[Footnote 678: ][ (return) ] "Topics," bk. i. ch. xii.; "Ethics," bk. vi. ch. iii.
Aristotle admits, however, that there are ideas or principles in the mind which can not be explained by experience, and we are therefore entitled to an answer to the question--how are these obtained? "Sensible experience gives us what is here, there, now, in such and such a manner, but it is impossible for it to give what is everywhere and at all times." [680] He tells us further, that "science is a conception of the mind engaged in universals, and in those things which exist of necessity, and since there are principles of things demonstrable and of every science (for science is joined with reason), it will be neither science, nor art, nor prudence, which discovers the principles of science;... it must therefore be (νοῦς) pure intellect," or the intuitive reason. [681] He also characterizes these principles as self-evident. "First truths are those which obtain belief, not through others, but through themselves, as there is no necessity to investigate the 'why' in scientific principles, but each principle ought to be credible by itself." [682] They are also necessary and eternal. "Demonstrative science is from necessary principles, and those which are per se inherent, are necessarily so in things." [683] "We have all a conception of that which can not subsist otherwise than it does.... The object of science has a necessary existence, therefore it is eternal. For those things which exist in themselves, by necessity, are all eternal." [684] But whilst Aristotle admits that there are "immutable and first principles," [685] which are not derived from sense and experience--"principles which are the foundation of all science and demonstration, but which are themselves indemonstrable," [686] because self-evident, necessary, and eternal; yet he furnishes no proper account of their genesis and development in the human mind, neither does he attempt their enumeration. At one time he makes the intellect itself their source, at another he derives them from sense, experience, and induction. This is the defect, if not the inconsistency, of his method. [687]
[Footnote 680: ][ (return) ] "Post. Analytic," bk. i. ch. xxxi.
[Footnote 681: ][ (return) ] "Ethics," bk. vi. ch. vi.
[Footnote 682: ][ (return) ] "Topics," bk. i. ch. i.
[Footnote 683: ][ (return) ] "Post. Analytic," bk. i. ch. vi.
[Footnote 684: ][ (return) ] "Ethics," bk. vi. ch. iii.
[Footnote 685: ][ (return) ] Ibid., bk. vi. ch. xi.
[Footnote 686: ][ (return) ] "Post. Analytic," bk. i. ch. iii.
[Footnote 687: ][ (return) ] Hamilton attempts the following mode of reconciling the contradictory positions of Aristotle:
"On the supposition of the mind virtually containing, antecedent to all experience, certain universal principles of knowledge, in the form of certain necessities of thinking; still it is only by repeated and comparative experiments that we compass the certainty; on the one hand, that such and such cognitions can not but be thought as necessary, native generalities; and, on the other, that such and such cognitions may or may not be thought, and are, therefore, as contingent, factitious generalizations. To this process of experiment, analysis, and classification, through which we attain to a scientific knowledge of principles, it might be shown that Aristotle, not improperly, applies the term Induction."--"Philosophy," p. 88.