Initiation into Philosophy | Page 8

his more
especially philosophical ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more
precisely, man is composed of soul and body. The body is composed of

organs, a well-made piece of mechanism; the soul is its final purpose;
the body, so to speak, results in the soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on
the body, and is in it not its end but its means of acting upon things, and
the whole forms a full and continuous harmony. The faculties of the
soul are its divers aspects, and its divers methods of acting; for the soul
is one and indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as being able to
conceive what is most general, and in consequence it forms within us
an intermediary between ourselves and God. God is unique; He is
eternal; from all eternity He has given motion to matter. He is purely
spiritual, but all is material save Him, and He has not, as Plato would
have it, _ideas_--immaterial living personifications--residing in His
bosom. Here may be perceived, in a certain sense, progress, from Plato
to Aristotle, towards monotheism; the Olympus of ideas in Plato was
still a polytheism, a spiritual polytheism certainly, yet none the less a
polytheism; there is no longer any polytheism at all in Aristotle.
HIS THEORIES OF MORALS AND POLITICS.--The moral system
of Aristotle sometimes approaches that of Plato, as when he deems that
the supreme happiness is the supreme good, and that the supreme good
is the contemplation of thought by thought--thought being
self-sufficing; which is approximately the imitation of God which Plato
recommended. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is very practical and
almost mediocre, as when he makes it consist of a mean between the
extremes, a just measure, a certain tact, art rather than science, and
practical science rather than conscience, which will know how to
distinguish which are the practices suitable for an honest and a
well-born man. It is only just to add that in detail and when after all
deductions he describes the just man, he invites us to contemplate
virtues which if not sublime are none the less remarkably lofty.
His very confused political philosophy (the volume containing it,
according to all appearance, having been composed, after his death, of
passages and fragments and different portions of his lectures) is
specially a review of the divergent political constitutions which existed
throughout the Greek world. The tendencies, for there are no
conclusions, are still very aristocratic, but less radically aristocratic
than those of Plato.

THE AUTHORITY OF ARISTOTLE.--Aristotle, by reason of his
universality, also because he is clearer than his master, and again
because he dogmatises--not always, but very frequently--instead of
discussing and collating, had throughout both antiquity and the Middle
Ages an authority greater than that of Plato, an authority which became
(except on matters of faith) despotic and well-nigh sacrosanct. Since
the sixteenth century he has been relegated to his due rank--one which
is still very distinguished, and he has been regarded as among the
geniuses of the widest range, if not of the greatest power, that have
appeared among men; even now he is very far from having lost his
importance. For some he is a transition between the Greek
genius--extremely subtle, but always poetic and always somewhat
oriental--and the Roman genius: more positive, more bald, more
practical, more attached to reality and to pure science.


CHAPTER VI
VARIOUS SCHOOLS
The Development in Various Schools of the General Ideas of Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle.
THE SCHOOL OF PLATO; THEOPHRASTUS.--The school of Plato
(not regarding Aristotle as belonging entirely to that school) was
continued by Speusippus, Polemo, Xenocrates, Crates, and Crantor.
Owing to a retrograde movement, widely different from that of
Aristotle, it dabbled in the Pythagorean ideas, with which Plato was
acquainted and which he often appreciated, but not blindly, and to
which he never confined himself.
The most brilliant pupil of Aristotle was Theophrastus, naturalist,
botanist, and moralist. His great claim to fame among posterity, which
knows nothing of him but this, is the small volume of Characters,
which served as a model for La Bruyère, and before him to the comic

poets of antiquity, and which is full of wit and flavour, and--to make
use of a modern word exactly applicable to this ancient
work--"humour."
SCHOOLS OF MEGARA AND OF ELIS.--We may just mention the
very celebrated schools which, owing to lack of texts, are unknown to
us--that of Megara, which was called the Eristic or "wrangling" school,
so marked was its predilection for polemics; and that of Elis, which
appears to have been well versed in the sophistic methods of Zeno of
Elea and of Gorgias.
THE CYNIC SCHOOL; ANTISTHENES; DIOGENES.--Much more
important is the Cynic school, because a school, which was nothing
less than Stoicism itself, emanated or appeared to