A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



It is said even that the rudiments of geometry which 

 he acquired there influenced all his later teachings. 

 But be that as it may, the historian of science must 

 recognize in the founder of the Academy a moral 

 teacher and metaphysical dreamer and sociologist, 

 but not, in the modern acceptance of the term, a scien- 

 tist. Those wider phases of biological science which 

 find their expression in metaphysics, in ethics, in po- 

 litical economy, lie without our present scope ; and for 

 the development of those subjects with which we are 

 more directly concerned, Plato, like his master, has a 

 negative significance. 



ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.) 



When we pass to that third great Athenian teacher, 

 Aristotle, the case is far different. Here was a man 

 whose name was to be received as almost a synonym 

 for Greek science for more than a thousand years 

 after his death. All through the Middle Ages his writ- 

 ings were to be accepted as virtually the last word re- 

 garding the problems of nature. We shall see that his 

 followers actually preferred his mandate to the testi- 

 mony of their own senses. We shall see, further, that 

 modern science progressed somewhat in proportion 

 as it overthrew the Aristotelian dogmas. But the 

 traditions of seventeen or eighteen centuries are not 

 easily set aside, and it is perhaps not too much to say 

 that the name of Aristotle stands, even in our own 

 time, as vaguely representative in the popular mind 

 of all that was highest and best in the science of an- 

 tiquity. Yet, perhaps, it would not be going too far 

 to assert that something like a reversal of this judg- 



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