Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/30

 16 D. G. EITCHIE : of exercise for thought." 1 Now, Aristotle's philosophising of the history of philosophy is certainly very rudimentary com- pared with Hegel's ; but it seems to me a treatment of that history essentially the same in kind. The various opinions are not simply put alongside of one another in scholastic fashion, as if they were all utterances of persons on the same mental level and conscious of precisely the same problem. Aristotle expressly groups them according to the degree in which they realise the fourfold question that has, in his view, to be asked about reality. As Hegel sees the categories of his Logic gradually reached by the successive philosophical schools, so Aristotle finds his doctrine of the four causes bit by bit emerging from the progress of Greek thought. The earliest philosophers, when they asked themselves what is the underlying principle of things, were content to assign the " matter," that out of which the world of phenomena came and into which it returns. Empedocles felt the need of efficient causes, and " in a stammering way " expressed a principle of movement in his "love" and "strife," but he then went on to treat these as if they were simply material elements alongside of the other four. Anaxagoras made an epoch by assigning Reason or Intelligence as the efficient cause which produces order out of chaos, but he did not work out the principle in detail. Similarly, the Pythagoreans had advanced beyond the lonians in assigning Number (or rather we should say " Figure," for Greek arithmetic was geo- metrical) as the principle of things ; but they went on to- treat this formal principle as if it were material, as if the universe were actually pieced together out of geometrical points, lines and figures. The Pythagorean "number " was the germ of the Platonic " ideas," which are a formal prin- ciple clearly recognised as such. And thus there only remains the final cause for Aristotle himself to put forward as his distinctive principle, though the germs of that also are to be found in earlier philosophy and especially in the Platonic. Now, whatever be thought of this particular interpretation of the history of Greek philosophy, it seems to me an inter- pretation of the same kind as that which Hegel applies to the history of all philosophy. Besides, we find Aristotle ex- pressly recognising a logical necessity in the transition from 1 Schwegler also thinks that the notion of a cycle in history excludes the idea of logical development. Aristotle certainly has the popular Greek notion of a cycle as a background to his thinking now and then ; but it nowhere prevents him from taking a thoroughly scientific view of social or intellectual evolution. Contrast Pol. I. 2, with Plato's Laws; III., 676-680.