THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 149 



mechanical reasoning; and, in 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 Goethe to credit the Stagirite with an 

 almost superhuman power of amassing and systematis- 

 ing facts, but to consider him fatally defective on that 

 side of the mind, in respect to which incompleteness 

 has been just ascribed to Goethe. 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 substi- 

 tution of vague or inapplicable notions, involving 

 only relations 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 mis- 

 takes. 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 confident 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 particular 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 uni- 

 verse was possible. His notions of motion were en- 

 tirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, better 



