Part 11

Before attempting to set forth in its great salient points the ethical system of Aristotle, it will be at once interesting and useful to sketch shortly the leading events of his life, omitting altogether, as a matter of course, those hundred and one points of uncertain report and slippery slander which are wont to attach themselves to the fame of any great man as to a natural nucleus. And when a man like Aristotle is not only a great man according to the common measure of human greatness, but an altogether extraordinary man, it is as natural that he should be spoken against from all sides as that dogs should bark at a stranger. The epiphany of an intellectual giant in any assembly of men of average talent makes those appear dwarfs who had previously, not without reason, accounted themselves of reputable stature; and as no man likes to be dwarfed, the necessary result of such an apparition is to set men’s wits agog to find out cunning devices, whereby the overwhelming stature of the huge intruder may seem to be curtailed. So Aristotle, we are told, had “a whole host of enemies;” and we shall therefore, as just judges, be justified in throwing out of court, as vitiated in its source, the greater part of the merely anecdotal {134} accretions that cling to the name of the mighty Stagirite.

The adjuncts of high social position and freedom from pecuniary pressure, always advantageous to wise men, hurtful only to fools, Aristotle enjoyed in a remarkable degree. Born 384 B.C. in a Greek town, but under Macedonian influence, his father, who belonged to an old Asclepiad family, as court physician to King Amyntas, had ample opportunities of launching him into the world with all the training, equipment, and supports that are the natural harbingers of a prosperous career. He was not therefore a Greek in the strict sense of the word; and, though he borrowed his language and culture from Attica, and sympathized mainly with popular institutions, as his great work on Politics shows, he had good reason to congratulate himself that he did not lose his original citizenship when the eloquence of Demosthenes thundered in vain against the gold and the iron of the Macedonian. In the period of Aristotle’s youth there was nothing in Greece proper to make any thoughtful person lament that he had been born a subject of a sturdy and semi-barbarous but rising monarchy, rather than a citizen of an exhausted and decaying democracy; for though the victories of Chabrias had restored in some sort the supremacy of the Athenians at sea, the brilliant career of Epaminondas had elevated Thebes for a moment only to make general Greece more divided and less able to resist the growing power of Macedonia. Whether his father had destined him to follow his own profession is uncertain; there are however in the _Ethics_, and elsewhere in his works, frequent allusions to the medical art, such as might have been expected from {135} the associations of his parentage; and the prominent place given to physical science in his writings seems to indicate a tendency partly favoured by the circumstances of his birth, partly evoked by the natural progress of the Greek mind in the then stage of its development. This only we know certainly, that at the age of seventeen, about the time when young men in Scotland generally leave school for the university, the future father of encyclopædic science was sent to Athens, where he remained for twenty years as a pupil of Plato in the Academy. But though a pupil, he was anything but a disciple. Naturally of an inductive rather than a speculative habit of mind, and disposed to dissect and to tabulate rather than to collect and to construct, he displayed from year to year a more marked divergence from the great ideal thinker who at that time was impressing his type on the rising intellect of Greece. The reported gossip of antiquity has much to say about some bitter rivalry that arose, and unseemly quarrel that broke out, between the dictatorial master and the independent pupil; but we need believe nothing of this, except in so far as it may be an indication of a radical difference of intellectual character in the two men, which could not but make itself felt in various ways, more or less inconsistent with the relation of a merely receptive and responsive discipleship. Nothing is more common in the intercourse of cultivated men, than that one of the parties finds himself in a condition to respect profoundly what he cannot at all agree with, and what he feels bound, ever and anon, decidedly to controvert. So it fared no doubt with young Aristotle in relation to old Plato. Confluence between two souls so differently constituted there {136} could be none. They cannot be compared as one rose may be compared with another, or even as one flower may be contrasted with another flower, but only as things of a totally different nature, may be named in the same sentence to make their incommensurability more patent. The intellect of Aristotle was a granite palace, that of Plato a garden of paradise; Aristotle’s wit was like a sharp knife and a weighty hammer, Plato’s like a rolling river and a shining ocean; the one bristled with all carious knowledge, the other blossomed with all lofty speculation; Aristotle analysed all things great and small; Plato harmonized all things beautiful and grand. Along with this inborn diversity of intellectual character, we have reason to suppose that there were certain habits of life and social peculiarities about the Stagirite, which were not without offence to the more strict and devoted Platonists. For that there was a certain tinge of Puritanism, and even a sort of lofty pedantry, occasionally manifested in the great architect of ideas, can, I think, scarcely be doubted by any one who has read his great work--the _Republic_--with an unbribed judgment. Now if Plato was somewhat of a philosophical Puritan, in Aristotle there was presented that combination of a philosopher and a man of the world, of the man of principle with the man of practice, which, because it is difficult to produce, is always rare, and because it is rare is always admired. A physician, and above all a court physician, must be a man who enjoys and who understands society: such was Aristotle’s father; and the son, while betaking himself to the quiet bowers of the Athenian Academy for the cultivation of thought, could not forget that there was a large busy world without {137} which imperiously asserted itself, and from which not even a philosopher could be allowed to withdraw with impunity. It was a characteristic tenet of the Peripatetic school that the external trappings and decorations of life are not to be looked down on with a lofty contempt, but rather cared for as serviceable, and in some cases necessary, aids to a perfect life; and so those Quaker-like affectations of plain garb, and those over-virtuous abstinences from “cakes and ale” and other delights of the merely sensuous part of our nature, which some Platonic and Stoic philosophers affected, could not but meet from Aristotle with a practical protest, of which some significant hint peeps out here and there among the scraps of ancient anecdote-mongers and memoir-writers. Plato, we are told, “was not pleased with Aristotle’s manner of life, nor with his dress. For indeed he was somewhat nice and curious in his apparel, and there was a particular tidiness about his shoes; and his hair also he had cut after a jaunty fashion, not approved of by men of Plato’s following; and he made a display of many rings on his finger. Moreover, there was a peculiar sarcastic play about his mouth, and, when he spoke, he could prattle away with a notable fluency; all which things seemed not to be quite in keeping with the character of a philosopher, and were the occasion that Plato preferred Speusippus and Xenocrates, who afterwards became his successors in the Academy.” This picture is, no doubt, in the main true; and it can only excite our admiration when we consider that the same man of whom this is told was also noted as the most severe and persistent reader in Athens; his house, indeed, was called by Plato “the house of the reader;” and the {138} learned geographer Strabo notes him as the first Greek who collected books on a large scale, and supplied to the Ptolemies of the succeeding age the model of those systematic stores of books with which they made Alexandria famous. Aristotle therefore may justly be regarded as the great prototype of those modern Germans who, like the mailed knights of the middle ages, stand up in our libraries, cased in the invulnerable panoply of polyhistoric and encyclopædic erudition; and he gave birth to that curious sort of intellectual laboriosity, which when divorced from his genius and his sagacity, produced those accumulations of written and printed record, under which the shelves of so many libraries groan, by which also, we may justly say, not a few strong intellects have been lost to the living world, smothered beneath heaps of cumbrous babblement, in extent infinite, in value infinitesimal.

After the death of Plato in the year 347, Aristotle retired for a few years to the court of his fellow-student and friend Hermias, then ruler of Atarnæ, on the coast of Asia Minor. This change of scene was necessary for him, while on the one hand his scheme of establishing a new school of philosophy was yet immature, and, on the other hand, the political relations between Macedonia and Athens were not such as that it would be pleasant for him to be identified with a city which might soon be forced into hostility with his natural sovereign. It was fruitful also, no doubt, in those shrewd observations on men and manners which stamp so many sagacious pages in his moral and political treatises. From this judicious retirement after a few years he was called to a field of more {139} honourable and influential activity. In the year 342 he received a letter from Philip of Macedon, requesting him to undertake the office of tutor to his young son Alexander. The duties of this position he performed with such results to his royal pupil as in such circumstances were to be expected; and with the great advantage to himself of adding the resources of an absolute monarch and a great conqueror to his own private instruments for the prosecution of scientific research. The unexpected death of Philip by the hands of an assassin, called Alexander prematurely to dash into that brilliant career of Asiatic victory which has made his name no less famous than that of his tutor, who by this event relieved at once from personal responsibility and political apprehension, found himself in a position to establish that independent school of wisdom at Athens, which now for more than two thousand years has propagated itself in the world as the natural and necessary complement to the Platonic style of thought. In the year 334 he pitched his intellectual camp at the Lyceum, in the eastern suburbs of Athens, under Mount Lycabettus, and here during the space of thirteen years he remained exercising towards his scholars the diverse functions of fatherhood and fraternity, which in the ancient philosophical associations, as in the early Christian Churches, were so happily combined. After the death of Alexander, in the year 322, he left Athens and retired to Chalcis, in Eubœa, where he had a small property; a migration to which political considerations must have been the main inducement, for so distinguished a dependant of the Macedonian court could scarcely look upon himself as safe in {140} the Attic capital the moment that the death of the great conqueror opened up to the most distinguished people whom his arms had subjugated the prospect of political liberation. The philosopher, accordingly, when leaving the city of his adoption, as it turned out for the last time, with an obvious allusion to the fate of Socrates, is reported to have said that he did so in order that the Athenians might not again have the opportunity of signalizing themselves by the murder of a philosopher; for, indeed, in unlimited democracy generally, and specially in the extreme democracy of that time, he had no faith, observing sarcastically that while the Athenians had discovered two useful things, wheat and freedom, they understood how to use the one, but the other they had possessed for a short time, only to abuse. And no doubt he acted wisely in retreating from a scene where no weight of character or reputation for grave wisdom could have shielded him from the combined assault of personal malignity and political rancour so ready in every democratic soil to rise with jealous spite against individual eminence and independence. The philosopher was threatened, we are told, with prosecution for atheism; a charge which, however unfounded to the eye of reason, might have been brought against the Stagirite from the orthodox Athenian point of view with much more justice than about eighty years before it had been brought against the great father of moral science. An atheist certainly, in the strict sense of the term, Aristotle was not, but a pious believer in the polytheistic theology of his country he was even less; piety indeed of any kind is not at all a pronounced feature in the composition of his character. Like many a {141} modern man of science, he had cultivated acuteness at the expense of wonder; and, while indulging in the omnivorous lust of knowledge, had starved veneration, and stunted the growth of some of the most delicate emotions of the soul. For devotion is of the very finest fragrance of the emotional life; and as there are some flowers without smell, so there are some souls without piety. In point of religious feeling, beyond all question, both Socrates and Plato were infinitely superior to Aristotle.

Such are the few trustworthy notices that have been preserved to us of the outward fortunes of this great hierarch of encyclopædic knowledge. He died shortly after his retirement to Chalcis, at the early age of sixty-three, followed immediately by his great contemporary Demosthenes. On his deathbed he named Theophrastus as his successor in the chair of the great school of philosophy which he had founded.