ARISTOTLE. 165 



be found in any of the philosopher's works which have come down 

 to us. 



From these few and meagre specimens of the exoteric works of Popularity of 

 Aristotle, we may observe without any difficulty that in every respect ^^ oietic 

 they were calculated in a rhetorical and superficial age, such as that of 

 the successors of Theophrastus was, to supersede the others. Litera- 

 ture became fashionable in high places. Philosophers thronged to 

 the courts of an Antigonus, a Ptolemy, or an Attains, and exerted 

 themselves in making royal roads to knowledge for the sake of their 

 patrons. A general acquaintance with the doctrines of the school to 

 which they attached themselves was all that these latter could pretend 

 to, and the instructor soon found out that very little more would be 

 sufficient for himself. Why should he bestow time and labour on 

 what would not be available to his purposes ? Why should he trouble 

 himself with thinking out the results which he could find ready pro- 

 vided to his hand ? Above all, why should he neglect works which 

 supplied food to his fancy and grace to his style, agreeably and lucidly 

 written, and generally acceptable in literary society, for the dry 

 and laborious systematic treatise, whose only merit was its rigidly 

 logical connexion. The very discipline of the Lyceum, as we have 

 shown in an earlier part of this essay, contributed its share to the work 

 of deterioration, by producing an unconscious indifference to the truth 

 of opinions provided only they were plausible and coherent ; and the 

 vanity of possessing a multifarious knowledge lost the only check 

 which could have restrained it. The age of thought gave way to an 

 age of mere accumulation of learning ; and in such a one what could 

 attract any man to works like Aristotle's scientific ones ? In the time 

 of Cicero a considerable impulse had certainly been given to philosophy. 

 Yet how instructive is the story which he relates in the introduction 

 to his 'Topica!' His friend Trebatius had stumbled while looking 

 over his library upon the ' Topica ' of Aristotle, of which he had never 

 heard, and on learning from Cicero the nature of the work was seized 

 with a strong desire to read it. The obscurity of the book repelled Difficulty of 

 him, and an eminent rhetorician to whom he applied for assistance ^ sc 

 told him that of those works of Aristotle he knew nothing. " This I 

 was by no means surprised at," says Cicero, " that a rhetorician should 

 know nothing of a philosopher, of whom philosophers themselves, with 

 the exception of a very few, knew nothing" 1 And although Cicero 

 deservedly prides himself upon being the introducer of Greek philosophy 

 among his countrymen, it is extremely questionable whether, with the 

 exception of those works which have a direct application to oratory, 

 his knowledge of Aristotle was not confined to the exoteric writings. 

 It is certainly these which he takes as his model and his basis in his 

 own philosophical works. 



Where a writer's opinions are studied rather than his principles and 



1 Topica, i. 1. So, too, in a fragment in Nonius, voce contendere, he says, Magna 

 etiam animi contentio adhibenda est explicando Aristoteli. 



ones. 



