Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/100

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE and indeed the highest life which is of the mind? This is the AristoteHan view, and one properly belonging to a man who saw life whole and realized the splendor of its mani- festations, beyond the fields of science, in art and literature, in tragedy and epic poetry. The " end " of the body is the human person- ality made up not only of its intellectual strainings, but of its nobler impulses and more sublime emotions, the sense of holiness and beauty and other unanalyzable things of human experience. And as for the example of Aristotle, though he be prone to leap to principles from insuffi- cient grounds, and though his methods were not those of modern scientific verification, still the largeness and penetration of his views, his constant envisaging of each detail as part of a greater living whole, his insistence upon the ultimate bearings of each fact, all this still has at least some echo of inspiration even for a time when the vast complexity of research forces most scholars, as well as scientists, into a sort of rodent specialism. Before him no one had so grandly and so profoundly seen the organism as a whole and as a coordination of parts, and few men since his time. [78]