Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/582

Rh 522 ARISTOTLE into existence, and this couid not be without implying the previous existence of the potential. The universe, according to Aristotle, is a continuous chain ; at the one end is the purely potential matter without form or qualities ; at the other end is pure unconditioned actuality, the ever existent, or God. Reflection upon the relations of the potential and the actual shows the world to have been eternal, for the actual must always have preceded the potential ; l the seed is the potentiality of the plant, and the plant must always have preceded the seed, 2 the fowl the egg, &c. Thus, all the system of cause and effect, which makes up what is called &quot;nature,&quot; has been and will be, according to Aristotle, of eternal duration, and is only slightly modified and altered by two incalculable elements 3 of causation, chance and the will of man. &quot;Nature,&quot; or the system prevailing from the earth up wards through the planetary sphere, is full of reason; it does nothing in vain. 4 The formal cause, the form, or per fection, of each thing, is generally to be identified with the final cause, or end, at which nature aims. Matter, rising from the merely potential, through the four elements into various substances, is the material cause ; and the efficient, or motive cause is supplied by the active powers of heat and cold. Nature, however, is impersonal, and to speak of it as pervaded by reason, has all the appearance of pantheism. But yet in the system of Aristotle there was a God who was not part of nature. Aristotle s utterances on this subject are obscure ; he speaks of the unmoved Mover of all things at one time 5 as if He supplied motion to the periphery of heaven, at another as if He moved things by desire, under the form of the Good. But, at all events, He is personal : He enjoys for ever that bliss which we can only at brief moments attain to ; His life is the thinking upon thought. In all this there is something incomplete, and the different points of view are not reconciled. Aristotle argues that 6 God could not, as thought, have any object of thought inferior to himself, else the divine thought, by thinking upon an inferior object, would suffer change and degradation. God, there fore, can only think upon himself. This argument would seem to foreclose the possibility of either Providence or prayer. There is something Eastern in this idea of a God absorbed in self -meditation ; and, on the other hand, we observe that Aristotle, while considering no trouble too great to obtain excellence in any little point of art, or science, or morals, or politics, still, in comparison with the great universe, makes human affairs of relatively little importance. But yet, within the sphere of nature, man is, according to _ him, the highest product indeed, the one end for which all the arrangements of nature are but means. 7 Nor does man himself fall wholly within the sphere of nature. Every natural soul is the ultimate expres sion (eVreXe^aa) of a corresponding physical body. But in the human soul there is something which has no physical substratum, which came in from without. 8 And, if not physical, this something must belong to the ethereal essence 1 Metaphys., viii. 8, 1-11. 3 A similar doctrine to this was stated by Sir V. Thomson in his address to the British Association, 1871. He said, &quot;I am ready to adopt as an article of scientific faith, true through all space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life.&quot; His suggestion as to our own globe was &quot; that life originated on this earth through moss-grown fragments from the ruins of another world.&quot; 3 Eth. Nic., iii. 3, 7, &c. 4 See the whole of book ii. of the Physical Discourse. 8 Metaph., xi. 9, 4. 7 See Polit., i. 8, 11, where it is said that &quot; plants are evidently for the sake of animals, and animals for the sake of man ; thus nature, which does nothing in vain, has made all things for the sake of man.&quot; e De Gen. Animal., ii. 3, 9, 10. of which the outer heavens and the self-conscious, happy stars are composed. Thus man, by his reason, lias a direct connection with the sphere of the eternal and the blessed. The question then arises whether the individual man can look forward to immortality. On this, regardless of Plato s elaborate pictures of a Hell, a Purgatory, and a Heaven, Aristotle says nothing. In one celebrated passage 9 he makes reason twofold, the active and the passive, of which the active reason, and it alone, is indestructible ; but if this be incapable of receiving impressions, it would seem that all our memory, in short, all that constitutes human individuality, is doomed to extinction. But Aristotle never says so in express terms, and therefore has given scope for much controversy in modern times as to his opinion. 10 Returning to his psychology, we find that 11 he considers knowledge to imply a certain similarity, if not identity, between the subject and the object. Therefore, the higher reason in apprehending universals, apprehends something homogeneous with itself, something, in short, ethereal, This would bring the Aristotelian universals very near to the Platonic ideas, but that he maintains 12 that the univer sals are always immanent in the individuals, never tran scendental, or existing by themselves. But this doctrine widely separates Aristotle from the modern experimental school, though, on the other hand, there is no trace of his having believed in &quot; innate ideas &quot; upon any subject. Aristotle, like Locke, considered each human mind to bo originally a blank tablet, but he would not agree with Locke that this tablet is written upon by external objects, he would rather say that, by the joint action of the active and the passive reason, the tablet writes upon itself, and that there is much in our knowledge which comes from tho nature of the intellect itself. Two doctrines lie at the foundation of his system : 1st, the principle of contradic tion, that a thing must be either A or not A ; 2d, the dualistic opposition, throughout the universe, of reason and matter. In modern times we have been long accustomed to think of this world as having had a beginning, and recent theories of &quot; development &quot; are attempts at a speculative history of nature gradually arriving at its pre sent condition. Such theories have nothing to correspond to them in the system of Aristotle, for in his view the pre sent fabric of the world has had an eternal existence, and nature is fixed, being only slightly varied by the element of chance. He admits, indeed, a process of development in human society, but in order to adapt this process to a fixed and eternal frame of things he announces 13 the curious opinion, that the human race has repeatedly brought to perfection all art, science, and philosophy, and has on each occasion been swept away by some wide spread catastrophe or convulsion of nature, leaving only a few individuals to repropagate the race, and to begin again the development of civilisation out of the merest rudiments. In endeavouring to bring forward, in a brief space, some of the salient characteristics of Aristotle, we have been led to mention chiefly those points on which he differs most 9 De Anima, iii. 5, 2. 10 Averroes made for himself a bad name by pushing the words of Aristotle to their logical conclusion. On the other hand, St Thomas Aquinas argued in favour of Aristotle s belief in immortality. Spengel, apparently, takes the latter view (see note 3, p. 520) ; he quotes with approval an anonymous ancient &quot;Ort U&amp;lt;ir&amp;lt;av, &amp;lt;f&amp;gt;ij&amp;lt;rJ, KO. Apia-rorf-r]s aQavarov o^o/ojy fyovffi rr/i/ T/VXT]V, KO.V rives els rbv AptcrTOT(ovs vow OUK fnPaevvovrts 6i&amp;gt;r,Tr)v vo^ovcriv avr bv Xeyeiv- See some criticisms on Crete s view, Ed. Rev., No. 278, pp. 553-556. See Die Erkenntnissthcorie des Arisiotles, von Dr F. Kampe (Leipsic, 1870), p. 316, sqq. 12 Post. Analyt., i. 11, 1, & c. 13 Metaphys., xi. 8, 19.
 * See the dissertation on the nature of God, Metaph., xi. c. 6-10.