 4) to the works of Nature: “Perpetuity, for which all things long, is attained not by the individual, for that is impossible, but by the species.” These logical deductions are, however, never drawn by Aristotle himself, who in his ‘Ethics’ (I. xi. 1) protests against any rude contradiction of the popular opinion that the dead retain their consciousness, and even their interest in what passes in this world. Thus, whether he did or did not believe in a future life has been a matter for controversy in modern times. On the whole, while we have hardly sufficient data for pronouncing one way or the other, it seems certain that no part of his philosophy, so far as we possess it, shows any trace of the influence of this doctrine.

As to Free Will: That is a question which has arisen out of theology, out of the ideas of the infinite power and knowledge of a personal God, which caused the question to be asked, Can man do anything except what he has been predestined to do? But such a difficulty implies two conditions, both of which were absent from the mind of Aristotle—namely, a strong apprehension of the personality and will of God, and a strong apprehension of the importance of human acts and of the eternal consequences attached to them. Aristotle, as we shall see, can hardly be said to have attributed personality to the Deity; he thought human actions to be of comparatively small importance; and