Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers Part 6

Aristotle might have a.s.sumed important affairs of State, but practical politics were not to his liking. "What Aristotle is in the world of thought I will be in the world of action," said Alexander.

On all of his journeys Alexander found time to keep in touch with his old teacher at home; and we find the ruler of Asia voicing that old request, "Send me something to read," and again, "I live alone with my thoughts, amidst a throng of men, but without companions."

Plutarch gives a copy of a letter sent by Alexander wherein Aristotle is chided for publishing his lecture on oratory. "Now all the world will know what formerly belonged to you and me alone," plaintively cries the young man who sighed for more worlds to conquer, and therein shows he was the victim of a fallacy that will never die--the idea that truth can be embodied in a book. When will we ever learn that inspired books demand inspired readers!

There are no secrets. A book may stimulate thought, but it can never impart it.

Aristotle wrote out the Laws of Oratory. "Alas!" groans Alexander, "everybody will turn orator now." But he was wrong, because Oratory and the Laws of Oratory are totally different things.

A Boston man of excellent parts has just recently given out the Sixteen Perfective Laws of Oratory, and the Nineteen Steps in Evolution.

The real truth is, there are Fifty-seven Varieties of Artistic Vagaries, and all are valuable to the man who evolves them--they serve him as a scaffolding whereby he builds thought. But woe betide Alexander and all rareripe Bostonians who mistake the scaffolding for the edifice.

There are no Laws of Art. A man evolves first, and builds his laws afterward. The style is the man, and a great man, full of the spirit, will express himself in his own way.

Bach ignored all the Laws of Harmony made before his day and set down new ones--and these marked his limitations, that was all. Beethoven upset all these, and Wagner succeeded by breaking most of Beethoven's rules. And now comes Grieg, and writes harmonious discords that Wagner said were impossible, and still it is music, for by it we are transported on the wings of song and uplifted to the stars.

The individual soul striving for expression ignores all man-made laws.

Truth is that which serves us best in expressing our lives. A rotting log is truth to a bed of violets, while sand is truth to a cactus. But when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought from a madman's brain. And when the proud and lofty cactus writes a book it never mentions violets, because it has never stooped to seek them.

Art is the blossoming of the Soul.

We can not make the plant blossom--all we can do is to comply with the conditions of growth. We can supply the sunshine, moisture and aliment, and G.o.d does the rest. In teaching, he only is successful who supplies the conditions of growth--that is all there is of the Science of Pedagogics, which is not a science, and if it ever becomes one, it will be the Science of Letting Alone, and not a scheme of interference. Just so long as some of the greatest men are those who have broken through pedagogic fancy and escaped, succeeding by breaking every rule of pedagogy, as Wagner discarded every Law of Harmony, there will be no such thing as a Science of Education.

Recently I read Aristotle's Essays on Rhetoric and Oratory, and I was pained to see how I had been plagiarized by this man who wrote three hundred years before Christ. Aristotle used charts in teaching and indicated the mean by a straight horizontal line, and the extreme by an upright dash. He says: "From one extreme the mean looks extreme, and from another extreme the mean looks small--it all depends upon your point of view. Beware of jumping to conclusions, for beside the appearance you must look within and see from what vantage-ground you gain the conclusions. All truth is relative, and none can be final to a man six feet high, who stands on the ground, who can walk but forty miles at a stretch, who needs four meals a day and one-third of his time for sleep. A loss of sleep, or loss of a meal, or a meal too much, will disarrange his point of view, and change his opinions," And thus do we see that a belief in "eternal punishment" is a mere matter of indigestion.

A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of G.o.d, he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more than the barbarians who preceded him.

He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point--the net bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition, expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing n.o.body comprehends: "Essential being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another; that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated." It gives one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on the brain, or powdered gra.s.shopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we see that he antic.i.p.ates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of night lie between them.

Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:

_Definitions:_

All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.

Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal to one another.

A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.

The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram--that is, an oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to anything.

A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that meet together, but are not on the same floor.

All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.

_Postulates and Propositions:_

A pie may be produced any number of times.

The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of propositions.

A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By Allen's.

The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not meet.

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at the Phalanstery.

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.

If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the side of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and the wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the weekly bills of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill be the greater, then the other bill is less than it might have been, which is absurd.

Therefore the bills are equal.

_Quod erat demonstrandum._

The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the past behind him, and dives into the future, spreads the present out thin. Therein lies the bane of most religions. A man goes out into the woods to study the birds: he walks and walks and walks and sees no birds. But just let him sit down on a log and wait, and lo! the branches are full of song.

Those who pursue Culture never catch up with her. Culture takes alarm at pursuit and avoids the stealthy pounce. Culture is a woman, and a certain amount of indifference wins her. Ardent wooing will not secure either wisdom or a woman--except in the case where a woman marries a man to get rid of him, and then he really does not get the woman--he only secures her husk. And the husks of culture are pedantry and sciolism.

The highest philosophy of the future will consist in doing each day that which is most useful. Talking about it will be quite incidental and secondary.

After Alexander had completed his little task of conquering the world, it was his intention to sit down and improve his mind. He was going back to Greece to complete the work Pericles had so well begun. To this end Aristotle had left Macedonia and established his Peripatetic School at Athens. Plato was exclusive, and taught in the Garden with its high walls. Aristotle taught in the "peripatos," or porch of the Lyceum, and his cla.s.ses were for all who wished to attend. Socrates was really the first peripatetic philosopher, but he was a roustabout. Nothing sanctifies like death--and now Socrates had become respectable, and his methods were to be made legal and legitimate.

Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty; he taught the rights of the individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State, the politicians got alarmed and put him to death. Plato, much more cautious, wrote his "Republic," wherein everything is subordinated for the good of the State, and the individual is but a cog in a most perfectly lubricated machine. Aristotle saw that Socrates was nearer right than Plato--sin is the expression of individuality and is not wholly bad--the State is made up of individuals, and if you suppress the thinking-power of the individual, you will get a weak and effeminate body politic; there will be none to govern. The whole fabric will break down of its own weight. A man must have the privilege of making a fool of himself--within proper bounds, of course. To that end learning must be for all, and liberty both to listen and to teach should be the privilege of every man.

This is a problem that Boston has before it today: Shall free speech be allowed on the Common? William Morris tried it in Trafalgar Square, to his sorrow; but in Hyde Park, if you think you have a message, London will let you give it. But this is not considered good form, and the "Best Society" listen to no speeches in the park. However, there are signs that Aristotle's outdoor school may come back. Phillips Brooks tried outdoor preaching, and if his health had not failed, he might have popularized it. It only wants a man who is big enough to inaugurate it.

Aristotle had various helpers, and arranged to give his lectures and conferences daily in certain porches or promenades. These lectures covered the whole range of human thought--logic, rhetoric, oratory, physics, ethics, politics, esthetics, and physical culture. These outdoor talks were called exoteric, and there gradually grew up esoteric lessons, which were for the rich or luxurious and the dainty. And there being money in the esoteric lessons, these gradually took the place of the exoteric, and so we get the genesis of our modern private school or college, where we send our children to be taught great things by great men, for a consideration.

Will the exoteric, peripatetic school come back?

I think so.

I believe that university education will soon be free to every boy and girl in America, and this without going far from home. Esoteric education is always more or less of a sham. Our public-school system is purely exoteric, only we stop too soon. We also give our teachers too much work and too little pay. Stop building warships, and use the money to double the teachers' salaries, making the profession respectable, raise the standard of efficiency, and the free university with the old Greek Lyceum will be here.

America must do this--the Old World can't. We have the money, and we have the men and the women; all that is needed is the desire, and this is fast awakening.

When Alexander died, of acute success, aged thirty-two, Aristotle's sustaining prop was gone. The Athenians never thought much of the Macedonians--not much more than Saint Paul did, he having tried to convert both and failed.

Athens was jealous of the power of Alexander: that a provincial should thus rule the Mother-Country was unforgivable. It was as if a Canadian should make himself King of England!

Everybody knew that Aristotle had been the tutor of Alexander, and that they were close friends. And that a Macedonian should be the chief school-teacher in Athens was an affront. The very greatness of the man was his offense: Athens had none to match him, and the world has never since matched him, either. How to get rid of the Macedonian philosopher was the question.

And so our old friend, heresy, comes in again. A poem was found, written by Aristotle many years before, on the death of his friend, King Hermias, wherein Apollo was disrespectfully mentioned. It was the old charge against Socrates come back--the hemlock was brewing. But life was sweet to Aristotle; he chose discretion to valor, and fled to his country home at Chalcis in Euboea.