tions already known to the learner as true or false, and by challenging him to produce any one case, in which when it is true to say no A is B, it is not equally true to say no B is A; the universality of the maxim being liable to be overthrown by any one contradictory instance. If this proof does not convince him, no better can be produced. In a short time, doubtless, he will acquiesce in the general formula at first hearing, and he may even come to regard it as self-evident.'

This is a striking instance of Grote's opinion that men's faith in the syllogism and in its subordinate maxims depends, not on any law of their minds, not on any compulsory force in the form of the syllogism itself, but on their constantly trying the validity of the rules by the test of what they know otherwise to be true, and thus, says Grote, they will gradually come to acquiesce in the formula, and even perhaps to regard them as self-evident. In answer to this, we would submit that there is a sense of necessity attached to a formula like that of the conversion of the Universal Negative, which is not and could not be gradually arrived at through the induction of instances. It may be that an instance is required to bring home the formula to the mind of the learner, but one instance clenches the matter for ever, and the learner does not require a short 'time' or a long time to acquiesce in the formula when once instanced. When it has once been stated No A is B, there"fore no B is A, as, for instance, No man is immortal, therefore no immortal being is a man,' the similar convertibility of all similar propositions is at once accepted without doubt. It is just like the demonstrations of Euclid, in which one single instance settles a truth as universal. When Euclid shows that the lines A B and C D cannot have a common segment, it is sufficiently established, without examining other cases, that no two straight lines can have a common segment. This proceeds from the reasoning in pari materiá—that all possible instances of space and quantity are under a common law. And may we not say that it is the same law that governs the syllogism, and which our minds are necessitated to recognise? Formally speaking, the syllogism is the expression of laws relative to the mutual coincidence or mutual exclusion of classes, which may be viewed as quantities or spaces. Thus the Universal Negative may be represented as a proposition declaring that the class, or space, A, is completely exclusive of the class, or space, B; or that no portion of the space A is coincident with any portion of the space B. From this it follows by the quantitative laws of our minds that we cannot conceive any portion of the space B coinciding with any portion of the space A. How we got those quantitative laws of thinking, whether intuitively, or

from repeated observation, is another question, but that we have them is certain, and it is through their binding force that we accept the formulæ of the syllogism, and not from fresh associations obtained by comparing those formula with actual experience, and by gradually finding that they always hold

true.

Though we differ occasionally from Grote's views of particular logical questions, we would yet speak with high respect of his account of the Organon' as a whole. It is a real gain to the student of Greek philosophy to have now at his command so great an assistance as this towards getting over a difficult but unavoidable stage in the journey. And one special merit in Grote's achievement is, that, for the first time in English, it gives us the Organon' set forth and explained as a whole, tracing the application of the syllogism in demonstrative science and in dialectic. Grote's remarks on the logic of induction, so far as entered upon by Aristotle, are interesting, though we confess to being not convinced that he has succeeded in adequately grasping Aristotle's conception of Nous as the faculty of universals. On the other hand, he has in his paper on First Principles (printed in Appendix II. vol. ii.) succeeded in showing that Sir William Hamilton considerably garbled or mistranslated passages of Aristotle, which he endeavoured to press into the support of an intuitional and authoritative common sense among mankind. But the most lively, and, at the same time, most valuable part of Grote's work, consists in the picture which he gives of Athenian dialectic, as an intellectual game or fencing-match, constantly practised; to lay down rules for which, to regulate it, and establish it as a highly salubrious and necessary intellectual art, was the object of the Topics' and the Sophistical Refu'tations' of Aristotle. These treatises form a pendant to the dialogues of Plato, they are the methodised outcome of a society which was possessed by an insatiate appetite for discussion and controversy, whether with a view to truth or to mere victory over an opponent. Such a society gave scope to a class, which gradually arose, of professional and paid disputants, or professors and teachers of the art of controversy. This professional class, under the name of Sophists,' got a bad name in antiquity, and Aristotle, speaking in accordance with what Xenophon, Plato, and Isocrates had said before him, treats them very disparagingly as mere charlatans, and describes their art as a thoroughly dishonest one with gain as its object, and mere fallacy as its only instrument. What we call logical fallacy' Aristotle classifies and exposes under the name of

Sophistical Refutations'-that is, the tricks of argument by which Sophists had been known to refute, or to attempt to refute, dialectical opponents. Grote, as is well known, when writing in his History of Greece' on the characteristics of the age of Socrates, had seen reason to protest to some extent against this verdict of antiquity, and he brought forward many pleas in favour of the respectability of the Sophists as a class; these were carried further in his subsequent work on Plato; and now, in commenting on Aristotle, he by no means alters his view. The other side of the question is given in Professor Jowett's Dialogues of Plato Translated,' especially in the introduction to the dialogue entitled Sophist.' We have no wish here to enter upon the controversy, but we must admit that Grote is successful in pointing out the doubtful demarcation often to be observed in Aristotle between what he blames as Sophistic,' and what he encourages as Dialectic.' It was, however, we think, an unconscious partisanship in Grote which led him in his eleventh chapter of this work (as before in his work on Plato) to undertake the defence of the famous Homo 'Mensura' doctrine of Protagoras, the first great Sophist, against the particular attack made on it by Aristotle. Aristotle, in laying down the maxim of contradiction-that the same proposition cannot be at once true and false-as the basis for all philosophy, mentioned three doctrines as incompatible with this principle: first, the doctrine of Heraclitus, that, all things being in a state of flux, everything is and at the same time is not; second, that of Anaxagoras, that everything is mixed in everything; third, that of Democritus, that the full and the void, in other words, being and not being, exist alike and together in every part. He added that the doctrine of Protagoras that all which appears is true,' or that man is the measure of all things,' comes under the same head, as being a denial of the maxim of contradiction, because the same proposition, being believed by one man and disbelieved by another, will be at the same time true and false; and surely if truth be 'what each man troweth,' fixed principles will be rendered difficult, it will be possible to play fast and loose with each assertion. Grote admits that we do not know at all certainly what the doctrine of Protagoras really was, but he thinks that it implied nothing more than an assertion of the universal relativity of truth and knowledge, the assertion that an object could only exist in relation to an individual subject. This assertion would not only be in itself harmless, but it would be an important announcement in philosophy. But the whole question is, how was the tenet of Protagoras applied by himself

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and his followers? The remarks of Aristotle on the subject lead to the inference that it was applied in a sceptical spirit, as it very well might be. If so, it amounted to a denial of the maxim of contradiction from the subjective side, just as the doctrines of the Heracliteans did on the objective side. They said you cannot assert anything that is more true than false, on account of the nature of things; the followers of Protagoras may very likely have said, and, according to Aristotle did say, You cannot assert anything as true, because it is only true to 'you, and every individual must be for himself the measure of truth.' This throws a haze of doubt over the first principles of knowledge, and tends to strike philosophy with paralysis. Aristotle said that it turned the pursuit after truth into a 'wild goose chase,'* and engendered despair in the minds of its votaries. The universal relativity of knowledge might well be held, provided that a loyal use of it were made; but Aristotle implies, and there seems no reason to doubt him, that in that age of disputation, a disloyal use was made of the doctrine. Hegel says that Aristotle acknowledged that man is the 'measure of all things,' on the proviso that this must be understood to mean the universal man and not the individual. In other words, the universal consciousness, manifesting itself either in general consensus or in the beliefs of the greatest and most cultivated minds, must be made the referee.

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We turn now for a moment to Grote's account of Aristotle's treatise On the Soul,' which excited some interest among students of philosophy when it first appeared as an appendix to the third edition of Professor Bain's work on The Senses and the Intellect' in 1868. The treatise itself is a very curious one, and well worthy of study in the present day, in reference to the speculations of Mr. Darwin and his school. After all, the Darwinian theory' is but a speculation, though it claims to bring forward a certain chain of facts (acknowledged not to be complete) in its own support. It cannot then be otherwise than interesting to compare with this nineteenthcentury hypothesis on the genesis of the human soul, the hypothesis on the same subject of so great a naturalist and philosopher, of the fourth century before Christ, as Aristotle. A striking difference between the two views meets us, however, at the outset, for Aristotle appears to leave no place for historical development in the animated kingdom. He admits, indeed, that the human race has at different times and in different places grown out of barbarism into civilisation, and by

* Τὸ γὰρ τὰ πετόμενα διώκειν τὸ ζητεῖν ἂν εἴη τὴν ἀληθείνα.

the progressive cultivation of art, science, and philosophy had repeatedly attained perfection. Whenever this had taken place, he thinks that deluges or other convulsions of nature must have swept away the entire race, all but a few individuals left on the mountain tops, or otherwise preserved for the repopulation of the earth, left, however, as under such circumstances would necessarily have been the case, destitute of all the apparatus of the arts, and having to begin again de novo the development of civilisation. With this strange conception of a cyclical rise and fall in the civil history of mankind, Aristotle combined the view that Nature as a whole is eternal, and must for ever have been in all essential particulars just as it is now. Thus he would equally have discarded the idea of a creation of the world and of the development of species. He united, indeed, the whole of organised nature into one chain by the common term soul,' which he attributed to every plant and animal no less than to man. He thought that insoul' there was an ascending scale, the functions of the lower soul being always inherent in and subservient to those of the higher. The soul' of the plant had merely the functions of nutrition and growth; in the animal the nutritive soul existed, but was additionally endowed with functions of motion, sensation, and desire, and with some gleams of even a higher intelligence; in man, the animal soul was differentiated by the introduction into it from without' of a divine element, called Nous,' which by its presence and intermixture made the most decisive changes, and raised man into an intellectual and moral being, capable of being a law to himself, and capable also of participating here on earth in that joy which the Divine Being feels everlastingly.

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Such was the view of the creatures on this earth which commended itself to Aristotle. It is opposed to the Darwinian philosophy (which closely corresponds with that of Epicurus), not only in its belief in the fixedness of nature, but also in

It is remarkable that this view of Aristotle-which was based on the argument that the actual must always have existed prior to the potential, the flower always have existed prior to the seed, &c.—has been revived, or one similar to it enunciated, in the present day. Sir William Thomson, in his remarkable address to the British Association at Edinburgh, in August 1871, said: 'I confess to being deeply impressed by the evidence put before us by Professor Huxley, and 'I am ready to adopt, as an article of scientific faith, true through all space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from 'nothing but life.' His conclusion is that life originated on this earth through moss-grown fragments from the ruins of another world.'