In the old Academy, we lose the presence of inventive genius; with few exceptions we find here no movements of progress, but rather a gradual retrogression of the Platonic philosophizing. After the death of Plato, Speusippus, his nephew and disciple, held the chair of his master in the Academy during eight years. He was succeeded by Xenocrates, after whom we meet with Polemo, Crates, and Crantor. It was a time in which schools for high culture were established, and the older teacher yielded to his younger successor the post of instruction. The general characteristics of the old Academy, so far as can be gathered from the scanty accounts, were great attention to learning, the prevalence of Pythagorean elements, especially the doctrine of numbers, and lastly, the reception of fantastic and demonological notions, among which the worship of the stars played a part. The prevalence of the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers in the later instructions of the Academy, gave to mathematical sciences, particularly arithmetic and astronomy, a high place, and at the same time assigned to the doctrine of ideas a much lower position than Plato had given it. Subsequently, the attempt was made to get back to the unadulterated doctrine of Plato. Crantor is said to be the first editor of the Platonic writings.
As Plato was the only true Socraticist, so was Aristotle the only genuine disciple of Plato, though often abused by his fellow-disciples as unfaithful to his master’s principles.
We pass on at once to him, without stopping now to inquire into his relation to Plato, or the advance which he made beyond his predecessor, since these points will come up before us in the exhibition of the Aristotelian philosophy. (See § XVI: III. 1.)
SECTION XVI.
ARISTOTLE.
I. Life and Writings of Aristotle.—Aristotle was born 384 B. C. at Stagira, a Greek colony in Thrace. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician, and the friend of Amyntas, king of Macedonia. The former fact may have had its influence in determining the scientific direction of the son, and the latter may have procured his subsequent summons to the Macedonian court. Aristotle at a very early age lost both his parents. In his seventeenth year he came to Plato at Athens, and continued with him twenty years. On account of his indomitable zeal for study, Plato named him “the Teacher,” and said, upon comparing him with Xenocrates, that the latter required the spur, the former the bit. Among the many charges made against his character, most prominent are those of jealousy and ingratitude towards his master, but most of the anecdotes in which these charges are embodied merit little credence. It is certain that Aristotle, after the death of Plato, stood in friendly relations with Xenocrates; still, as a writer, he can hardly be absolved from a certain want of friendship and regard towards Plato and his philosophy, though all this can be explained on psychological grounds. After Plato’s death, Aristotle went with Xenocrates to Hermeas, tyrant of Atarneus, whose sister Pythias he married after Hermeas had fallen a prey to Persian violence. After the death of Pythias he is said to have married his concubine, Herpyllis, who was the mother of his son Nicomachus. In the year 343 he was called by Philip of Macedon, to take the charge of the education of his son Alexander, then thirteen years old. Both father and son honored him highly, and the latter, with royal munificence, subsequently supported him in his studies. When Alexander went to Persia, Aristotle betook himself to Athens, and taught in the Lyceum, the only gymnasium then vacant, since Xenocrates had possession of the Academy, and the Cynics of the Cynosaerges. From the shady walks περίπατοι of the Lyceum, in which Aristotle was accustomed to walk and expound his philosophy, his school received the name of the Peripatetic. Aristotle is said to have spent his mornings with his more mature disciples, exercising them in the profoundest questions of philosophy, while his evenings were occupied with a greater number of pupils in a more general and preparatory instruction. The former investigations were called acroamatic, the latter exoteric. He abode at Athens, and taught thirteen years, and then, after the death of Alexander, whose displeasure he had incurred, he is said to have been accused by the Athenians of impiety towards the gods, and to have fled to Chalcis, in order to escape a fate similar to that of Socrates. He died in the year 322 at Chalcis, in Eubæa.
Aristotle left a vast number of writings, of which the smaller (perhaps a fourth), but unquestionably the more important portion have come down to us, though in a form which cannot be received without some scruples. The story of Strabo about the fate of the Aristotelian writings, and the injury which they suffered in a cellar at Scepsis, is confessedly a fable, or at least limited to the original manuscripts; but the fragmentary and descriptive form which many among them, and even the most important (e. g. the metaphysics) possess, the fact that scattered portions of one and the same work (e. g. the ethics) are repeatedly found in different treatises, the irregularities and striking contradictions in one and the same writing, the disagreement found in other particulars among different works, and the distinction made by Aristotle himself between acroamatic and exoterical writings, all this gives reason to believe that we have, for the most part, before us only his oral lectures written down, and subsequently edited by his scholars.
II. Universal Character and Division of the Aristotelian Philosophy.—With Plato, philosophy had been national in both its form and content, but with Aristotle, it loses its Hellenic peculiarity, and becomes universal in scope and meaning; the Platonic dialogue changes into barren prose; a rigid, artistic language takes the place of the mythical and poetical dress; the thinking which had been with Plato intuitive, is with Aristotle discursive; the immediate beholding of reason in the former, becomes reflection and conception in the latter. Turning away from the Platonic unity of all being, Aristotle prefers to direct his attention to the manifoldness of the phenomenal; he seeks the idea only in its concrete actualization, and consequently grasps the particular far more prominently in its peculiar determinateness and reciprocal differences, than in its connection with the idea. He embraces with equal interest the facts given in nature, in history, and in the inner life of man. But he ever tends toward the individual, he must ever have a fact given in order to develope his thought upon it; it is always the empirical, the actual, which solicits and guides his speculation; his whole course is a description of the facts given, and only merits the name of a philosophy because it comprehends the empirical in its totality and synthesis; because it has carried out its induction to the farthest extent. Only because he is the absolute empiricist may Aristotle be called the truly philosopher.
This character of the Aristotelian philosophy explains at the outset its encyclopedian tendency, inasmuch as every thing given in experience is equally worthy of regard and investigation. Aristotle is thus the founder of many courses of study unknown before him; he is not only the father of logic, but also of natural history, empirical psychology, and the science of natural rights.