TWO:It is remarkable that while Spinoza was giving a new application to the Platonic method, another Cartesian,414 Malebranche, was working it out more strictly on the old lines of speculative research. The Recherche de la V��rit�� of this unjustly neglected thinker is a methodical account of the various subjective obstacles which impede our apprehension of things as they really exist, and of the means by which it may be facilitated. Here also, attention is concentrated on the subjective side of philosophy; and if the mental processes selected for study are of theoretical rather than practical interest, we may probably attribute this to the circumstance that every ethical question was already decided for Malebranche by the Church whose orders he had assumed.

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TWO:We have seen how Plato came to look on mathematics as217 an introduction to absolute knowledge. He now discovered a parallel method of approach towards perfect wisdom in an order of experience which to most persons might seem as far as possible removed from exact science��in those passionate feelings which were excited in the Greek imagination by the spectacle of youthful beauty, without distinction of sex. There was, at least among the Athenians, a strong intellectual element in the attachments arising out of such feelings; and the strange anomaly might often be seen of a man devoting himself to the education of a youth whom he was, in other respects, doing his utmost to corrupt. Again, the beauty by which a Greek felt most fascinated came nearer to a visible embodiment of mind than any that has ever been known, and as such could be associated with the purest philosophical aspirations. And, finally, the passion of love in its normal manifestations is an essentially generic instinct, being that which carries an individual most entirely out of himself, making him instrumental to the preservation of the race in forms of ever-increasing comeliness and vigour; so that, given a wise training and a wide experience, the maintenance of a noble breed may safely be entrusted to its infallible selection.134 All these points of view have been developed by Plato with such copiousness of illustration and splendour of language that his name is still associated in popular fancy with an ideal of exalted and purified desire.

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TWO: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 Goethe��s 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 Aristotle��s 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 survive��he334 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.

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