Aristotle 25 



is usually plain to baldness and very frequently obscure. We 

 find sometimes the lightening touch of humour, but the style 

 hardly ever rises to beauty. Furthermore, even in matters 

 of fact, while many observations exhibit wonderful insight and, 

 forestalling modern discovery, betray a most searching and care- 

 ful application of scientific methods, yet elsewhere we find errors 

 that are childish and could have been avoided by the merest tyro. 

 This curious state of the Aristotelian writings has given rise 

 to much discussion among scholars and to explain it there has 

 been developed what is known as the ' notebook theory '. 

 It is supposed that the bases of the material that we possess were 

 notebooks put together by Aristotle himself for his own use, 

 probably while lecturing. These passed, it is believed, into 

 the hands of certain of his pupils and were perhaps in places 

 incomprehensible as they stood. Such pupils, after the master s 

 death, filled out the notebooks either from the memory of his 

 teaching or from their own knowledge or ignorance. Thus 

 modified, however, they were still not prepared for publication, 

 even in the limited sense in which works may be said to have 

 been published in those days, but they formed again the fuller 

 bases of notes for lectures delivered by his successors. In this 

 form they have finally survived to our time, suffering, how- 

 ever, from certain further losses and displacements on a larger 

 scale. Some of the ' Aristotelian' works are undoubtedly more 

 deeply spurious, but the works that are regarded as * genuine ' 

 do not seem to have been seriously tampered with, except by 

 mere scribal or bookbinders' blunders, at any date later than 

 a generation or two following Aristotle's .own time. These 

 notebooks as they stand are in fact probably in much the 

 state in which we should find them were we able to retrieve a 

 copy dating from the first or second century B. c. 1 



1 The problem of genuineness is discussed in detail by R. Shute, On the 

 history of the process by which the Aristotelian writings arrived at their present 

 form, Oxford, 1888. 



