ARISTOTLE. Ill 



tion and respect. It manifests itself in their very style ; Aristotle's 

 being the dryest and most jejune prose, while that of Plato teems with 

 the imagery of poetry. The one delights to dress his thoughts in all 

 the pomp of as high a degree of fancy as one can conceive united to a 

 sound judgment ; the other seems to consider that the slightest gar- 

 I ment would cramp their vigour and hide their symmetry. In Aris- 

 totle we find a searching and comprehensive view of things as they 

 present themselves to the understanding, but no attempt to pass the 

 limits of that faculty no suspicion indeed that such exist. Plato, on 

 the contrary, never omits an opportunity of passing from the finite to 

 the infinite, from the sensuous to the spiritual, from the domain of the 

 intellect to that of the feelings ; he is ever striving to body forth an 

 ideal, and he only regards the actual as it furnishes materials for this. 

 Hence, he frequently forgets that he violates the conditions to which 

 the actual world is subjected ; or, perhaps, we should rather say, he dis- 

 regards the importance of this. A striking exemplification of the es- 

 sential difference between the two great philosophers is afforded by 

 the Republic of Plato compared with the criticism of it by Aristotle. 

 (' Pol.' ii.) The former seems to have grown up out of a wish to em- 

 body an ideal of justice, and is the genuine offspring of a vigorous and 

 luxuriant imagination reviewing the forms of social life and seeing in 

 all analogies to the original conception which it was the aim of the 

 artist to set forth. But from this point of view it is never once con- 

 templated by its critic. Essentially a picture, it is discussed by him 

 as if it were a map. 1 The natural consequence of these different bents 

 is, that Aristotle's views always form parts of a system intellectually 

 complete, while Plato's harmonize with each other morally : we rise 

 from the study of the latter with our feelings purified, from that of the 

 former with our perceptions cleared ; the one strengthens the intellect, 

 the other elevates the spirit. Consistently with this opposition it 

 happened that in the early centuries Christianity was often grafted on 

 Platonism, and even where this was not the case, many persons were 

 prepared for its reception by the study of Plato ; while in the age of 

 the schoolmen an age when religion had become theology Aristotle's 

 works were the only food which the philosophy of the time could as- 

 similate. 



The difference which is so strikingly marked between the matured Misinter 

 philosophical characters of these two giant intellects is of a kind which petedbyin- 



1 The sacred subjects, as they were treated by the early Italian painters indeed 

 down to the time of Raffaelle and Correggio present an analogy to this work. 

 There is in them a certain dominant thought, which it is the artist's problem to 

 embody, and which all the details, however incongruous they may be in all other 

 respects, assist in bringing out more fully and clearly. Thus in the celebrated 

 Vierge au Poisson there is a real unity of feeling to which each of the particulars 

 contributes its share. But a spectator who misses this will at once remark on the 

 glaring absurdity of the evangelist, an old man, reading his gospel to the subject of 

 it, an infant in arms ; and of Tobias presenting a fish of the size of a mackerel, as 

 that one which " leaped out of the river and would have devoured him," Exactly 

 on such principles does Aristotle's critique on the Republic proceed. 



