ADDRESS. xxiii 
relations of space or emotions of wonder.” ‘This is doubtless true; but the 
word ‘neglect’ implies mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in Aristotle, 
as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natural incapacity 
which lay at the root of his mistakes, As a physicist, Aristotle displayed 
what we should consider some of the worst attributes of a modern physical 
investigator—indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of 
language, which led to the delusive notion that he had really mastered his 
subject, while he had as yet failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put 
words in the place of things, subject in the place of object. He preached 
Induction without practising it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing 
from the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to the 
general. “He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the centre of which he 
fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his own satisfaction and 
to that of the world for near 2000 years, that no other universe was possible. 
His notions of motion were entirely unphysical. It was natural or unnatural, 
better or worse, calm or violent—no real mechanical conception regarding it 
lying at the bottom of his mind. He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, 
and proved that if it did exist motion in it would be impossible. He deter- 
mined @ priori how many species of animals must exist, and shows on 
general principles why animals must have such and such parts. When an 
eminent contemporary philosopher, who is far removed from errors of this 
kind, remembers these abuses of the @ prior method, he will be able to make 
allowance for the jealousy of physicists as to the acceptance of so-called 
a priori truths. . Aristotle’s errors of detail, as shown by Eucken and Lange, 
were grave anduumerous. He affirmed that only in man we had the beating 
of the heart, that the left side of the body was colder than the right, that 
men have more teeth than women, and that there is an empty space at the 
back of every man’s head. 
There is one essential quality in physical conceptions which was entirely 
wanting in those of Aristotle and his followers. I wish it could be ex- 
pressed by a word untainted by its associations ; it signifies a capability of 
being placed as a coherent picture before the mind. The Germans express 
the act of picturing by the word vorstellen, and the picture they call a 
Vorstellung. We have no word in English which comes nearer to our 
requirements than Jmagination, and, taken with its proper limitations, the 
word answers very well ; but, as just intimated, it is tainted by its associations, 
and therefore objectionable to some minds. Compare, with reference to this 
capacity of mental presentation, the case of the Aristotelian, who refers the 
ascent of water in a pump to Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, with that of 
Pascal when he proposed to solve the question of atmospheric pressure by the 
ascent of the Puy de Dome. In the one case the terms of the explanation 
refuse to fall into place as a physical image; in the other the image is di- 
stinct, the fall and rise of the barometer being clearly figured as the balancing 
of two varying and opposing pressures. 
During the drought of the Middle Ages in Christendom, the Arabian intel- 
lect, as forcibly shown by Draper, was active. With the intrusion of the Moors 
into Spain, he says, order, learning, and refinement took the place of their 
opposites. When smitten with disease, the Christian peasant resorted to a 
shrine, the Moorish one to an instructed physician. The Arabs encouraged 
translations from the Greek philosophers, but not from the Greek poets. 
They turned in disgust “‘from the lewdness of our classical mythology, and 
denounced as an unpardonable blasphemy all connexion between the impure 
Olympian Jove and the Most High God.” Draper traces still further than 
