ARISTOTLE. 



FROM B. C. 384 TO B. C. 323. 



IN the account which we are about to give of the founder of the 

 Peripatetic school, we shall confine ourselves strictly to the pro- 

 vince of the biographer. 1 We shall enter more into detail respecting 

 the documents which exist for our purpose than has been done in the 

 lives of Plato and Socrates, and in the sketch of the earlier philosophers 

 of Greece, because an acquaintance with this subject is absolutely 

 necessary for estimating the value of any information relative to the 

 lives of these remarkable men, and the existing sources of all our 

 possible knowledge in any one case, are very nearly the same as those 

 for every other. 



If the acquaintance we possessed with the private life of individuals 

 were at all proportioned to the influence exerted by them on the 

 destinies of mankind, the biography of Aristotle would fill a library ; 

 for without attempting here to discuss the merits of his philosophy as 

 compared with that of others, it may safely be asserted that no man 

 ever yet lived who exerted so much influence upon the world. 

 Absorbing into his capacious mind the whole existing philosophy of 

 his age, he reproduced it, digested and transmuted, in a form of which 

 the main outlines are recognised at the present day, and of which the 

 language has penetrated into the inmost recesses of our daily life. 

 Translated in the fifth century of the Christian era into the Syriac 

 language by the Nestorians who fled to Persia, and from Syriac into 

 Arabic four hundred years later, his writings furnished the Moham- 

 medan conquerors of the East with a germ of science which, but for 

 the effect of their religious and political institutions, might have shot 

 up into as tall a tree as it did produce in the West ; while his logical 

 works in the Latin translation which Boethius, " the last of the 

 Eomans," bequeathed as a legacy to posterity, formed the basis of 

 that extraordinary phenomenon, the philosophy of the schoolmen. 

 An empire like this, extending over nearly twenty centuries of time, 

 sometimes more, sometimes less, despotically, but always with great 

 force, recognised in Bagdat and in Cordova, in Egypt and in Britain, 

 and leaving abundant traces of itself in the language and modes of 

 thought of every European nation, is assuredly without a parallel. 

 Yet of its founder's personal history all that we can learn is to be 

 gathered from meagre compilations, scattered anecdotes, and accidental 



1 For an analysis of Aristotle's philosophical doctrines, see th* volume of this 

 Encyclopedia on ' Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy.' 



