16 ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST 



If a statue please us, shall not the living fill us with 

 delight ; all the more if in the spirit of philosophy we 

 search for causes and recognize the evidences of design. 

 Then will Nature's purpose and her deep-seated laws be 

 everywhere revealed, all tending in her multitudinous 

 work to one form or another of the Beautiful.' In some- 

 what similar words does Bacon, 1 retranslate a familiar 

 saying : ' He hath made all things beautiful according 

 to their seasons ; also he hath submitted the world to 

 man's inquiry.' On the other hand, a most distinguished 

 philosopher of to-day is struck, and apparently per- 

 plexed, by ' the awkward and grotesque, even the 

 ludicrous and hideous forms of some plants and animals '. 2 

 I commend him, with all respect, to Aristotle or to that 

 Aristotelian verity given us in a nutshell by Rodin, 

 1 II n'y a pas de laideur ! ' 



To be sure, Aristotle's notion of beauty was not 

 Rodin's. He had a philosopher's comprehension of the 

 Beautiful, as he had a great critic's knowledge and under- 

 standing of Poetry ; but wise and learned as he was, he 

 was neither artist nor poet. His style seldom rises, and 

 only in a few such passages as that which I have quoted, 

 above its level didactic plane. Plato saw philosophy, 

 astronomy, even mathematics, as in a vision ; but Aristotle 

 does not know this consummation of a dream. The 

 bees have a king, with Aristotle. Had Plato told us 

 of the kingdom of the bees, I think we should have 

 had Shakespearian imagery. The king would have had 

 his ' officers of sorts ', his magistrates, and soldiers, his 

 ' singing masons building roofs of gold '. Even Pliny, 

 arid encyclopaedist as he is, can now and then throb 

 and thrill us as Aristotle cannot do for example, when 



1 De Sapientia Veterum (Eccles. iii. u). 



2 Ward, op. cit., p. 85. 



