Considered as a mechanical agent, a hammer concentrates the power of the arms, and applies it in a manner that meets the requirements of various purposes. If great force is required, a long swing and slow blows accomplish tons; if but little force is required, a short swing and rapid blows will servethe degree of force being not only continually at control, but also the direction in which it is applied. Other mechanism, if employed instead of hammers to perform a similar purpose, would require to be complicated [104] machines, and act in but one direction or in one plane.
The teleology of Aristotle requires a word of explanation, which may appropriately find its place in the present connexion. In speaking of a purpose in Nature, he does not mean that natural productions subserve an end lying outside themselves; as if, to use Goethes illustration, the bark of cork-trees was intended to be made into stoppers for ginger-beer bottles; but that in every perfect thing the parts are interdependent, and exist for the sake of the whole to which they belong. Nor does he, like so many theologians, both ancient and modern, argue from the evidence of design in Nature to the operation of a designing intelligence outside her. Not believing in any creation at all apart from works of art, he could not believe in a creative intelligence other than that of man. He does, indeed, constantly speak of Nature as if she were a personal providence, continually exerting herself for the good of her creatures. But, on looking a little closer, we find that the agency in question is completely unconscious, and may be identified with the constitution of each particular thing, or rather of the type to which it belongs. We have said that Aristotles intellect was essentially descriptive, and we have here another illustration of its characteristic quality.333 The teleology which he parades with so much pomp adds nothing to our knowledge of causes, implies nothing that a positivist need not readily accept. It is a mere study of functions, an analysis of statical relations. Of course, if there were really any philosophers who said that the connexion between teeth and mastication was entirely accidental, the Aristotelian doctrine was a useful protest against such an absurdity; but when we have established a fixed connexion between organ and function, we are bound to explain the association in some more satisfactory manner than by reaffirming it in general terms, which is all that Aristotle ever does. Again, whatever may be the relative justification of teleology as a study of functions in the living body, we have no grounds for interpreting the phenomena of inorganic nature on an analogous principle. Some Greek philosophers were acute enough to perceive the distinction. While admitting that plants and animals showed traces of design, they held that the heavenly bodies arose spontaneously from the movements of a vortex or some such cause;222 just as certain religious savants of our own day reject the Darwinian theory while accepting the nebular hypothesis.223 But to Aristotle the unbroken regularity of the celestial movements, which to us is the best proof of their purely mechanical nature, was, on the contrary, a proof that they were produced and directed by an absolutely reasonable purpose; much more so indeed than terrestrial organisms, marked as these are by occasional deviations and imperfections; and he concludes that each of those movements must be directed towards the attainment of some correspondingly consummate end;224 while, again, in dealing with those precursors of Mr. Darwin, if such they can be called, who argued that the utility of an organ does not disprove its spontaneous origin, since only the creatures which, by a happy accident, came to possess it would survivehe334 answers that the constant reproduction of such organs is enough to vindicate them from being the work of chance;225 thus displaying his inability to distinguish between the two ideas of uniform causation and design.That lets me snap right down to my plan. Now we dont know where those emeralds are. We dont know which people used the seaplane, or whether the man who jumped has them and has gotten away or not. But if I should fade out of sight, and no one but my dependable Sky Patrol knows Im around
ONE:To get rid of superstitious beliefs was, no doubt, a highly meritorious achievement, but it had been far more effectually57 performed by the great pre-Socratic thinkers, Heracleitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus. These men or their followers had, besides, got hold of a most important principlethe vital principle of all sciencewhich was the reign of law, the universality and indefeasibility of physical causation. Now, Epicurus expressly refused to accept such a doctrine, declaring that it was even worse than believing in the gods, since they could be propitiated, whereas fate could not.119 Again, Greek physical philosophy, under the guidance of Plato, had been tending more and more to seek for its foundation in mathematics. Mathematical reasoning was seen to be the type of all demonstration; and the best hopes of progress were staked on the extension of mathematical methods to every field of enquiry in turn. How much might be done by following up this clue was quickly seen not only in the triumphs of geometry, but in the brilliant astronomical discoveries by which the shape of the earth, the phases of the moon, and the cause of eclipses were finally cleared up and placed altogether outside the sphere of conjecture. Nor was a knowledge of these truths confined to specialists: they were familiar alike to the older Academy, to the Peripatetic, and to the Stoic schools; so that, with the exception of those who doubted every proposition, we may assume them to have been then, as now, the common property of all educated men. Epicurus, on the other hand, seems to have known nothing of mathematics, or only enough to dispute their validity, for we are told that his disciple Polyaenus, who had previously been eminent in that department, was persuaded, on joining the school, to reject the whole of geometry as untrue;120 while, in astronomy, he pronounced the heavenly bodies to be no larger than they appear to our senses, denied the existence of Antipodes, and put the crudest guesses of early philosophy on the same footing with the best-authenticated results of later observation. It is no wonder, then, that during the whole58 continuance of his school no man of science ever accepted its teaching, with the single exception of Asclepiades, who was perhaps a Democritean rather than a disciple of the Garden, and who, at any rate, as a physiologist, would not be brought into contact with its more flagrant absurdities.His face slowly changed, gradually became red.
TWO:Hetty nodded absently; in society parlance Lady Longmere had taken Hetty up. Since the night of the card party at Lytton Avenue, when her ladyship had foresworn cards for good and all, she had seen a good deal of Hetty. And she was one of the few who stuck loyally to Bruce.
THREE:They told this, while we were waiting on a couple of protruding boards of the pontoon-bridge, so as to allow some extremely wide carts to pass. Once again shells exploded, a couple of hundred yards behind us, and one made a hole in the bank quite near."Nearly half a million from first to last. I ought to know, for it was I who added those fresh papers to the original deeds and forged those reports of the prosperity of the mine. Maitrank seemed quite satisfied till yesterday. Then he made a great discovery. It was an unfortunate discovery and a cruel piece of luck for you."
TWO:Be this as it may, we venture to hope that a principle has154 been here suggested deep and strong enough to reunite the two halves into which historians have hitherto divided the Socratic system, or, rather, the beginning of that universal systematisation called philosophy, which is not yet, and perhaps never will be, completed; a principle which is outwardly revealed in the character of the philosopher himself. With such an one, ethics and dialectics become almost indistinguishable through the intermixture of their processes and the parallelism of their aims. Integrity of conviction enters, both as a means and as an element, into perfect integrity of conduct, nor can it be maintained where any other element of rectitude is wanting. Clearness, consecutiveness, and coherence are the morality of belief; while temperance, justice, and beneficence, taken in their widest sense and taken together, constitute the supreme logic of life.
TWO:Be this as it may, Spinoza takes up the Aristotelian identification of logical with dynamical connexion, and gives it the widest possible development. For the Stagirite would not, at any rate, have dreamed of attributing any but a subjective existence to the demonstrative series, nor of extending it beyond the limits of our actual knowledge. Spinoza, on the other hand, assumes that the whole infinite chain of material causes is represented by a corresponding chain of eternal ideas; and this chain he calls the infinite intellect of God.566 Here, besides the necessities of systematisation, the411 influence of mediaeval realism is plainly evident. For, when the absolute self-existence of Platos Ideas had been surrendered in deference to Aristotles criticism, a home was still found for them by Plotinus in the eternal Nous, and by the Christian Schoolmen in the mind of God; nor did such a belief present any difficulties so long as the divine personality was respected. The pantheism of Spinoza, however, was absolute, and excluded the notion of any but a finite subjectivity. Thus the infinite intellect of God is an unsupported chain of ideas recalling the theory at one time imagined by Plato.567 Or its existence may be merely what Aristotle would have called potential; in other words, Spinoza may mean that reasons will go on evolving themselves so long as we choose to study the dialectic of existence, always in strict parallelism with the natural series of material movements constituting the external universe; and just as this is determined through all its parts by the totality of extension, or of all matter (whether moving or motionless) taken together, so also at the summit of the logical series stands the idea of God, from whose definition the demonstration of every lesser idea necessarily follows. It is true that in a chain of connected energies the antecedent, as such, must be always precisely equal to the consequent; but, apparently, this difficulty did not present itself to Spinoza, nor need we be surprised at this; for Kant, coming a century later, was still so imbued with Aristotelian traditions as, similarly, to derive the category of Cause and Effect from the relation between Reason and Consequent in hypothetical propositions.568The evolution of Greek tragic poetry bears witness to the same transformation of taste. On comparing Sophocles with Aeschylus, we are struck by a change of tone analogous to that which distinguishes Thucydides from Herodotus. It has been shown in our first chapter how the elder dramatist delights in tracing events and institutions back to their first origin, and in following derivations through the steps of a genealogical sequence. Sophocles, on the other hand, limits himself to a close analysis of the action immediately represented, the motives by which his characters are in91fluenced, and the arguments by which their conduct is justified or condemned. We have already touched on the very different attitude assumed towards religion by these two great poets. Here we have only to add that while Aeschylus fills his dramas with supernatural beings, and frequently restricts his mortal actors to the interpretation or execution of a divine mandate, Sophocles, representing the spirit of Greek Humanism, only once brings a god on the stage, and dwells exclusively on the emotions of pride, ambition, revenge, terror, pity, and affection, by which men and women of a lofty type are actuated. Again (and this is one of his poetic superiorities), Aeschylus has an open sense for the external world; his imagination ranges far and wide from land to land; his pages are filled with the fire and light, the music and movement of Nature in a Southern country. He leads before us in splendid procession the starry-kirtled night; the bright rulers that bring round winter and summer; the dazzling sunshine; the forked flashes of lightning; the roaring thunder; the white-winged snow-flakes; the rain descending on thirsty flowers; the sea now rippling with infinite laughter, now moaning on the shingle, growing hoary under rough blasts, with its eastern waves dashing against the new-risen sun, or, again, lulled to waveless, windless, noonday sleep; the volcano with its volleys of fire-breathing spray and fierce jaws of devouring lava; the eddying whorls of dust; the resistless mountain-torrent; the meadow-dews; the flowers of spring and fruits of summer; the evergreen olive, and trees that give leafy shelter from dogstar heat. For all this world of wonder and beauty Sophocles offers only a few meagre allusions to the phenomena presented by sunshine and storm. No poet has ever so entirely concentrated his attention on human deeds and human passions. Only the grove of Col?nus, interwoven with his own earliest recollections, had power to draw from him, in extreme old age, a song such as the nightingale might have warbled amid those92 inviolable recesses where the ivy and laurel, the vine and olive gave a never-failing shelter against sun and wind alike. Yet even this leafy covert is but an image of the poets own imagination, undisturbed by outward influences, self-involved, self-protected, and self-sustained. Of course, we are only restating in different language what has long been known, that the epic element of poetry, before so prominent, was with Sophocles entirely displaced by the dramatic; but if Sophocles became the greatest dramatist of antiquity, it was precisely because no other writer could, like him, work out a catastrophe solely through the action of mind on mind, without any intervention of physical force; and if he possessed this faculty, it was because Greek thought as a whole had been turned inward; because he shared in the devotion to psychological studies equally exemplified by his younger contemporaries, Protagoras, Thucydides, and Socrates, all of whom might have taken for their motto the noble lines
"To listen to your story," said Lawrence.When we next hear of Aristotle he is at the Macedonian285 Court,174 acting as tutor to Alexander, the future conqueror of Asia, who remained under his charge between the ages of thirteen and sixteen years. The philosopher is more likely to have obtained this appointment by Court interesthis father was Court-physician to Alexanders grandfather, Amyntasthan by his reputation, which could hardly have been made until several years afterwards. Much has been made of a connexion which, although it did not last very long, appeals strongly to the imagination, and opens a large field for surmise. The greatest speculative and the greatest practical genius of that agesome might say of all agescould not, one would think, come into such close contact without leaving a deep impression on each other. Accordingly, the philosopher is supposed to have prepared the hero for his future destinies. Milton has told us how Aristotle bred great Alexander to subdue the world. Hegel tells us that this was done by giving him the consciousness of himself, the full assurance of his own powers; for which purpose, it seems, the infinite daring of thought was required; and he observes that the result is a refutation of the silly talk about the practical inutility of philosophy.175 It would be unfortunate if philosophy had no better testimonial to show for herself than the character of Alexander. It is not the least merit of Grotes History to have brought out in full relief the savage traits by which his conduct was marked from first to last. Arrogant, drunken, cruel, vindictive, and grossly superstitious, he united the vices of a Highland chieftain to the frenzy of an Oriental despot. No man ever stood further from the gravity, the gentleness, the moderationin a word, the S?phrosyn of a true Hellenic hero. The time came when Aristotle himself would have run the most imminent personal risk had he been within the tyrants immediate grasp. His286 nephew, Callisthenes, had incurred deep displeasure by protesting against the servile adulation, or rather idolatry, which Alexander exacted from his attendants. A charge of conspiracy was trumped up against him, and even the exculpatory evidence, taken under torture, of his alleged accomplices did not save him. I will punish the sophist, wrote Alexander, and those who sent him out. It was understood that his old tutor was included in the threat. Fortunately, as Grote observes, Aristotle was not at Ecbatana but at Athens; he therefore escaped the fate of Callisthenes, who suffered death in circumstances, according to some accounts, of great atrocity.A good many refugees were on their way to The Netherlands, but the bulk of the crowd had passed before my visit along the long road which I walked now in the opposite direction. I did not arrive in210 Antwerp before nightfall and was then very tired. The town was dark, dismal, and deserted, and only German soldiers went about in the streets, apparently looking in vain for a shop or caf where they might find some diversion. I myself, exhausted by a walk of twenty-five miles, sauntered along, constantly looking for some place or other to pass the night. Not a shop or hotel was open, and yet my stomach was craving for food, my body for rest. At last I met a policeman and told him of my difficulty.Both increate and indestructible,The intricacy of the subject renders it a difficult one to deal with except by the aid of diagrams, and as such mechanism may be inspected in almost any machine fitting shop, attention is called to the subject as one of the best that can be chosen for demonstration by diagrams. Problems of these variable speed movements are not only of great interest, but have a practical importance not found in many better known problems which take up time uselessly and have no application in a practical way.We have here, also, the secret of that elaborate machinery devised for the very unnecessary purpose of converting syllogisms of the second and third figure into syllogisms of the first, which is one of the Stagirites principal contributions to logic. For it is only in the first figure that the notion by which the extremes are either united or held apart is really a middle term, that is to say, really comes between the others. The distinction between perfect and imperfect syllogisms also serves to illustrate Aristotles systematic division between the necessary and the contingent. The method of proof by inclusion corresponds in its unconditioned and independent validity to the concentric arrangement of the supernal spheres; the second and third figures, with their conversions and reductions, to the sublunary sphere in its helpless dependence on380 the celestial revolutions, and its transformations of the elements into one another.
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THREE:There still remained one form of government to be tried, the despotic rule of a single individual. In the course of his travels Plato came into contact with an able and powerful specimen of the tyrant class, the elder Dionysius. A number of stories relating to their intercourse have been preserved; but the different versions disagree very widely, and none of them can be entirely trusted. It seems certain, however, that Plato gave great offence to the tyrant by his freedom of speech, that he narrowly escaped death, and that he was sold into slavery, from which condition he was redeemed by the generosity of Anniceris, a Cyrenaean philosopher. It is supposed that the scathing description in which Plato has196 held up to everlasting infamy the unworthy possessor of absolute powera description long afterwards applied by Tacitus to the vilest of the Roman emperorswas suggested by the type which had come under his own observation in Sicily.Again, Hobbes differs wholly from Bacon in the deductive character of his method. His logic is the old syllogistic system reorganised on the model of mathematical analysis. Like all the great thinkers of his time, he was a geometrician and a mechanical physicist, reasoning from general to particular propositions and descending from causes to effects.554397 His famous theory of a social contract is a rational construction, not a historical narrative. But though a mathematician, he shows no traces of Platonic influence. He is, therefore, all the more governed by Atomist and Stoic modes of thought. He treats human nature, single and associated, as Galileo and Descartes had treated motion and space. Like them, too, he finds himself in constant antagonism to Aristotle. The description of man as a social animal is disdainfully rejected, and the political union resolved into an equilibrium of many opposing wills maintained by violent pressure from without. In ethics, no less than in physics, we find attractive forces replaced by mechanical impacts.
THREE:
