Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/17



T has been well remarked by Sir Frederick Pollock that just as a Brahman, when he starts to write a book, invokes Ganesh, the elephant-headed Deity of Wisdom, so any Western, essaying to treat of politics, might well begin with an invocation of the name of Aristotle.

On almost all subjects connected with man and his problems Aristotle is the first and the greatest master. He possessed—as no other thinker has possessed in an equal degree—a combination of the philosophic and the scientific mind. He 'saw life steadily, and saw it whole'; his calm and piercing gaze enabled him to penetrate to the heart of a problem, to analyse its component elements, and, with the nearest human approach to infallibility, to select and stress its most important factors.

Of rhetoric, of passion—other than the passion for facts and laws in facts—of any merely literary striving after style, his works, as they have come down to us, are quite destitute. As Cardinal Newman remarked, he writes like Nature talking of her own works. In the serenity with which he strides over whole continents of thought, and maps out once for all their chief landmarks, he reminds us of the great material conqueror, with his almost godlike calm, narrating so simply and so clearly his campaigns in Gaul. But there is no touch of 'veni, vidi, vici' about Aristotle. His gaze is so intensely rivetted on the facts, his mind so absorbed in their analysis and explanation, that,