VII 



Aristotle on Birds 167 



and thinking men were then almost entirely Greeks 

 were beginning to feel what we now call the 

 scientific spirit ; that is, the desire to know exactly 

 what happens and exists in this world of ours, and 

 why it is so. The Greeks, in whose prose and 

 poetry we chiefly delight, nearly all of them lived 

 and died before Aristotle ; they belong, not to the 

 age of scientific inquiry, but rather to an age of 

 art, and faith, and fancy, when men delighted in 

 what they saw around them, and took it all for 

 granted, without troubling themselves with questions 

 about its nature and its cause. Where they did 

 inquire, they inquired in such a vague and general 

 way, that in regard to the secrets of nature they often 

 rather mystified both themselves and their pupils. 

 This was the way of Greek men of intellect down to 

 the middle of the fourth century B.C. ; i.e. down to 

 the time when Philip of Macedon was beginning to 

 build up his mighty power, so soon to overshadow 

 and to overwhelm the bright Hellenic race. 



The father of this Philip of Macedon had a Greek 

 physician of great repute ; and the son of this doctor, 

 who was therefore much the same age as Philip him- 

 self, was Aristotle. The place where the family lived 

 was a Greek town on the north coast of the ^Egean Sea; 

 and here, with ample opportunity for indulging a boy's 

 love of bird and beast, the young Aristotle lived his 

 early years, helping his father in the surgery and labor- 



