The suggestions of Aristotle for the education of his citizens are far less copious and circumstantial than those of Plato in his Republic. He delivers no plan of study, no arrangement of sciences to be successively communicated, no reasons for preferring or rejecting. We do not know what it was precisely which Aristotle comprehended in the term “philosophy,� intended by him to be taught to his citizens as an aid for the proper employment of their leisure. It must probably have included the moral, political, and metaphysical sciences, as they were then known — those sciences to which his own voluminous works relate.
By means of the public table, supplied from the produce of the public lands, Aristotle provides for the full subsistence of every citizen. Yet he is well aware that the citizens will be likely to increase in numbers too rapidly, and he suggests very efficient precautions against it. No child at all deformed or imperfect in frame is to be brought up: children beyond a convenient number, if born, are to be exposed: but should the law of the State forbid such a practice, care must be taken to forestall consciousness and life in them, and to prevent their birth by ἄμβλωσις (vii. 14. 10).
Aristotle establishes two agora in his city: one situated near to the harbour, adapted to the buying, selling, and storing of goods, under the surveillance of the agoranomus: the other called the free agora, situated in the upper parts of the city, set apart for the amusement and conversation of the citizens, and never defiled by the introduction of any commodities for sale. No artisan or husbandman is ever to enter the latter unless by special order from the authorities. The temples of the Gods, the residences of the various boards of government functionaries, the gymnasia of the older citizens, are all to be erected in this free agora (vii. 11). The Thessalian cities had an agora of this description where no traffic or common occupations were permitted.
The moral tendency of Aristotle’s reflections is almost always useful and elevating. The intimate union which he formally recognizes and perpetually proclaims between happiness and virtue, is salutary and instructive: and his ideas of what virtue is, are perfectly just, so far as relates to the conduct of his citizens towards each other: though they are miserably defective as regards obligation towards non-citizens. He always assigns the proper pre-eminence to wisdom and virtue: he never overvalues the advantages of riches, nor deems them entitled on their own account, to any reverence or submission: he allows no title to the obedience of mankind, except that which arises from superior power and disposition to serve them. Superior power and station, as he considers them, involve a series of troubles — some obligations which render them objects of desire only to men of virtue and beneficence. What is more rare and more creditable still, he treats all views of conquest and aggrandizement by a State as immoral and injurious, even to the conquerors themselves.
APPENDIX.
[I.]
THE DOCTRINE OF UNIVERSALS.
The controversy respecting Universals first obtained its place in philosophy from the colloquies of Sokrates, and the writings and teachings of Plato. We need not here touch upon their predecessors, Parmenides and Herakleitus, who, in a confused and unsystematic manner, approached this question from opposite sides, and whose speculations worked much upon the mind of Plato in determining both his aggressive dialectic, and his constructive theories. Parmenides of Elea, improving upon the ruder conceptions of Xenophanes, was the first to give emphatic proclamation to the celebrated Eleatic doctrine, Absolute Ens as opposed to Relative Fientia: i.e. the Cogitable, which Parmenides conceived as the One and All of reality, ἓν καὶ πᾶν, enduring and unchangeable, of which the negative was unmeaning, — and the Sensible or Perceivable, which was in perpetual change, succession and multiplicity, without either unity, or reality, or endurance. To the last of these two departments Herakleitus assigned especial prominence. In place of the permanent underlying Ens, which he did not recognize, he substituted a cogitable process of change, or generalized concept of what was common to all the successive phases of change — a perpetual stream of generation and destruction, or implication of contraries, in which everything appeared only that it might disappear, without endurance or uniformity. In this doctrine of Herakleitus, the world of sense and particulars could not be the object either of certain knowledge or even of correct probable opinion; in that of Parmenides, it was recognized as an object of probable opinion, though not of certain knowledge. But in both doctrines, as well as in the theories of Demokritus, it was degraded, and presented as incapable of yielding satisfaction to the search of a philosophizing mind, which could find neither truth nor reality except in the world of Concepts and Cogitables.
Besides the two theories above-mentioned, there were current in the Hellenic world, before the maturity of Sokrates, several other veins of speculation about the Kosmos, totally divergent one from the other, and by that very divergence sometimes stimulating curiosity, sometimes discouraging all study as though the problems were hopeless. But Parmenides and Herakleitus, together with the arithmetical and geometrical hypotheses of the Pythagoreans, are expressly noticed by Aristotle as having specially contributed to form the philosophy of Plato.