NATURE 



699 



THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24, m.-)M,. 



THE OXFORD ARISTOTLE. 

 The Works of Aristotle. Translated Into 

 [Eng^lish under the Editorship of W. D. Ross. 

 'Magna Moralin. l-'.thica Eudemia, and De 

 Virtiitibus et ]'itiis. Tnpag-ed. (Oxford: At 

 the Clarendon Press, 1915.) Price 55. net. 

 Also : De Mundo and Dc Spiritu. (Oxford : 

 At the Clarendon Press, 191 5.) Price 2s. net. 

 s) Illustrations of Positivism. By J. H. Bridg^es. 

 New Edition. Pp. xiii + 480. (London: Watts 

 and Co., 1915.) Price 35. 6d. net. 

 [i) '' I ^HE thanks of all Eng-lish-speaking- 

 L students of philosophy and of the 

 iistory of science are owing- for the steady pro- 

 ;ss which is being- made by the Oxford Press 

 [the translation into English of the whole Aris- 

 jlian corpus, ^^'ith regard to the works under 

 riew, the student oi cthks who is not also a 

 -rate Greek scholar, owes a special debt of 

 Ititude to Mr. J. Solomon and to Mr. St. George 

 :k : to the former for his very accurate version 

 the "Eudemian Ethics." As Mr. Solomon and 

 [r. Stock both point out, this work has generally 

 been neglected by Aristotelian scholars. But this 

 neg-lect is surely unreasonable. The " Eudemian 

 Ethics" is at least a commentary on Aristotle's 

 own " Ethics " by a personal pupil reputed to 

 have been best acquainted with Aristotle's mind, 

 id should therefore be authoritative for the 

 lerstanding- of the master's meaning-. 

 [r. Stock not only gives us an admirably clear 

 forcible translation of the "Magna Moralia," 

 he has also provided indexes and detailed 

 iles of contents for this work and for the 

 tudemian Ethics." P\irther, in a short but 

 orously written introduction he discusses the 

 »le question of the relations of all three moral 

 itises which go under the name of Aristotle 

 to another. As he says, the problem is not 

 Ike that of the three Synoptic Gospels. "All 

 ie used once to be ascribed to the direct 

 pithorship of Aristotle with the same simple- 

 iartedness, or the same absence of reflection, 

 rith which all three Gospels used to be ascribed 

 the Holy Ghost." A special form of the general 

 lestion is the question whether the three books 

 >mmon to the " Nicomachean " and the 

 f'Eudemian Ethics" (E.N. v., vi., and vii., E.E., 

 iv., v., and vi.) proceed directly from the writer 

 t'l" the former, assumed to be Aristotle, or from 

 Eudemus, the writer of the latter. This question, 

 Mr. Stock observes, is of no great importance, 

 because in any case the doctrine is Aristotle's. 

 XO. 241;, VOL. 96] 



The prejudice in favour of the former work is 

 not peculiar to Oxford, where students are nur- 

 tured on the "Nicomachean Ethics," or to 

 English or foreign universities, or to modern 

 times, for Grant pointed out that whereas many 

 _iireek and Latin writers have written comment- 

 aries on the "Nicomachean," there has been no 

 such commentary on the "Eudemian Ethics." 



Mr. Stock dismisses somewhat summarily the 

 contention of Prof. Burnet that the curious mathe- 

 matics of the fifth book must be due to Aristotle, 

 who was no mathematician, and not to Eudemus, 

 who was one of the first mathematicians in an 

 age in which mathematics made more progress 

 than it ever did subsequently until the seventeenth 

 century. Does not this contention reduce, Mr. 

 Stock asks, to the bare statement that Eudemus 

 wrote on mathematics? And have we any inde- 

 pendent evidence that Aristotle was so poor a 

 mathematician? The arguments which Mr. Stock 

 marshals for deciding the authorship of the three 

 disputed books are too detailed to be quoted here. 

 His conclusion, arrived at mainly on linguistic 

 grounds, is that the three books contain Aris- 

 totle's own doctrine, but that they were not 

 written by him in the form in which we now have 

 them. Part of them, at any rate, we have only 

 as worked up by Eudemus and adjusted to the 

 latter's own work. 



Mr. E. S. Forster gives us an extremely 

 spirited version of the "De Mundo," a work which 

 is certainly unauthentic and probably based 

 on two works of Poseidonius, the Mercw^joXoyiKT/ 

 0-Toi;(etu)o-is and the Hepl Koa/xov. Prof. J. Dobson 

 is to be congratulated on the success with which 

 he has grappled with the difficulties of the text 

 of the " De Spiritu." 



(2) In the second edition of the late J. H. 

 Bridges's "Illustrations of Positivism," issued by 

 the English Positivist Committee under the editor- 

 ship of Mr. H. Gordon Jones, a number of papers 

 (many of them were originally delivered as 

 addresses or lectures) are included which were 

 published posthumously in the Positivist Review. 

 Mr. Jones has also classified all the papers accord- 

 ing to their subject-matter, and supplied numerous 

 bibliographical and explanatory footnotes, as well 

 as an index. To the present-day reader some of 

 these essays may seem to breathe the breath of 

 bygone controversies. Others, on the contrary, 

 as, for example, the brief account of Captain 

 A. T. Mahan'sbook, "The Influence of Sea-Power 

 upon History," will be icad uitli sprcial interest 

 to-day. Whatever topic he wrote on, Bridges 

 was never dull. Hz was possessed of an extra- 

 ordinarily fine sense of historical perspective, and, 



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