Chap. IX. ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. 157 



fuch as could not have been expeded from a man who had appli- 

 ed fo much to philofophy, and fuch as proves him, I think, to have 

 been a man of more univerfal knowledge, than perhaps any man 

 that ever exifted. 



The next w^ork of Ariftotle, I fhall mention, is his Natural Phi- 

 lofophy; in treating which, he has made a diftindion, that is not 

 commonly made by our modern philofophers, betwixt the hiftory 

 and the fcience or philofophy of nature. Under the firft of thefe 

 heads, we have an. admirable work upon the lubjedt of animals 

 where there is fuch a coUeiliion of facts, as he could not have made 

 without the alTiftance that he got from his pupil Alexander the 

 Great ; and to which the modern difcoveries, great as they arc, 

 have not been able to add much. Of the philofophy of nature he 

 has treated in a work altogether diftin(5l, which he has entitled 

 uK^oao-et; <pv<nxai : So that I hold his natural philofophy to be much more 

 complete than that of the moderns ; and particularly in this refpe<5t 

 that the moderns do not appear to know even the fubje(S of natu- 

 ral philofophy ; which, according to Arillotle, is body animated or 

 moved by mind*: For mind, he fays, not only moves all anim^il and 

 vegetable bodies, but alio minerals, and all bodies unor^aniied as 

 well as organifed ; and, he adds, it is a mind in thefe bodies, which 

 not only moves them in certain diredions, but forms them, and 

 makes them what they are. There is, therefore, in every body, ac- 

 cording to him, an immaterial principle, which, as it produces all the 

 qualities of the body, and makes it what it is, may be called the 

 idea of the thing: So that ideas, according to him, fo far from be- 

 ing inventions and fidions of our minds, as Mr Locke makes them 

 to be, are entities as real as the bodies which they form and move • 

 and one of thefe, by which bodies are moved up or down, or are 

 carried on in any diredion in which they are impelled, and which 



I 



* Vol. I. of diis work, p. 231. 



