28 ARISTOTLE AS A BIOLOGIST 



it with one whom the Lord Chancellor of England has 

 called ' the greatest master of abstract thought since 

 Aristotle died '. For Hegel, 1 as surely for Aristotle also, 

 Entwicklung was not a ' time-process but a thought- 

 2 process'. To Hegel, an actual, realistic, outward, his- 

 torical evolution seemed but a clumsy and materialistic 

 philosophy of nature. In a sense, the ' time- difference 

 has no interest for thought '. And if the lower animals 

 help us to understand ourselves, it is in a light reflected 

 from the study of Man. 



So grows up, upon a broad basis of Natural History, 

 the whole psychology of Aristotle, and in particular that 

 great doctrine of the tripartite soul, according to which 

 created things ' by gradual change sublimed, To vital 

 spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual ! ' 



In this \j/vx^ of Aristotle there was (in spite of the 

 passage which I have quoted) a trace of the concrete 

 and the all but material, which later Greek as well 

 as Christian thought was not slow to discern and to 

 modify. But, as a philosopher of our own day reminds 

 us, it was in relation to a somewhat idealized Body 

 that Aristotle described that somewhat unspiritual Soul. 

 Such as it is, it has remained at the roots of our 

 psychology, even to this day. 



/Bergson only partially gets rid of it when he 



/recasts Aristotelian psychology on the lines of that 



\ branching tree which modern evolutionary biology sub- 



\stitutes for the scala Naturae of Aristotle : ./and when he 



sees, for instance, in psychological evolution, not the 



successive grades of continuous development, through 



sensibility and instinct to intelligence, but rather the 



splitting up of an original activity, of which instinct 



1 Ritchie, op. cit. Cf. Hoffding, in Darwin and Modetn Science. 

 Cambridge, 1909, p. 449. 



