Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/50

34 First, then, with reference to plant life, I draw attention to the remarkable first two chapters of Aristotle's work upon plants. What is most interesting in them, as is so often the case with Aristotle, are the opinions of earlier profound philosophers quoted by him. We see there that Anaxagoras and Empedocles quite rightly taught that plants have the motion of their growth by virtue of their indwelling desires ; nay, that they also attributed to them pleasure and pain, therefore sensation. But Plato only ascribed to them desires, and that on account of their strong appetite for nutrition (cf. Plato in the "Timæus," p. 403, Bip.) Aristotle, on the other hand, true to his customary method, glides on the surface of things, confines himself to single characteristics and conceptions fixed by current expressions, and asserts that without sensation there can be no desires, and that plants have not sensation. He is, however, in considerable embarrassment, as his confused language shows, till here also, "where fails the comprehension, a word steps promptly in as deputy," namely,, the faculty of nourishing. Plants have this, and thus a part of the so-called soul, according to his favourite division into anima vegetativa, sensitiva, and intellectiva. This, however, is just a scholastic Quidditas, and signifies plantæ nutriuntur quia habent facultatem nutritivam. It is therefore a bad substitute for the more profound research of his predecessors, whom he is criticising. We also see, in the second chapter, that Empedocles even recognised the sexuality of plants; which Aristotle then also finds fault with, and conceals his want of special knowledge behind general propositions, such as this, that plants could not have both sexes combined, for if so they would be more complete than animals. By quite an analogous procedure he displaces the correct astronomical system of the world of the Pythagoreans, and by his absurd fundamental principles, which he specially explains in the books de Cælo, introduces the system of Ptolemy, whereby mankind was again