Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals Part 8

While this elementary education is going on, the officers of the State have abundant opportunity for observing the different characters of the children, and distinguishing the n.o.ble from the ign.o.ble. As soon as a child shows plainly that it belongs by nature to the lowest cla.s.s, they consign it to that cla.s.s, and its education by the State practically ceases. Of course these officers know from what cla.s.s each child came, and they make use of this knowledge in determining its future destiny.

At the same time, they are not to be entirely guided by it, but to act impartially. The education of the lowest cla.s.s after childhood the State leaves to take care of itself, persuaded that appet.i.te will always find means for its own satisfaction. The n.o.bler natures it continues to educate, without any break, until they reach the age of twenty. And this education is distinctly a military training. As time goes on, the gymnastic exercises become more violent, more complex, and more sustained, but always have for their subject the soul, rather than the body, and never degenerate into mere athletic brutality. Special attention is directed to the musical and literary exercises, as the means whereby the soul is directly trained and harmonized. Plato holds that no change can be made in the "music" of a State, without a corresponding change in the whole organization; in other words, that the social and political condition of a people is determined by the literature and music which it produces and enjoys. He virtually says, Let me make the songs of a people, and he who will may make their laws.

Of the character of the music which he recommends we have already spoken. From literature he would exclude all that we are in the habit of calling by that name, all that is mimetic, poetic, or creative, and confine the term to what is scientific, didactic, and edifying. He sends the poets out of the State with mock-reverent politeness, as creatures too divine for human use. He is particularly severe upon the dramatists, not sparing even the sublime aeschylus. In fact, he would banish from his State all art not directly edifying. The literature which he recommends is plainly of the nature of aesop's _Fables_, the Pythagorean _Golden Words_, and the Parmenidean or Herac.l.i.tean work _On Nature_. If we wished to express his intent in strictly modern language, we should have to say that he desired to replace literary training by ethical and scientific, and the poetical mode of presenting ideals by the prosaic.

The true music, he held, is in the human being. "If we find," he says, "a man who perfectly combines gymnastics with music, and in exact proportion applies them to the soul, we shall be entirely justified in calling him the perfect musician and the perfect trainer, far superior to the man who arranges strings alongside each other."

There are many matters of detail in Plato's scheme of military training that well deserve consideration, but cannot be even touched upon here.

Before we leave it, however, we may give the dates at which the different branches of education are to begin. Care of the body begins at birth, story-telling with the third year, gymnastics with the seventh, writing and reading with the tenth, letters and music with the fourteenth, mathematics with the sixteenth, military drill, which for the time supplants all other training, with the eighteenth. When the young people reach the age of twenty, those who show no great capacity for science, but are manly and courageous, are a.s.signed to the soldier cla.s.s, and start on a course of higher education in military training, while those who evince great intellectual ability become novices in the ruling cla.s.s, and begin a curriculum in science, which lasts till the close of their thirtieth year. This course includes arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, the only sciences at that time cultivated, and aims at impressing upon the youthful mind the unity and harmony of the physical or phenomenal universe. At the age of thirty, those students who do not show any particular apt.i.tude for higher studies are drafted off into the lower public offices, while those who do, pa.s.s five years in the study of dialectics, whereby they rise to pure ideas. They are then, from their thirty-fifth to their fiftieth year, made to fill the higher public offices, in which they take their orders directly from the sages. During this period they put their acquirements to a practical test, and so come really and fully into possession of them. At the end of their fiftieth year, after half a century of continuous education of body, mind, and will, they are reckoned to have reached the vision of the supreme good, and therefore to be fit to enter the contemplative ruling cla.s.s. They are now free men; they have reached the goal of existence; their life is hidden with G.o.d; they are free from the prison of the body, and only remain in it voluntarily, and out of grat.i.tude to the State which has educated them, in order to direct it, in accordance with absolute truth and right, toward the Supreme Good.

Such, in its outlines, is Plato's theory of education, as set forth in the _Republic_. It is easy to point out its defects and its errors, which are neither small nor few, but fundamental and all-pervasive. But it is equally easy to see how it came to have these defects and errors, since they are simply those of every aesthetic social scheme which ignores the nature of the material with which it presumes to deal, and takes no account of the actual history of social inst.i.tutions or of the forces by which they are evolved. It is emphatically the product of a youthful intellect, carried away by an artistic ideal. It was, however, the intellect of a Plato, who, when he became more mature, saw, without "irreverence for the dreams of youth," the feebleness of ideas for the conflict with human frailties, and strove to correct his exaggerated estimate of their power.

This he did in the _Laws_, whose very t.i.tle suggests, in a way almost obtrusive, the change of att.i.tude and allegiance. While in the _Republic_ the State is governed by sages, almost entirely without laws, in the later work, the sages almost disappear and the laws a.s.sume an all-important place. In writing the _Laws_, moreover, he exchanges allegiance to Socrates and ideas for allegiance to Pythagoras and the G.o.ds. In saying this, I have marked the fundamental difference between the _Republic_ and the _Laws_. While in the former Plato finds the moral sanctions, in the last resort, in the ideas of the pure intellect, trained in mathematics, astronomy, and dialectics, in the latter he derives them from the content of the popular consciousness, with its G.o.ds, its ethical notions, its traditions. In these, as embodied in inst.i.tutions, he finds the most serviceable, if not the most exalted, revelation of divine truth. Trusting to this, he no longer seeks to abolish the family and private property, but merely to have them regulated; he no longer banishes strangers and poets from his State, but merely subjects them to State supervision; he no longer demands a philosophical training for the rulers, but only practical insight; he no longer divides his citizens into sages, soldiers, and wealth-producers, but into freemen (corresponding to his previous military cla.s.s) and slaves. His government is no longer an aristocracy of intellect, but a compound of aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, representing, respectively, worth, wealth, and will. His plan of education is modified to suit these altered conditions. The children, as in Sparta, do not begin the State course of education until about their seventh year, after which their training is very much the same as that demanded in the _Republic_, with the omission, of course, of dialectics. Though women are no longer to be relieved of their home duties, they are still to share in the education and occupations of men, an arrangement which is facilitated by the law ordaining that both men and women shall eat at public tables. In making these changes, Plato believed that he was falling from a lofty, but unrealizable, ideal, and making concessions to human weakness; in reality, he was approaching truth and right.

BOOK III

ARISTOTLE (B.C. 384-322)

CHAPTER I

ARISTOTLE--LIFE AND WORKS

Aristotle, in my opinion, stands almost alone in philosophy.--Cicero.

Aristotle, Nature's private secretary, dipping his pen in intellect.--Eusebius.

Wherever the divine wisdom of Aristotle has opened its mouth, the wisdom of others, it seems to me, is to be disregarded.--Dante.

I could soon get over Aristotle's _prestige_, if I could only get over his reasons.--Lessing.

If, now in my quiet days, I had youthful faculties at my command, I should devote myself to Greek, in spite of all the difficulties I know. Nature and Aristotle should be my sole study. It is beyond all conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, observed. To be sure he was sometimes hasty in his explanations; but are we not so, even to the present day?--Goethe (at 78).

If the proper earnestness prevailed in philosophy, nothing would be more worthy of establishing than a foundation for a special lectureship on Aristotle; for he is, of all the ancients, the most worthy of study.--Hegel.

Aristotle was one of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses that ever appeared--a man beside whom no age has an equal to place.--_Id._

Physical philosophy occupies itself with the general qualities of matter. It is an abstraction from the dynamic manifestations of the different kinds of matter; and even where its foundations were first laid, in the eight books of Aristotle's _Physical Lectures_, all the phenomena of nature are represented as the motive vital activity of a universal world-force.--Alexander von Humboldt.

It was characteristic of this extraordinary genius to work at both ends of the scientific process. He was alike a devotee to facts and a master of the highest abstractions.--Alexander Bain.

Aristotle is the _Father of the Inductive Method_, and he is so for two reasons: First, he theoretically recognized its essential principles with a clearness, and exhibited them with a conviction, which strike the modern man with amazement; and then he made the first comprehensive attempt to apply them to all the science of the Greeks.--Wilhelm Oncken.

Aristotle, for whose political philosophy our admiration rises, the more we consider the work of his successors, is less guided by imagination than Plato, examines reality more carefully, and recognizes more acutely, the needs of man.--Bluntschli.

It appears to me that there can be no question, that Aristotle stands forth, not only as the greatest figure in antiquity, but as the greatest intellect that has ever appeared upon the face of this earth.--George J. Romanes.

Aristotle, with all the wisdom of Plato before him, which he was well able to appropriate, could find no better definition of the true good of man than the full exercise or realization of the soul's faculties in accordance with its proper excellence, which was excellence of thought, speculative and practical.--Thomas Hill Green.

It is pretty definitely settled, among men competent to form a judgment, that Aristotle was the best educated man that ever walked on the surface of this earth. He is still, as he was in Dante's time, the "master of those that know." It is, therefore, not without reason that we look to him, not only as the best exponent of ancient education, but as one of the worthiest guides and ensamples in education generally. That we may not lose the advantage of his example, it will be well, before we consider his educational theories, to cast a glance at his life, the process of his development, and his work.

Aristotle was born about B.C. 384, in the Greek colony of Stagira in Thrace, near the borders of Macedonia. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician of good standing, the author of several medical works, and the trusted friend of Amyntas, the Macedonian King. His mother, Phaestis, was descended from the early settlers of the place. It was doubtless under his father's guidance that the boy Aristotle first became interested in those physical studies in which he was destined to do such wonderful work. Losing, however, both his parents at an early age, he came under the charge of Proxenus, of Atarneus, who appears to have done his duty by him. At the age of eighteen he came to Athens for his higher education, and entered the school of Plato in the Academy. Here he remained for nearly twenty years, listening to Plato, and acquiring those vast stores of information which in later life he worked up into lectures and scientific treatises. Nothing escaped him, neither art, science, religion, philosophy, nor politics. He seems, being well off, to have begun early to collect a library, and to aim at encyclopaedic knowledge. About his methods of study we know very little; but we hear that at times he a.s.sisted Plato in his work and was very careful of his own attire. It is clear that, in course of time, he rose in thought above the teachings of his master, and even rejected the most fundamental of them, the doctrine of self-existent ideas. But he never lost respect for that master, and when the latter died, he retired with Xenocrates, son of the new head of the Academy, to Atarneus, the home of his old guardian Proxenus, and of his fellow-Academic, Hermias, now king or tyrant of the place. Here he remained for three years, in the closest intimacy with his friend, until the latter was treacherously murdered by the Persians. He then crossed over to Mytilene, taking with him Pythias, Hermias' sister or niece, whom he had married, and to whom he was deeply devoted. He erected in Delphi a statue to his dead friend, and dedicated to him a poem, of which we shall hear more in the sequel.

About B.C. 343, when he was over forty years old, he was called to Macedonia, as tutor to Alexander, the thirteen-year-old son of King Philip, and grandson of his own father's old patron, Amyntas. This office he filled for about three years with distinguished success, and it may be safely said that never had so great a tutor so great a pupil.

During the latter part of the time, at least, Aristotle and Alexander seem to have lived at Stagira. This town had been captured and destroyed by Philip, and its inhabitants scattered. With the permission of the conqueror, Aristotle rea.s.sembled the inhabitants, rebuilt the town, drew up its laws, and laid out near it, at Mieza, in imitation of the Academy, a gymnasium and park, which he called the _Nymphaeum_. Hither he appears to have retired with his royal pupil and several other youths who were receiving education along with him, among them Theophrastus and the ill-fated Callisthenes. It was probably here that Aristotle adopted the habit of walking while imparting instruction, a habit which afterwards gave the name to his school. When Alexander, at sixteen, entered his father's army, Aristotle still continued to teach in the Nymphaeum, which existed even in Plutarch's time, more than four hundred years afterwards. But this lasted only for about five years; for in 335, when Alexander, who in the previous year had succeeded his murdered father, was preparing to invade Persia, Aristotle moved to Athens.

Finding that his old friend, Xenocrates, was director of the school in the Academy, he established himself, as a public teacher or professor, in the Lyceum, the Periclean gymnasium, used chiefly, it should seem, by the lower cla.s.ses and by foreign residents, of whom he himself was one.

As an alien, as the friend of the victorious Macedonians, who three years before had broken the power of Greece at Chaeronea, and taken away her autonomy forever, as a rival of the Platonists, and as a wealthy, well-dressed gentleman, he had many enemies and detractors; but his conduct seems to have been so un.o.bjectionable that no formal charge could be brought against him. His very numerous pupils were mostly foreigners, a fact not without its influence on the subsequent course of thought. He divided his days between writing and teaching, taking his physical exercise while engaged in the latter occupation. In the mornings he gave lectures to a narrow circle, in a strictly formal and scientific way, upon the higher branches of science; while in the afternoons he conducted conversations upon more popular themes with a less select audience. The former were called his esoteric, the latter his exoteric, discourses.

It was during his second residence in Athens, in the twelve years from B.C. 335 to 323, that Aristotle composed most of those great works in which he sought to sum up, in an encyclopaedic way, the results of a life of all-embracing study and thought. He had been in no haste to put himself on record, and it was not until he had reached a consistent view of the world that he ventured to treat, in a definitive way, any aspect of it. Thus it was that each of his treatises formed part of one great whole of thought. Had he succeeded in completing his plan, he would have left to the world a body of science such as, even in our own day, would look in vain for a peer among the works of any one man. Unfortunately, his plan was not completed, and even of the works which he did write only a portion has come down to us. But that portion is sufficient to place their author at the head of all scientific men. Some of his works, for example, his _Logic_, _Metaphysics_, _Ethics_, and _Politics_, still occupy the first place in the literature of these subjects. How a single man could have done all that he did, and in so many different departments, is almost inconceivable. No doubt he had helpers, in the shape of secretaries, learned slaves, and disciples; and it is certain that he received from his royal pupil munificent aid, which enabled him to do much, especially in the directions of physical and political research, that would have been impossible for a poor man; but, after all allowances have been made, his achievement still seems almost miraculous.

During all the years in which Aristotle was thus engaged, his position at Athens was becoming more and more insecure. The anti-Macedonian party were waiting for the first opportunity to rid the city of him, and were prevented from open attempts at this only by dread of Alexander's displeasure. Even when it was known that Aristotle had incurred disfavor with his old pupil, they did not venture to attack him; but in 323, when the news of Alexander's sudden death made all Greece feel that now the time had come to get rid forever of the hated Macedonians, and recover its liberty, they at once gave vent to their long-cherished hatred. How hard it was to find matter for an accusation against him, is shown by the fact that they had to go back to his old poem on _Worth_, written in memory of Hermias (see p. 4), and to base thereon a charge of impiety--a charge always easily made, and always sure to arouse strong popular prejudice. According to Athenian law, the defendant in any such case might, if he chose, escape punishment by leaving the city any time before the trial; and Aristotle, not being, like Socrates, a citizen, could have no ground for refusing to take advantage of this liberty.

Accordingly, with the remark that he would not voluntarily allow the Athenians to sin a second time against philosophy, he withdrew to his country residence at Chalcis in Euba, the old home of his mother's family, to wait till affairs should take another turn, as, indeed, they soon afterwards did, when Athens had to open her gates to Antipater.

But, ere that happened, Aristotle was in his grave, having died in 322, shortly before Demosthenes, of disease of the stomach, from which he had long suffered. His remains are said to have been carried to Stagira, where the grateful inhabitants erected an altar over them and paid divine honors to his memory. His library and the ma.n.u.scripts of his works he left in the hands of Theophrastus, who succeeded him in the Lyceum. His will, the text of which has come down to us, bears testimony, along with all else that we know of him, to the n.o.bility, kindliness, and justice of his nature.

CHAPTER II

ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY

Platon revait; Aristote pensait.--Alfred de Musset.

Are G.o.d and Nature then at strife That Nature lends such evil dreams?

--Tennyson.

There are three Essences. Two of these are sensible; one being eternal, and the other perishable. The latter is admitted by all, in the form, for example, of plants and animals; in regard to the former, or eternal one, we shall have to consider its elements, and see whether they be one or many. The third is immutable [and, therefore, inaccessible to sense], and this some thinkers hold to be transcendent.--Aristotle.

The vision of the divine is what is sweetest and best; and if G.o.d always enjoys that vision as we sometimes do, it is wonderful, and if he does so in a yet higher degree, it is more wonderful still.

And so even it is. And life belongs to him; for the self-determination of thought is life, and he is self-determination.

And his absolute self-determination is the supreme and eternal life.

And we call G.o.d a living being, eternal, best; so that life and duration, uniform and eternal, belong to G.o.d; for this is G.o.d.--_Id._

We must consider in what way the system of the universe contains the good and the best, whether as something transcendent and self-determined, or as order. Surely in both ways at once, as in any army, for which the good is in order, and is the general, and the latter more than the former. For the general is not due to the order, but the order to the general.--_Id._

The thought of Aristotle differs from that of Plato both in its method and in its results. Plato, reared in the school of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Herac.l.i.tus, and Socrates, had, naturally enough, come to look for truth in the supersensual region of mind, and thought he found it in ideas attainable by a process of dialectic within the individual consciousness. He thus came to put forward a doctrine which, despite its ostensible purpose to cement the bonds of society, in reality tended to withdraw men from society altogether and increase the very individualism it was intended to cure. Aristotle, while still in Plato's school, had turned away from this doctrine, and in after-life he never lost an opportunity of combating it. He could point to Plato's _Republic_ as a warning example of its logical consequences. But, in doing this, he was prepared to put another doctrine in its place, and he did so on the basis of a profound study of the whole course of Greek thought, mythological and philosophical.

Instead of appealing, like Plato, to the individual consciousness, and trying to discover ultimate truth by bringing its data into harmony among themselves, Aristotle appeals to the historic consciousness, and endeavors to find truth by harmonizing and complementing its data through a further appeal to the outer world, in which these data are realized. He maintains that the truths reached by the dialectic process are merely formal, and therefore empty,--useless in practice, until they have been filled by experience from the storehouse of nature. In consequence of this changed att.i.tude, he sets aside the dialectic process, and subst.i.tutes for it the _Method of Induction_, which he was the first man in the world to comprehend, expound, and apply, becoming thus the father of all true science. And he makes a more extensive use of induction than any other man since his time, applying it in a field in which even now it is hardly supposed to yield any results, the field of the common consciousness. Indeed, he everywhere begins his search for concrete truth by examining the historic consciousness, and, having, by a process of induction, discovered and generalized its contents, he turns with these to nature and, by a second induction, corrects, completes, and harmonizes them. We might express this in modern language, by saying that his whole endeavor is to correct and supplement the imperfect human consciousness by a continual appeal to the divine consciousness, _as manifested in the world_. It is the error of modern investigators that they employ only one-half of the inductive method, the objective, and either omit altogether the subjective, or else, like Plato, apply it only to the individual consciousness. Hence come the widely divergent results which still meet us in so many of the sciences, in Politics, Psychology, etc., hence the fact that a great deal of science, instead of correcting, widening, and harmonizing the common consciousness, stands altogether apart from it, or even in direct opposition to it. The man who writes a treatise on Psychology, or on the Soul, without troubling himself to discover what "Soul" means in the general consciousness of mankind, and perhaps setting out with an altogether individual notion of it, can hardly look for any other result. Aristotle, true to his method of induction, devotes one entire book of his _Psychology_ to finding out what "Soul" means in the historic consciousness, unreflective as well as reflective. Then, with this meaning, he goes to nature, seeks by induction to discover what she has to say about it, and abides by her reply. Hence it is that his thought has laid hold upon the world, and influenced it in practical ways, as no other man's thought has ever done. Hence it is that, of all ancient men, he is the one before whom the modern scientist bows with respect.

If we now ask ourselves what was the underlying thought that shaped Aristotle's theory of induction, what was his _Weltanschauung_, we shall find it to be this: The divine intelligence reveals itself subjectively in an historic process in the human consciousness, and objectively[4] in a natural process in the outer world. Truth for man is the harmony of the two revelations. It follows directly from this that the scientist must take impartial account of both. So, for example, if he finds G.o.ds in the historical consciousness, and laws or forces in nature, he has no right, like the theologian, to merge the latter in the former, or, like the physicist, to replace the former by the latter. He must retain both till he can bring them into harmony. Only then does he know either.

Such a philosophy as this, instead of drawing men away from the world of nature and history, and confining them to the narrow circle of their own consciousness, of necessity sent them back to that world, as the only means by which any human well-being could be reached. It is for this reason that it has so powerfully affected both social life and science.

Nevertheless, we should err greatly, if we supposed that, in Aristotle's view, the divine is nothing more than an immanent idea, working as a force-form in nature, and as a thought-form in mind. He does, indeed, believe that the divine is all this, but not that this is all the divine there is. Over and above the divine which is determined in nature and in man, there is the transcendent Mind, or G.o.d, determining himself through himself, and bearing the same relation to the divine that the sun bears to light, the human mind to human thought, the general to the order of his army. Here we are far away from Pantheism, and, though we have not yet risen to a clear conception of personality, we have at the "helm of the universe" a conscious being, the source of law and order. And man, rising above the thought whereby he knows himself through nature, and nature through himself, may enter into the consciousness of G.o.d and become a partaker in that life which is "sweetest and best." These are the features of Aristotle's thought which in the thirteenth century made it acceptable to the Christian Church in her struggle against Pantheism, and which paved the way for that higher mysticism of which Thomas Aquinas is the most distinguished exponent--a mysticism which does not, like that of the Neoplatonists and Buddhists, dispense with thought to lose itself in vacancy, but which, rising upon a broad basis of knowledge, pierces the clouds of sense, to find itself in the presence of the most concrete Reality, the inexhaustible source of all thought and all things.