Politics he considered an inseparable part of ethics, and the state as the copy of a well-regulated individual life: from the three different activities of the soul he deduced the three main elements of the state, likening the working class to the appetitive element of the soul, both of which equally require to be kept under control; the military order, which answered, in his idea, to the emotive element, ought to develop itself in thorough dependence on the reason; and from that the governing order, answering to the rational faculty, must proceed. The right of passing from a subordinate to a dominant position must depend on the individual capacity and ability for raising itself. But from the difficulties of realizing his theories, he renounces this absolute separation of ranks in his book on Laws, limits the power of the governors, attempts to [pg xx] reconcile freedom with unity and reason, and to mingle monarchy with democracy.
With respect to his theology, he appears to have agreed entirely with Socrates.
Aristotle was born at Stageira, b.c. 384. His father, Nicomachus, was physician to Amyntas II., king of Macedon. At the age of seventeen he went to Athens, in hopes to become a pupil of Plato; but Plato was in Sicily, and did not return for three years, which time Aristotle applied to severe study, and to cultivating the friendship of Heraclides Ponticus. When Plato returned, he soon distinguished him above all his other pupils. He remained at Athens twenty years, maintaining, however, his connexion with Macedonia; but on the death of Plato, b.c. 347, which happened while Aristotle was absent in Macedonia on an embassy, he quitted Athens, thinking, perhaps, that travelling was necessary to complete his education. After a short period, he accepted an invitation from Philip to superintend the education of Alexander. He remained in Macedonia till b.c. 335, when he returned to Athens, where he found Xenocrates had succeeded Speusippus as the head of the Academy. Here the Lyceum was appropriated to him, in the shady walks (περίπατοι) of which he delivered his lectures to a number of eminent scholars who flocked around him. From these walks the name of Peripatetic was given to the School which he subsequently established. Like several others of the Greek philosophers, he had a select body of pupils, to whom he delivered his esoteric doctrines; and a larger, more promiscuous, and less accomplished company, to whom he delivered his exoteric lectures on less abstruse subjects. When he had resided thirteen years at Athens, he found himself threatened with a prosecution for impiety, and fled to Chalcis, in Eubœa, and died soon after, b.c. 322.
His learning was immense, and his most voluminous writings embraced almost every subject conceivable; but only a very small portion of them has come down to us. Cicero, however, alludes to him only as a moral philosopher, and occasionally as a natural historian; so that it may be [pg xxi] sufficient here for us to confine our view of him to his teaching on the Practical Sciences; his Ethics, too, being one of his works which has come down to us entire.
God he considered to be the highest and purest energy of eternal intellect,—an absolute principle,—the highest reason, the object of whose thought is himself; expanding and declaring, in a more profound manner, the νοῦς of Anaxagoras. With respect to man, the object of all action, he taught, was happiness: and this happiness he defines to be an energy of the soul (or of life) according to virtue, existing by and for itself. Virtue, again, he subdivided into moral and intellectual, according to the distinction between the reasoning faculty and that quality in the soul which obeys reason. Again, moral virtue is the proper medium between excess and deficiency, and can only be acquired by practice; intellectual virtue can be taught; and by the constant practice of moral virtue a man becomes virtuous, but he can only practise it by a resolute determination to do so. Virtue, therefore, is defined further as a habit accompanied by, or arising out of, deliberate choice, and based upon free and conscious action. From these principles, Aristotle is led to take a wider view of virtue than other philosophers: he includes friendship under this head, as one of the very greatest virtues, and a principal means for a steady continuance in all virtue; and as the unrestricted exercise of each species of activity directed towards the good, produces a feeling of pleasure, he considers pleasure as a very powerful means of virtue.
Connected with Aristotle's system of ethics was his system of politics, the former being only a part, as it were, of the latter; the former aiming at the happiness of individuals, the latter at that of communities; so that the latter is the perfection and completion of the former. For Aristotle looked upon man as a “political animal”—as a being, that is, created by nature for the state, and for living in the state; which, as a totality consisting of organically connected members, is by nature prior to the individual or the family. The state he looked upon as a whole consisting of mutually dependent and [pg xxii] connected members, with reference as well to imaginary as to actually existing constitutions. The constitution is the arrangement of the powers in the state—the soul of the state, as it were,—according to which the sovereignty is determined. The laws are the determining principles, according to which the dominant body governs and restrains those who would, and punishes those who do, transgress them. He defines three kinds of constitutions, each of them having a corresponding perversion:—a republic, arising from the principle of equality; this at times degenerates into democracy; monarchy, and aristocracy, which arise from principles of inequality, founded on the preponderance of external or internal strength and wealth, and which are apt to degenerate into tyranny and oligarchy. The education of youth he considers as a principal concern of the state, in order that, all the individual citizens being trained to a virtuous life, virtue may become predominant in all the spheres of political life; and, accordingly, by means of politics the object is realized of which ethics are the groundwork, namely, human happiness, depending on a life in accordance with virtue.
Heraclides Ponticus, as he is usually called, was, as his name denotes, a native of Pontus. He migrated to Athens, where he became a disciple of Plato, who, while absent in Sicily, entrusted him with the care of his school.
Speusippus was the nephew of Plato, and succeeded him as President of the Academy; but he continued so but a short time, and, within eight years of the death of Plato, he died at Athens, b.c. 339. He refused to recognise the Good as the ultimate principle; but, going back to the older theologians, maintained that the origin of the universe was to be set down indeed as a cause of the Good and Perfect, but was not the Good and Perfect itself; for that was the result of generated existence or development, just as plants are of the seeds. When, with the Pythagoreans, he reckoned the One in the series of good things, he probably thought of it only in opposition to the Manifold, and wished to point out that it is from the One that the Good is to be derived. He appears, however, (see De Nat. Deor. i. 13,) to have attributed vital [pg xxiii] activity to the primordial unity, as inseparably belonging to it.
Theophrastus was a native of Eresus, from whence he migrated to Athens, where he became a follower of Plato, and afterwards of Aristotle, by whom, when he quitted Athens for Chalcis, he was designated as his successor in the presidency of the Lyceum; while in this position, he is said to have had two thousand disciples, and among them the comic poet Menander. When, b.c. 305, the philosophers were banished from Athens, he also left the city, but returned the next year on the repeal of the law. He lived to a great age, though the date of his birth is not certainly known.
He was a very voluminous writer on many subjects, but directed his chief attention to continuing the researches into natural history which had been begun by Aristotle. As, however, only a few fragments of his works have come down to us, and these in a very corrupt state, we know but little what peculiar views he entertained; though we learn from Cicero (De Inv. i. 42-50) that he departed a good deal from the doctrines of Aristotle in his principles of ethics, and also in his metaphysical and theological speculations; and Cicero (De Nat. Deor. i. 13) complains that he did not express himself with precision or with consistency about the Deity; and in other places (Acad. i. 10, Tusc. Quæst. v. 9), that he appeared unable to comprehend a happiness resting merely on virtue; so that he had attributed to virtue a rank very inferior to its deserts.