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THREE:We are here confronted with an important and much disputed question, Was Aristotle an empiricist? We hold most decidedly that he was, if by empiricist is meant, what alone should be meant��one who believes that the mind neither anticipates anything in the content, nor contributes anything to the form of experience; in other words, who believes knowledge to be the agreement of thought with things imposed by things on thought. We have already shown, when discussing Sir A. Grant��s view to the contrary, that Aristotle was in no sense a transcendental idealist. The other half of our position is proved by the chapter in the Posterior Analytics already referred to, the language of which is prima facie so much in favour of our view that the burden of proof391 rests on those who give it another interpretation. Among these, the latest with whom we are acquainted is Zeller. The eminent German historian, after asserting in former editions of his work that Aristotle derived his first principles from the self-contemplation of the Nous, has now, probably in deference to the unanswerable arguments of Kampe, abandoned this position. He still, however, assumes the existence of a rather indefinable �� priori element in the Aristotelian noology, on the strength of the following considerations:��In the first place, according to Aristotle, even sense-perception is not a purely passive process, and therefore intellectual cognition can still less be so (p. 190). But the passages quoted only amount to this, that the passivity of a thing which is raised from possibility to actuality differs from the passivity implied in the destruction of its proper nature; and that the objects of abstract thought come from within, not from without, in the sense that they are presented by the imagination to the reason. The pure empiricist need not deny either position. He would freely admit that to lose one��s reason through drunkenness or disease is a quite different sort of operation from being impressed with a new truth; and he would also admit that we generalise not directly from outward experience, but from that highly-abridged and representative experience which memory supplies. Neither process, however, constitutes an anticipation of outward experience or an addition to it. It is from the materialist, not from the empiricist, that Aristotle differs. He believes that the forms under which matter appears are separable from every particular portion of matter, though not from all matter, in the external world; and he believes that a complete separation between them is effected in the single instance of self-conscious reason, which again, in cognising any particular thing is identified with that thing minus its matter. Zeller��s next argument is that the cognition of ideas by the Nous is immediate, whereas the process of generalisation from experience described by Aristotle392 is extremely indirect. Here Zeller seems to misunderstand the word ?μεσο?. Aristotle never applies it to knowledge, but only to the objective relations of ideas with one another. Two terms constitute an ��immediate�� premise when they are not connected by another term, quite irrespective of the steps by which we come to recognise their conjunction. So with the terms themselves. They are ��immediate�� when they cannot be derived from any ulterior principle; when, in short, they are simple and uncaused. Finally, the objection that first principles, being the most certain and necessary of any, cannot be derived from sensible experience, which, dealing only with material objects, must inherit the uncertainty and contingency of matter,��is an objection, not to the empiricist interpretation of Aristotle��s philosophy, but to empiricism itself; and it is not allowable to explain away the plain words of an ancient writer in order to reconcile them with assumptions which he nowhere admits. That universality and necessity involve an �� priori cognition or an intellectual intuition, is a modern theory unsupported by a single sentence in Aristotle.287 We quite agree with Zeller when he goes on to say that in Aristotle��s psychology ��certain thoughts and notions arise through the action of the object thought about on the thinking mind, just as perception arises through the action of the perceived object on the percipient�� (p. 195); but how this differs from the purest empiricism is more than we are able to understand.So far Aristotle gives us a purely superficial and sensational view of the drama. Yet he could not help seeing that there was a moral element in tragedy, and he was anxious to show, as against Plato, that it exercised an improving effect on the audience. The result is his famous theory of the Catharsis, so long misunderstood, and not certainly understood even now. The object of Tragedy, he tells us, is to purify (or purge away) pity and terror by means of those emotions themselves. The Poetics seems originally to have contained an explanation of this mysterious utterance, now lost, and critics have endeavoured to supply the gap by writing eighty treatises on the subject. The result has been at least to show what Aristotle did not mean. The popular version of his dictum, which is that tragedy purges the passions by pity and terror, is clearly inconsistent with the wording of the original text. Pity and terror are both the object and the instrument of purification. Nor yet does he mean, as was once supposed,306 that each of these emotions is to counterbalance and moderate the other; for this would imply that they are opposed to one another, whereas in the Rhetoric he speaks of them as being akin; while a parallel passage in the Politics188 shows him to have believed that the passions are susceptible of homoeopathic treatment. Violent enthusiasm, he tells us, is to be soothed and carried off by a strain of exciting, impassioned music. But whence come the pity and terror which are to be dealt with by tragic poetry? Not, apparently, from the piece itself, for to inoculate the patient with a new disease, merely for the sake of curing it, could do him no imaginable good. To judge from the passage in the Politics already referred to, he believes that pity and terror are always present in the minds of all, to a certain extent; and the theory apparently is, that tragedy brings them to the surface, and enables them to be thrown off with an accompaniment of pleasurable feeling. Now, of course, we have a constant capacity for experiencing every passion to which human nature is liable; but to say that in the absence of its appropriate external stimulus we are ever perceptibly and painfully affected by any passion, is to assert what is not true of any sane mind. And, even were it so, were we constantly haunted by vague presentiments of evil to ourselves or others, it is anything but clear that fictitious representations of calamity would be the appropriate means for enabling us to get rid of them. Zeller explains that it is the insight into universal laws controlling our destiny, the association of misfortune with a divine justice, which, according to Aristotle, produces the purifying effect;189 but this would be the purgation of pity and terror, not by themselves, but by the intellectual framework in which they are set, the concatenation of events, the workings of character, or the reference of everything to an eternal cause. The truth is that Aristotle��s explanation of the moral effect produced by tragedy is307 irrational, because his whole conception of tragedy is mistaken. The emotions excited by its highest forms are not terror and pity, but admiration and love, which, in their ideal exercise, are too holy for purification, too high for restriction, and too delightful for relief.