been excited, although it has scarcely as yet thoroughly gone to work. But what must in any case remain to Aristotle is the praise, bestowed on him by Hegel, of having subordinated the wealth and the detail of the actual universe to the Notion. However great or however small may have been his independent work in the special sciences, the most important element of his whole activity will still be the collection of the matter of all existing sciences around speculative points of view, and therefore an activity which in principle coincides with that of the modern systematisers, and above all of Hegel.

Demokritos also mastered the whole extent of the science of his time, and that probably with greater independence and thoroughness than was the case with Aristotle; but we have no trace whatever of his having brought all these sciences under the yoke of his system. With Aristotle the carrying out of the speculative basis is the chief aim. The one and the permanent, which Plato sought outside things, Aristotle wants to find in the manifoldness of the things themselves. As he makes the external universe an enclosed sphere, with the earth resting in the centre, so the world of science is pervaded by the same method, the same manner of conception and representation, and everything gathers round the knowing subject, whose ideas, with a naive forgetfulness of all the limitations of knowledge, are viewed as the true and ultimate objects of apprehension.

Bacon advanced the assertion that the co-ordination of knowledge into a system was a hindrance to further progress. This view Aristotle could scarcely have opposed, for he held the task of science as a whole to be exhausted, and never for a moment doubted that he was in a position to supply a satisfactory answer to all really essential questions. As in the sphere of ethic and politic he confined himself to the types exhibited in the Hellenic world, and had little sense of the great changes which were going on beneath his eyes, so he troubled himself little with the

crowd of new facts and observations which were made accessible to the man of science by the campaigns of Alexander. That he accompanied Alexander in order to satisfy his desire of knowledge, or that plants and animals were sent to him for examination from distant climates, is mere fable. Aristotle confined himself in his system to the knowledge of his own day, and was convinced that this was all that was of real importance, and sufficed to solve all the principal problems.52 It was this very limitation of his views, and the certainty with which he moved in the narrow circle of his universe, that recommended Aristotle so eminently to the philosophical teachers of the Middle Ages, while modern times, with their inclination. to progress and revolution, had no task more important than to burst asunder the fetters of this system.

More conservative than Plato and Sokrates, Aristotle everywhere attaches himself to tradition, to popular opinion, to the conceptions contained in language; and his ethical demands keep as near as possible to the ordinary customs and laws of Hellenic communities. He has therefore always been the favourite philosopher of conservative schools and tendencies.

The unity of his theory of things Aristotle secures by the most reckless anthropomorphism. The corrupt teleology which argues from man and his aims is one of the most essential elements of his system. As in human production and activity, for example in the building of a house or ship, the idea of the whole is always the first thing present as the end of activity, and as this idea then, by the carrying out of the parts, realises itself in matter, nature must be supposed to proceed in the same way,

52 Cuvier observed that Aristotle describes the Egyptian fauna not from his personal observation, but from the details furnished by Herodotus. although the description reads as if he had himself seen the animals. Humboldt remarks that the zoologi

cal writings of Aristotle exhibit no trace of any addition to knowledge made by the campaigns of Alexander. (Eucken, loc. cit. p. 16 and p. 160; as to his view of the completion of scientific knowledge, p. 5 foll.)

because in his view this sequence of end and thing, of form and matter, is typical of all that exists. After man with his aims, the world of organisms is established. These serve him not only to show the real potentiality of the tree in the seed-corn, not only as types for the classification by species and genus, as model examples of the teleological principle, and so on, but especially, by the comparison of lower and higher organisms, to establish the view that everything in the universe is capable of being arranged in degrees of rank, and according to notions of value-a principle which Aristotle does not fail to go on to apply to the most abstract relations, such as above and below, right and left, and so on. And he obviously believes that all these relations of rank do not merely exist in the human method of comprehension, but are grounded upon the nature of things. So everywhere the universal is explained by means of the special, the easy by means of the difficult, the simple by the compound, the low by the higher. And this it is which in great measure has secured the popularity of the Aristotelian system; for man, to whom nothing is of course more familiar than the subjective circumstances of his thought and action, is always inclined to regard as clear and simple their causal relations to the world of objects, since he confounds the obvious succession in time of the internal and external with the mysterious motive power of efficient causes. Thus, for example, Sokrates could regard as a very simple matter the thinking and electing' by which human actions come about according to the notion of the end; the result of a determination seemed no less simple, and the precedent circumstances in muscles and nerves become merely indifferent accidents. Things in nature seem to betray a certain designedness, and therefore they also must arise by this so natural process of thought and election. A Creator constituted like man is therefore assumed; and as he is infinitely wise, the whole way of looking at things is rested upon a firm basis of optimism.

6

Aristotle had, of course, made a great advance in the method in which he conceives the end as operative in things. (Comp. note 40.) When man came to reflect more closely on the way and manner in which the end was realised, that most naive anthropomorphism which made the Creator work with human hands was no longer to be entertained. A rationalistic view of things, which regarded the popular religious ideas as the figurative presentation of supernatural facts, could, of course, make no exception in the case of teleology; and as here also, as everywhere, Aristotle endeavoured, after his manner, to attain to complete clearness, he was necessarily led by teleology itself, and by the consideration of the organic world, to a pantheistic theory, which makes the divine thought everywhere permeate matter, and realise itself and become immanent in the growth and becoming of all things. By the side of this view, which was capable, with very slight modification, of being developed into a complete Naturalism, there is in Aristotle a transcendental idea of God, which theoretically rests upon the truly Aristotelian thought that all motion must ultimately proceed from a something itself unmoved.53

The traces of empiricism in Aristotle are to be found. partly in isolated expressions, of which the most important are those which require us to respect facts, but partly also in his doctrine of substance (ovoía), which, of course,

The principle of the Aristotelian theology is very well and very succinctly expressed in Ueberweg, Grundriss, i. 4 Aufl. p. 175 foll., 1 E. T. 162, 163: "The world has its principle in God, and this principle exists not merely as a form immanent in the world, like the order in an army, but also as an absolute self-existent substance, like the general in an army." The conclusion of the theology with the words of Homer, our ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη, εἷς κοίρανος ἔστω, betrays the ethical tendency at its

foundation; but the ontological support of the transcendentality of God lies in the proposition that all motion, including the development from potentiality to reality, has a moving cause which is itself unmoved. "Every particular object which is the result of development implies an actual moving cause; so the world, as a whole, demands an absolutely first mover to give form to the naturally passive matter which constitutes it” (loc. cit. 162).

offends us by an irreconcilable contradiction. Aristotle, in this point differing essentially from Plato, calls, in the strict and proper sense, the individual existences and things substances. In them the form, the essential part, is united with matter; the whole is a concrete and thoroughly real existence. Nay, Aristotle sometimes speaks as though complete reality belonged properly to the concrete thing alone. This is the standpoint of the medieval Nominalists, who, however, have not, as a matter of fact, the opinion of Aristotle thoroughly on their side; for Aristotle spoils everything again by admitting a second kind of substance, especially in the notions of species, but also in universals generally. Not only is this apple-tree here before my window a reality, but the notion of kind also indicates a similar reality; only that the universal essence of the apple-tree does not dwell in the vague cloud-land of ideas, from which it radiates an influence into the things of the phenomenal world, but the universal essence of the apple-tree has its existence in the individual apple-trees.

There is here, in fact, so long as we confine ourselves to organisms, and compare only species and individual, a deceptive appearance which has already dazzled many moderns. Let us endeavour to indicate precisely the point where truth and error separate.

Let us begin by placing ourselves at the Nominalistic standpoint, which is perfectly clear. There are only individual apple-trees, individual lions, individual maybugs, and so on; and besides these names, by which we colligate the sum of existing objects, where similarity or likeness connects them together. The universal' is nothing but the name. It is not difficult, however, to give this way of looking at things an appearance of superficiality, by pointing out that we are here treating not of casual similarities, depending on the casual perception of the subject, but that objective nature offers certain obviously distinctive. groups which, by their real similitude, compel us to this