

THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 151 



regions where such reasoning reigns supreme, he became 

 a mere ignis fatuus to those who followed him. 



I have sometimes permitted myself to compare 

 Aristotle with Groethe to credit the Stagirite with an 

 almost superhuman power of amassing and systematising 

 facts, but to consider him fatally defective on that side 

 of the mind, in respect to which incompleteness has 

 been just ascribed to Groethe. Whewell refers the errors 

 of Aristotle not to a neglect of facts, but to ' a neglect 

 of the idea appropriate to the facts : the idea of 

 Mechanical cause, which is Force, and the substitution 

 of vague or inapplicable notions, involving only rela- 

 tions of space or emotions of wonder/ This is doubtless 

 true; but the word 'neglect' implies mere intellectual 

 misdirection, whereas in Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was 

 not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity 

 which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, 

 Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the 

 worst of attributes in a modern physical investigator 

 indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confi- 

 dent use of language which led to the delusive notion 

 that he had really mastered his subject, while he had, 

 as yet, failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put 

 words in the place of things, subject in the place of 

 object. He preached Induction without practising it, 

 inverting the true order of enquiry, by passing from 

 the general to the particular, instead of from the par- 

 ticular to the general. He, made of the universe a 

 closed sphere, in the centre of which he fixed the earth, 

 proving from general principles, to his own satisfaction 

 and to that of the world for near 2,000 years, that no 

 other universe was possible. His notions of motion 

 were entirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, 

 better or worse, calm or violent no real mechanioal 

 .conception regarding it lying at the bottom of his mind. 



