Such being the mental characteristics of the two men--their type of mind so opposite--we are prepared to expect that, in pursuing his inquiries, Aristotle would develop a different Organon from that of Plato, and that the teachings of Aristotle will give a new direction to philosophic thought.
ARISTOTELIAN ORGANON.
Plato made use of psychological and logical analysis in order to draw from the depth of consciousness certain fundamental ideas which are inherent in the mind--born with it, and not derived from sense or experience. These ideas he designates "the intelligible species" (τὰ νοουµενα γένη) as opposed to "the visible species"--the objects of sense. Such ideas or principles being found, he uses them as "starting-points" from which he may pass beyond the sensible world and ascend to "the absolute," that is, to God. [674] Having thus, by immediate abstraction, attained to universal and necessary ideas, he descends to the outer world, and attempts by these ideas to construct an intellectual theory of the universe. [675]
Aristotle will reverse this process. He will commence with sensation, and proceed, by induction, from the known to the unknown.
The repetition of sensations produces recollection, recollection experience, and experience produces science. [676] "Science and art result unto men by means of experience...." "Art comes into being when, from a number of experiences, one universal opinion is evolved, which will embrace all similar cases. For example, if you know that a certain remedy has cured Callias of a certain disease, and that the same remedy has produced the same effect on Socrates and on several other persons, that is Experience; but to know that a certain remedy will cure all persons attacked with that disease, is Art. Experience is a knowledge of individual things (τῶν καθέκαστα); art is that of universals (τῶν καθόλου)." [677]
[Footnote 674: ][ (return) ] "Republic," bk. vi. ch. xx.
[Footnote 675: ][ (return) ] "Timæus," ch. ix.
[Footnote 676: ][ (return) ] "Metaphysics," bk. i. ch. i.
Disregarding the Platonic notion of the unity of all Being in the absolute idea, he fixed his immediate attention on the manifoldness of the phenomenal, and by a classification of all the objects of experience he sought to attain to "general notions." Concentrating all his attention on the individual, the contingent, the particular, he ascends, by induction, from the particular to the general; and then, by a strange paralogism, "the universal" is confounded with "the general" or, by a species of logical sleight-of-hand, the general is transmuted into the universal. Thus "induction is the pathway from particulars to universals." [678] But how universal and necessary principles can be obtained by a generalization of limited experiences is not explained by Aristotle. The experiences of a lifetime, the experiences of the whole race, are finite and limited, and a generalization of these can only give the finite, the limited, and at most, the general, but not the universal.