24 ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST 



his sociology, his psychology, or in general on his philo- 

 sophy ? That such an influence must have been at work 

 is, prima facie, obvious. The physician who becomes 

 a philosopher will remain a physician to the end ; the 

 engineer will remain an engineer ; and the ideas of pure 

 mathematics, Roger Bacon's ' alphabet of philosophy ', 

 will find issue and expression in the philosophy of such 

 mathematicians as Plato, Leibnitz, Spinoza, or Descartes. 

 Moreover, it is not only the special training or prior 

 avocation of the philosopher that so affects his mind. 

 In divers historical periods the rapid progress or the 

 diffused study of a particular science has moulded the 

 philosophy of the time. So on a great scale in the present 

 day does biology ; so did an earlier phase of evolutionary 

 biology affect Hegel ; and in like manner, in the great days 

 after Lavoisier, the days of Dalton, Davy and Berzelius, did 

 chemistry help, according to John Stuart Mill, to suggest a 

 ' chemistry of the mind ' to the ' association ' psychologists. 

 A certain philosopher, 1 in dealing with this theme, begins 

 by telling us that ' Mathematics was the only science that 

 had outgrown its merest infancy among the Greeks '. Now 

 it is my particular purpose to-day to show, from Aristotle, 

 that this is not the case. Whether Aristotle's biological 

 forerunners were many or few, whether or not the Hippo - 

 cratics (for instance) had failed to raise physiology and 

 anatomy to the dignity of a science, or having done so, 

 had only reserved them, as a secret cult, to their own 

 guild ; in short, whether Aristotle's knowledge is in the 

 main the outcome of his solitary labours, or whether, as 

 Leibnitz said of Descartes, praeclare in rem suam vertit 

 aliorum cogitata, it is at least certain that biology was in 

 his hands a true and comprehensive science, only second 

 to the mathematics of his age. 



1 Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, p. 39. 



