So the whole range, we might say the whole conceivable range, of biological science is sketched out, and the greater part of the great canvas is painted in. But to bring it into touch with human life, and to make good its claim to the high places of philosophy, we must go yet farther and study Life itself, and what men call the Soul. So grows the great conception. We begin with trivial anecdote, with the things that fisherman, huntsman, peasant know; the sciences of zoology, anatomy, physiology take shape before our very eyes; and by evening we sit humbly at the feet of the great teacher of Life itself, the historian of the Soul. It is not for us to attempt to show that even here the story does not end, but the highest chapters of philosophy begin. Then, when we remember that this short narrative of ours is but the faintest adumbration of one side only of the philosopher’s many-sided task and enterprise, we begin to rise towards a comprehension of Roger Bacon‘s saying, that ‘although Aristotle did not arrive at the end of knowledge, he set in order all parts of philosophy’. In the same spirit a modern critic declares: ‘Il n’a seulement défini et constitué chacune des parties de la science; il en a de plus montré le lien et l’unité’.
Aristotle, like Shakespeare, is full of old saws, tags of wisdom, jewels five words long. Here is such a one, good for teacher and pupil alike—Δει πιστευειν τον μανθανοντα. It tells us that the road to Learning lies through Faith; and it means that to be a scholar one should have a heart as well as brains.
By reason partly of extraneous interpolation, but doubtless also through a lingering credulity from which even philosophers are not immune, we find in Aristotle many a strange story. The goats that breathe through their ears, the vulture impregnated by the wind, the eagle that dies of hunger, the stag caught by music, the salamander which walks through fire, the unicorn, the mantichore, are but a few of the ‘Vulgar Errors’ or ‘Received Tenents’ (as Sir Thomas Browne has it) which are perpetuated, not originated, in the Historia Animalium. Some of them come, through Persia, from the farther East: and others (we meet with them once more in Horapollo the Egyptian priest) are but the exoteric or allegorical expression of the arcana of ancient Egyptian religion.
So it comes to pass that for two thousand years and throughout all lands men have come to Aristotle, and found in him information and instruction—that which they desired. Arab and Moor and Syrian and Jew treasured his books while the western world sat in darkness; the great centuries of Scholasticism hung upon his words; the oldest of our Universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, were based upon his teaching, yea, all but established for his study. Where he has been, there, seen or unseen, his influence remains; even the Moor and the Arab find in him, to this day, a teacher after their own hearts: a teacher of eternal verities, telling of sleep and dreams, of youth and age, of life and death, of generation and corruption, of growth and of decay: a guide to the book of Nature, a revealer of the Spirit, a prophet of the works of God.
The purpose of these little essays, I have been told (though I had half forgotten it), is to help though ever so little to defend and justify the study of the language and the vast literature of Greece. It is a task for which I am unfitted and unprepared. When Oliver Goldsmith proposed to teach Greek at Leyden, where he ‘had been told it was a desideratum’, the Principal of that celebrated University met him (as we all know) with weighty objections. ‘I never learned Greek’, said the Principal, ‘and I don’t find that I have ever missed it. I have had a Doctor’s cap and gown without Greek. I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; and, in short’, continued he, ‘as I don’t know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.’—I have heard or read the story again and again, for is it not written in the Vicar of Wakefield? But I never heard that any man, not Goldsmith himself, attempted to confute the argument. I agree for the most part with the Principal, and can see clearly that all the Greek that Goldsmith knew, and all the Greek in all the world, would have meant nothing and done nothing for him. But there is and will be many another who finds in Greek wisdom and sweet Hellenic speech something which he needs must have, and lacking which he would be poor indeed: something which is as a staff in his hand, a light upon his path, a lantern to his feet.
In this workaday world we may still easily possess ourselves, as Gibbon says the subjects of the Byzantine Throne, even in their lowest servitude and depression, were still possessed, ‘of a golden key that could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical and prolific language that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy’.
Our very lives seem prolonged by the recollection of antiquity; for, as Cicero says, not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. I borrow the citation from Dr. Johnson, who reminds us also of a saying of Aristotle himself, that as students we ought first to examine and understand what has been written by the ancients, and then cast our eyes round upon the world. And Johnson prefaces both quotations by another:
Tibi res antiquae laudis et artis
ingredior, sanctos ausus recludere fontes.
But now I, who have dared to draw my tiny draft from Aristotle’s great well, seem after all to be seeking an excuse, seeking it in example and precept. Precept, at least, I know to be of no avail. My father spent all the many days of his life in the study of Greek; you might suppose it was for Wisdom’s sake,—but my father was a modest man. The fact is, he did it for a simpler reason still, a very curious reason, to be whispered rather than told: he did it for love.
Nigh forty years ago, I first stepped out on the east-windy streets of a certain lean and hungry town (lean, I mean, as regards scholarship) where it was to be my lot to spend thereafter many and many a year. And the very first thing I saw there was an inscription over a very humble doorway, ‘Hic mecum habitant Dante, Cervantes, Molière’. It was the home of a poor schoolmaster, who as a teacher of languages eked out the scanty profits of his school. I was not a little comforted by the announcement. So the poor scholar, looking on the ragged regiment of his few books, is helped, consoled, exalted by the reflection: Hic mecum habitant ... Homerus, Plato, Aristoteles. And were one in a moment of inadvertence to inquire of him why he occupied himself with Greek, he might perchance stammer (like Dominie Sampson) an almost inarticulate reply; but more probably he would be stricken speechless by the enormous outrage of the request, and the reason of his devotion would be hidden from the questioner for ever.