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Aristotle’s Physics Reviewed. 
169 
ARISTOTLE’S PHYSICS (PHYSIKE AKROASIS) 
REVIEWED. 
By JOHN J. ELMENDORF. S. T. D., 
Professor of Mental Philosophy in Racine College. 
An attempt to revivify Aristotle’s Physics, when this nineteenth century 
is drawing to its close, may seem to some an absurd anachronism His mis¬ 
statements of facts have furnished stock quotations to those who would 
illustrate the ignorance of benighted antiquity. His a priori method has 
been only subject for ridicule, because in this enlightened period there is 
only one secure path to true scientific knowledge, sc., the slow, but safe road 
of accurate observation and careful experiment. If the critical observer, 
from without the sacred precincts, remarks that empirical science mani¬ 
festly contains a priori assumptions which indicate the line, among an in¬ 
finitude of lines, which experiment shall follow, and is stated under the 
form of concepts which need accurate definition, the reply may be that 
advanced science is proceeding on the straight and lowly road of “ phe¬ 
nomenology,” and confines itself to that. The critic might reply, with Aris¬ 
totle, that there can be no such thing as a science of phenomena, because 
they must be appearances of some thing, and cannot be thought or de¬ 
scribed, much less accounted for , without some assumption, true or false, 
respecting that thing. But the dispute would only grow more lively, and 
the end be far off. The critic will, perhaps, be safer in confining himself 
to the remark, that so long as the experimenter says, “ I see that,” no 
meaning can be attached to the purely phenomenal construction of his words, 
to-wit.: “A chain of successive (subjective) states called, I, is at this mo¬ 
ment followed by the subjective state called, seeing one of co ordinate 
phenomena called that” Since pure phenomenology appears to be reduced 
to this, so much the worse for phenomenology. 
Logic, pure mathematics, even that despised thing called metaphysics, 
will have their word in the matter, and claim their place in the large do¬ 
main called ‘'science.” 
It is, perhaps, time to call a halt; and after laughing at “ high priori” 
roads to science, to consider more seriously whether or not those same a 
priori methods have not some place even in the study of nature, whether 
or not the analysis of reason’s fundamental concepts and necessary judg¬ 
ments is absolutely worthless for scientific ends. 
