with the race as with the individual, come only with the maturity of age. He has been termed the father of the Inductive Method. He indeed said something as to the necessity of proceeding from particulars to generals, and of deducing from a comparison of facts their connection and law; but it never occurred to him to question the testimony of the senses; on the contrary, he made it the foundation of the vast superstructure he undertook to rear. His method was necessarily deductive, from his utter ignorance of, or inability to use, the inductive; from the imperiousness and arrogance of his nature, and from the purpose he had in view, which was nothing less than to solve, in an age wholly incapable of any thing like an adequate investigation of natural law, every question coming within the range of human experience. He was the impressible child, full of animation and garrulity, not the mature man, silent and reflective from the consciousness of his own ignorance and impotence to interpret the mighty problems which confronted him on every side. Child as he was, his statements and illustrations were so grotesque and fanciful that it is to be wondered that he did not see their inconclusiveness and absurdity. Never disturbed by a doubt as to the soundness of his premises, he assumed to dispose by a single stroke, not only of problems for which, with all the lights of the present day, ages will hardly suffice, but those which wholly transcend human capacity. The manner in which he attempted to prove the world to be perfect is a capital illustration of his method and its results: "The bodies," he says, " of which the world is composed, are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now three is the most perfect number; it is the first of numbers; for of one we do not speak as a number; of two we say both; but three is the first number of which we say all; moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end!" By a similar method he undertook to prove the existence of a fifth element, or essence. "Simple elements," he tells us, "must have simple motions, and thus fire and air have their natural motions upward, and water and earth have their natural motions downward; but besides these motions, there is motion in a circle, which is unnatural to these elements, but which is a more perfect motion than the other, because a circle is a per

1

1 Whewell's "Inductive Sciences," Am. ed. vol. i. p. 72

fect line, and a straight line is not; and there must be something to which this motion is natural. From this it is evident that there is some essence or body different from those of the four elements, more divine than those, and superior to them. If things which move in a circle move contrary to Nature, it is marvellous, or rather absurd, that this, the unnatural motion, should alone be continuous and eternal; for unnatural motions decay speedily. And so, from all this, we must collect that besides the four elements which we have here and about us, there is another removed far off, and the more excellent in proportion as it is more distant from us." From this fifth essence the modern word quintessence is derived.1

The preceding illustrations will convey a sufficient idea of the method of Aristotle, and explain the barrenness of its results. The premises from which he reasoned were the untrained observations of phenomena, or the extravagant fictions of an ardent and fanciful mind. The conclusions to which he came were as grotesque and fanciful as the premises themselves. They were like attempts to solve mathematical problems by using numerals that accidentally presented themselves, and guessing at the results of their combination. If he could not discover the unsoundness of his premises and the inconclusiveness of his reasoning, still less could those whose only ambition was to implicitly adopt and unfold the doctrines of their great master. The more they commented, the more puerile and feeble, compared with his, their rhetoric and illustrations became. His mode of proof of the perfection of the earth possessed some charm and dignity as it fell from his lips. If it could have been accepted without discussion, no harm at the time could have come of it. The Greeks, incapable of scientific inquiry, would have been as well off with this as with any other explanation which was certain to be as far from the truth. The harm came from the discussions that followed. The freshness of the original propositions was wholly lost in the commentators; and as no truth, no goal, was ever arrived at, no end ever reached, proposition was piled upon proposition, and assumption upon assumption, till 'the faculty of reasoning, of perceiving the truth, was itself lost, and the race but little removed from a condition of mental idiocy. Absurd

1 Whewell, vol. i. pp. 72, 73.

as were his teachings and pretensions, he is by no means yet fully dethroned. He still is an authority in our colleges, and a great many very important questions, which should be treated on a scientific basis, are still treated by his methods, — that of money being one of the most notable.

"It is highly instructive," says Whewell, in his History of the Inductive Sciences, "to trace the principles of this undertaking (of Aristotle); for the course pursued was certainly one of the most natural and tempting that could be imagined. The essay was made by a nation unequalled in fine mental endowments, at the period of its greatest activity and vigor; and yet, it must be allowed (for, at least so far as physical science is concerned, none will contest this) to have been entirely unsuccessful. We cannot consider otherwise than as an utter failure, an endeavor to discover the cause of things, of which the most complete results are the Aristotelian Physical Treatises; and which, after reaching the point which these Treatises mark, left the human mind to remain stationary, at any rate, upon all such subjects for nearly two thousand years."

It was not, however, till nearly fifteen hundred years after his decease, that Aristotle began to exercise a paramount and at the same time a most baleful influence over the human mind. He exerted little or none over his own nation; and, although

1 Whewell, vol. i. p. 56.

2 "Aristotle affords," says Bacon, "the most eminent instance of the first (sophistic philosophy); for he corrupted natural philosophy by logic: thus, he formed the world of categories, assigned to the human soul, the noblest of substances, a genus determined by words of secondary operation, treated of density and rarity (by which bodies occupy a greater or lesser space) by the frigid distinctions of action and power; asserted that there was a peculiar and proper motion in all bodies, and that, if they shared in any other motion, it was owing to an external moving cause, and imposed innumerable arbitrary distinctions upon the nature of things; being everywhere more anxious as to definitions in teaching and the accuracy of the wording of his propositions, than the internal truth of things. And this is best shown by a comparison of his philosophy with the others of the greatest repute among the Greeks. For the similar parts of Anaxagoras, the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus, the heaven and earth of Parmenides, the discord and concord of Empedocles, the resolution of bodies into the common nature of fire, and their condensation, according to Heraclitus, exhibit some sprinkling of natural philosophy, the nature of things, and experiment; whilst Aristotle's physics are mere logical terms, and he remodelled the same subject, in his metaphysics, under a more imposing title; and more as a realist than a nominalist.. Nor is much stress to be laid on his frequent recourse to experiment in his books on animals, his problems, and other treatises; for he had already decided, without having properly consulted experience as the basis of his decisions and axioms, and, after having so decided, he drags experiment along, as a captive constrained to accommodate herself to his decisions; so that he is even more to be blamed than his modern followers (of the scholastic school) who have deserted her altogether. - Novum Organum. Book i. 63.

one of the greatest and wisest of her philosophers, that which he did exert only contributed to precipitate her fall. The practical and unimaginative Romans, who finally included Greece in the universal empire, regarded at first, with a like contempt, her literature and culture. At no time did these exert any considerable influence over the lives or fortunes of the conquerors; at least, none that served to arrest their decline and fall. That fall buried for ages all the culture of the past in its ruins. On the rise of the new nationalities, and on the revival of learning in the Middle Ages, it could not be otherwise than that scholars, whose own tongues were compounds of barbarous dialects, should become enraptured with a language the most perfect the world has yet seen; should without reserve accept Aristotle, one of the most accomplished writers of this language, as their master, and should regard his works as the great store-house of human wisdom.

"We may consider," continues Whewell, in his History of the Inductive Sciences, "the reign of mere disputation as fully established at the time of which we are now speaking" (the 12th and 13th centuries); "the only kind of philosophy henceforth studied was one in which no sound physical science had or could have place. The wavering abstractions, the indistinct generalizations, and loose classifications of common language which we have already noticed as the fountain of physics of the Greek Schools of philosophy, were also the only source from which the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages drew their views, or rather their arguments; and though these notional and verbal relations were invested with a most complex and pedantic technicality, they did not on this account become at all more precise as notions, or more likely to lead to a single real truth. Instead of acquiring distinct ideas, they multiplied abstract terms; instead of real generalizations, they had recourse to verbal distinctions. The whole course of their employments tended to make them not only ignorant of physical truth, but incapable of conceiving its nature.

"Having thus taken upon themselves the task of raising and discussing questions by means of abstract terms, verbal distinctions, and logical rules alone, there was no tendency in their activity to come to an end, as there was no progress. The same questions, the same answers, the same difficulties, the same solutions, the same verbal subtleties, sought for, admired, cavilled at, abandoned, reproduced, and again admired, might recur without limit. John of Salisbury observed of the Parisian teachers, that, after several years' absence, he found them not a step advanced, and still employed in urging and parrying the same arguments; and this, as Mr. Hallam remarks, was equally applicable to the period of centuries.' The same knots were tied and untied; the same clouds were formed

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and dissipated. The poet's censure of the sons of Aristotle is just as happily expressed :

They stand

Locked up together, hand in hand.

Every one leads as he is led;

The same bare path they tread,

And dance like Fairies a fantastic round,

But neither change their motion nor their ground.1'"

The ascendency of Aristotle upon the revival of learning could not have become so paramount, but for the fact that he was accepted as authority by the Church equally with the Schools. The methods of the two were precisely the same. Each assumed the truth of the premises upon which the systems of each were constructed. The Church had nothing to fear from one who stood in the way of all inquiry by which truth could be discovered, and, by rendering all progress impossible, gave for a time an historic truth to the famous boast of "Semper Eadem." Uniformity throughout the ages, whether in science or in art, in religion or in dogma, is the uniformity of death. In spite, however, of Church and of Aristotle, discoveries continued to be made, each one of which enlarged the vision and means of those that followed. The spirit of freedom and inquiry came from the new races. They burst the bonds, both physical and religious, in which the world had so long been held. For such an effort, neither Greece nor Rome had the aspiration nor the power. So firm, however, had become the grasp of the Church and the Schools upon the human mind, that it was not till the beginning of the seventeenth century that Bacon, for the first time, displayed to the race, in all their length and breadth, the methods by which truth is to be discovered, methods which cannot fail, so far as the faculties of man can go, to unfold all the laws of the universe.

The difference between the methods of Aristotle and Bacon is, that to the Aristotelian, the sun rises and sets; upon the evidence of his senses he immediately constructs a system which assumes to explain all the phenomena of the heavens. To the Baconian, the sun appears to rise and set; but from this appearance he draws no conclusions whatever. His first essay is to test the accuracy of the testimony of his senses. He finds in the end that the phenomena entirely contradict the facts,

1 Whewell, vol. i. p. 234-5.