ONE:"Come along," she said. "I've got the key of the courtyard. Not that we are in the least likely to find anything there?"The dialectic theory, considered in its relation to physics, tended to substitute the study of uniformity for the study of mechanical causation. But the general conceptions established by science were a kind of soul in Nature; they were immaterial, they could not be perceived by sense, and yet, remaining as they did unchanged in a world of change, they were far truer, far more real, than the phenomena to which they gave unity and definition. Now these self-existent ideas, being subjective in their origin, readily reacted on239 mind, and communicated to it those attributes of fixedness and eternal duration which had in truth been borrowed by them from Nature, not by Nature from them. Plato argued that the soul was in possession of ideas too pure to have been derived from the suggestions of sense, and therefore traceable to the reminiscences of an ante-natal experience. But we can see that the reminiscence was all on the side of the ideas; it was they that betrayed their human origin by the birthmark of abstraction and finalitybetokening the limitation of mans faculties and the interest of his desireswhich still clung to them when from a temporary law of thought they were erected into an everlasting law of things. As Comte would say, Plato was taking out of his conceptions what he had first put into them himself. And, if this consideration applies to all his reasonings on the subject of immortality, it applies especially to what he regards as the most convincing demonstration of any. There is one idea, he tells us, with which the soul is inseparably and essentially associatednamely, the idea of life. Without this, soul can no more be conceived than snow without cold or fire without heat; nor can death approach it without involving a logical contradiction. To assume that the soul is separable from the body, and that life is inseparable from the soul, was certainly an expeditious method of proof. To a modern, it would have the further disadvantage of proving too much. For, by parity of reasoning, every living thing must have an immortal soul, and every soul must have existed from all eternity. Plato frankly accepted both conclusions, and even incorporated them with his ethical system. He looked on the lower animals as so many stages in a progressive degradation to which human beings had descended through their own violence or sensuality, but from which it was possible for them to return after a certain period of penitence and probation. At other times he describes a hell, a purgatory, and a heaven, not unlike what we read of in240 Dante, without apparently being conscious of any inconsistency between the two representations. It was, indeed, an inconsistency such as we find in the highest order of intellects, the inconsistency of one who mediated between two worlds, between naturalistic metempsychosis on the one side, and ethical individualism on the other.
TWO:The systematising power of Aristotle, his faculty for bringing the isolated parts of a surface into co-ordination and continuity, is apparent even in those sciences with whose material truths he was utterly unacquainted. Apart from the falseness of their fundamental assumptions, his scientific treatises are, for their time, masterpieces of method. In this respect they far surpass his moral and metaphysical works, and they are also written in a much more vigorous style, occasionally even rising into eloquence. He evidently moves with much more assurance on the solid ground of external nature than in the cloudland of Platonic dialectics, or among the possibilities of an ideal morality. If, for example, we open his Physics, we shall find such notions as Causation, Infinity, Matter, Space, Time, Motion, and Force, for the first time in history separately discussed, defined, and made the foundation of natural philosophy. The treatise On the Heavens very properly regards the celestial movements as a purely mechanical problem, and strives throughout to bring theory and practice327 into complete agreement. While directly contradicting the truths of modern astronomy, it stands on the same ground with them; and anyone who had mastered it would be far better prepared to receive those truths than if he were only acquainted with such a work as Platos Timaeus. The remaining portions of Aristotles scientific encyclopaedia follow in perfect logical order, and correspond very nearly to Auguste Comtes classification, if, indeed, they did not directly or indirectly suggest it. We cannot, however, view the labours of Aristotle with unmixed satisfaction until he comes on to deal with the provinces of natural history, comparative anatomy, and comparative psychology. Here, as we have shown, the subject exactly suited the comprehensive observation and systematising formalism in which he excelled. Here, accordingly, not only the method but the matter of his teaching is good. In theorising about the causes of phenomena he was behind the best science of his age; in dissecting the phenomena themselves he was far before it. Of course very much of what he tells was learned at second-hand, and some of it is not authentic. But to collect such masses of information from the reports of uneducated hunters, fishermen, grooms, shepherds, beemasters, and the like, required an extraordinary power of putting pertinent questions, such as could only be acquired in the school of Socratic dialectic. Nor should we omit to notice the vivid intelligence which enabled even ordinary Greeks to supply him with the facts required for his generalisations. But some of his most important researches must be entirely original. For instance, he must have traced the development of the embryo chicken with his own eyes; and, here, we have it on good authority that his observations are remarkable for their accuracy, in a field where accuracy, according to Caspar Friedrich Wolff, is almost impossible.210
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