206 PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 



to the Predicaments or Categories of Aristotle, that it was usually 

 prefixed to that treatise ; and the two have been used as an elementary 

 work together, up to modern times. The Predicables are the five 

 steps which the gradations of generality and particularity introduce ; — 

 genus, species, difference, individual, accident: — the Categories are the 

 ten heads under which assertions or predications may be arranged ; 

 — substance, quantity, relation, quality, place, time, position, habit, 

 action, passion. 



At a later period, the Aristotelian commentators became more ser- 

 vile, and followed the author step by step, explaining, according to 

 their views, his expressions and doctrines ; often, indeed, with extreme 

 prolixity, expanding his clauses into sentences, and his sentences into 

 paragraphs. Alexander Aphrodisiensis, who lived at the end of the 

 second century, is of this class ; " sometimes useful," as one of the 

 recent editors of Aristotle says ; 5 " but by the prolixity of his interpre- 

 tation, by his perverse itch for himself discussing the argument ex- 

 pounded by Aristotle, for defending his opinions, and for refuting or 

 reconciling those of others, he rather obscures than enlightens." At 

 various times, also, some of the commentators, and especially those of 

 the Alexandrian school, endeavored to reconcile, or combined without 

 reconciling, opposing doctrines of the great philosophers of the earlier 

 times. Simplicius, for instance, and, indeed, a great number of the 

 Alexandrian Philosophers, 7 as Alexander, Ammonius, and others, em- 

 ployed themselves in the futile task of reconciling the doctrines of the 

 Pythagoreans, of the Eleatics, of Plato, and of the Stoics, with those 

 of Aristotle. Boethius 8 entertained the design of translating into 

 Latin the whole of Aristotle's and Plato's w r oiks, and of showing their 

 agreement : a gigantic plan, which he never executed. Others em- 

 ployed themselves in disentangling the confusion which such attempts 

 produced, as John the Grammarian, surnamed Philoponus, " the Labor- 

 loving ;" who, towards the end of the seventh century, maintained 

 that Aristotle was entirely misunderstood by Porphyry and Proclus, 9 

 who had pretended to incorporate his doctrines into those of the New 

 Platonic school, or even to reconcile him with Plato himself on the 

 subject of ideas. Others, again, wrote Epitomes, Compounds, Ab- 

 stracts ; and endeavored to throw the works of the philosopher into 

 some simpler and more obviously regular form, as John of Damascus, in 



8 Ib. i. 288. * ib. i. 311. 



8 Degerando, Hist. desSyst. iv. 100. 9 Ib. iv. 155. 



