Aristotle
music more difficult of execution had been recently introduced into
the agones, and had found its way from the agones into the ordinary
education. He decidedly disapproves and excludes it (viii. 6. 4). He
forbids both the flute and the harp, and every other instrument
requiring much art to play upon it: especially the flute, which he
considers as not ethical, but orgiastical--calculated to excite
violent and momentary emotions. The flute obtained a footing in
Greece after the Persian invasion; in Athens at that time it became
especially fashionable; but was discontinued afterwards (Plutarch
alleges, through the influence of Alcibiades).
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 [Greek: a)/mblôsis] (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.
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,
[Greek: e(\n kai\ pa=n], 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.
Neither Parmenides, nor Herakleitus, nor the Pythagoreans were
dialecticians. They gave out their own thoughts in their own way,
with little or no regard to dissentients. They did not cultivate the
art of argumentative attack or defence, nor the correct application
and diversified confrontation of universal terms, which are the great
instruments of that art. It was Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides,
that first employed dialectic in support of his master's theory, or
rather against the counter-theories of opponents. He showed by
arguments memorable for their subtlety, that the hypothesis of an
Absolute, composed of Entia Plura Discontinua, led to consequences
even more absurd than those that opponents deduced from the
Parmenidean hypothesis of Ens Unum Continuum. The dialectic, thus
inaugurated by Zeno, reached still higher perfection in the
colloquies of Sokrates; who not only employed a new method, but also
introduced new topics of debate--ethical, political, and social
matters instead of physical things and the Kosmos.
The peculiar originality of Sokrates is well known: a man who wrote
nothing, but passed his life in indiscriminate colloquy with every
one; who professed to have no knowledge himself, but interrogated
others on matters that they talked about familiarly and professed to
know well; whose colloquies generally ended by puzzling the
respondents, and by proving to themselves that they neither knew nor
could explain even matters that they had begun by affirming
confidently as too clear to need explanation. Aristotle tells us[1]
that Sokrates was the first that set himself expressly and
methodically to scrutinize the definitions of general or universal
terms, and to confront them, not merely with each other, but also, by
a sort of inductive process, with many particular cases that were, or
appeared to be, included under them. And both Xenophon and Plato give
us abundant examples of the terms to which Sokrates applied his
interrogatories: What is the Holy? What is the Unholy? What is the
Beautiful or Honourable? What is the Ugly or Base? What is
Justice--Injustice--Temperance--Madness--Courage--Cowardice--A City--A
man fit for civil life? What is the Command of Men? What is the
character fit for commanding men? Such are the specimens, furnished
by a hearer,[2] of the universal terms whereon the interrogatories of
Sokrates bore. All of them were terms spoken and heard familiarly by
citizens in the market-place, as if each understood them perfectly;
but when Sokrates, professing his own ignorance, put questions asking
for solutions of difficulties that perplexed his own mind, the answers
showed that these difficulties were equally insoluble by respondents,
who had never thought of them before. The confident persuasion of
knowledge, with which the colloquy began, stood exposed as a false
persuasion without any basis of reality. Such illusory semblance of
knowledge was proclaimed by Sokrates to be the chronic, though
unconscious, intellectual condition of his contemporaries. How he
undertook, as the mission of a long life, to expose it, is
impressively set forth in the Platonic Apology.
[Footnote 1: Metaphysica, A. p. 987, b. 2; M. p. 1078, b. 18.]
[Footnote 2: Xenophon Memorab. I. i. 16; IV. vi. 1-13.]
It was thus by Sokrates that the meaning of universal terms and
universal propositions, and the relation of each respectively to
particular terms and particular propositions were first made a
subject of express enquiry and analytical interrogation. His
influence was powerful in imparting the same dialectical impulse to
several companions; but most of all to Plato, who not only enlarged
and amplified the range of Sokratic enquiry, but also brought the
meaning of universal terms into something like system and theory, as
a portion of the conditions of trustworthy science. Plato was the
first to affirm the doctrine afterwards called Realism, as the
fundamental postulate of all true and proved cognition. He affirmed
it boldly, and in its most extended sense, though he also produces
(according to his frequent practice) many powerful arguments and
unsolved objections against it. It was he (to use the striking phrase
of Milton[3]) that first imported into the schools the portent of
Realism. The doctrine has been since opposed, confuted, curtailed,
transformed, diversified in many ways; but it has maintained its
place in logical speculation, and has remained, under one phraseology
or another, the creed of various philosophers, from that time down to
the present.
[Footnote 3: See the Latin verses 'De Ideâ Platonicâ quemadmodum
Aristoteles intellexit'--
"At tu, perenne ruris Academi decus,
Hæc monstra si tu primus induxti scholis," &c.]
The following account of the problems of Realism was handed down to
the speculations of the mediæval philosophers by Porphyry (between
270-300 A.D.), in his Introduction to the treatise of Aristotle on
the Categories. After informing Chrysaorius that he will prepare for
him a concise statement of the doctrines of the old philosophers
respecting Genus, Differentia, Species, Proprium, Accidens,
"abstaining from the deeper enquiries, but giving suitable
development to the more simple,"--Porphyry thus proceeds:--"For
example, I shall decline discussing, in respect to Genera and
Species, (1) Whether they have a substantive existence, or reside
merely in naked mental conceptions; (2) Whether, assuming them to
have substantive existence, they are bodies or incorporeals; (3)