Any
children
begotten without
the authority of the State share the same fate, either before or after
birth.
the authority of the State share the same fate, either before or after
birth.
Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals by Thomas Davidson
For all that is fair and good, said
I, increases for men, as life advances, not through beauties, but
through virtues. Such, Socrates, to the best of my recollection, was the
first conversation I had with my wife. '"
Ischomachus goes on and tells how, in subsequent conversations, he
taught his wife the value of order, "how to have a place for everything,
and everything in its place," how to train a servant, and how to make
herself attractive without the use of cosmetics or fine clothes. But
enough has been quoted to show what the ideal family relation among the
Athenians was, and what education was thought fitting for girls and
women. Just as the man was merged in the citizen, so the woman was
merged in the housewife, and they each received the education and
training demanded by their respective duties. If Athenian husbands had
all been like Ischomachus, it is clear that the lives of wives might
have been very happy and useful, and that harmony might have reigned in
the family. But, unfortunately, that was not very often the case. Wives,
being neglected, became lazy, wasteful, self-indulgent, shrewish, and
useless, while their husbands, finding them so, sought in immoral
relations with brilliant and cultivated _hetaerae_, or in worse relations
still, a coarse substitute for that satisfaction which they ought to
have sought and found in their own homes. Thus there grew up a condition
of things which could not fail to sap the moral foundations of society,
and which made thoughtful men turn their attention to the question of
woman's education and sphere of duty.
CHAPTER III
PLATO
All human laws are nourished by the one divine law; for it
prevaileth as far as it listeth, and sufficeth for all and surviveth
all. --Heraclitus
Though reason is universal, the mass of men live as if they had each
a private wisdom of his own. --_Id. _
ANTIGONE. . . . But him will I inter;
And sweet 'twill be to die in such a deed,
And sweet will be my rest with him, the sweet,
When I have righteously offended here.
For longer time, methinks, have I to please
The dwellers in yon world than those in this;
For I shall rest forever there. But thou,
Dishonor still what's honored of the gods.
--Sophocles, _Antigone_.
The circle that gathered round Isaiah and his household in these
evil days, holding themselves apart from their countrymen,
treasuring the word of revelation, and waiting for Jehovah, were
indeed, as Isaiah describes them, "signs and tokens in Israel from
Jehovah of hosts that dwelleth in Mount Zion. " The formation of this
little community was a new thing in the history of religion. Till
then no one had dreamed of a fellowship of faith dissociated from
all national forms, maintained without the exercise of ritual
services, bound together by faith in the divine word alone. It was
the birth of a new era in the Old Testament religion, for it was the
birth of the conception of the _Church_, the first step in the
emancipation of spiritual religion from the forms of political
life,--a step not less significant that all its consequences were
not seen till centuries had passed away. --W. Robertson Smith,
_Prophets of Israel_.
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit. --Lowell.
That which is to be known I shall declare, knowing which a man
attains immortality--the beginningless Supreme Brahma that is said
to be neither Aught nor Naught. --_Bhagavad Gita. _
The only Metaphysics which really and immediately sustains Ethics is
one which is itself primarily ethical, and made of the staff of
Ethics. --Schopenhauer.
In answer to the burning question, How can Athens be brought back to
moral life and strength? Socrates had answered, "By finding a new moral
sanction. " He had even gone further, and said: "This sanction is to be
found in correct thinking, in thinking whole thoughts, which, because
they are whole, are absolutely true, being the very principles according
to which God governs the world. " This is, obviously, a mere formal
answer. If it was to be of any real service, three further questions had
to be answered: (1) How can whole thoughts be reached? (2) What do they
prove to be when they are reached? (3) How can they be applied to the
moral reorganization of human life? Plato's philosophy is but an attempt
to answer these questions. It therefore naturally falls into three
divisions, (1) _Dialectics_, including Logic and Theory of Knowledge,
(2) _Theoretics_, including Metaphysics and Physics, (3) _Practics_,
including Ethics and Politics.
It is obvious that any attempt to reform society on Socratic principles
must proceed, not from society itself, but from some person or persons
in whom these principles are realized, and who act upon it from without.
These persons will be the philosophers or, rather, the sages. Two
distinct questions, therefore, present themselves at the outset: (1) How
does a man become a sage? (2) How can the sage organize human life, and
secure a succession of sages to continue his work after him? To the
first of these questions, dialectics gives the answer; to the second,
practics; while theoretics exhibits to us at once the origin and the
end, that is, the meaning, of all existence, the human included. In the
teaching of Plato we find, for the first time recognized and exhibited,
the extra-civic or super-civic man, the man who is not a mere fragment
of a social whole, completely subordinated to it, but who, standing
above society, moulds it in accordance with ideas derived from a higher
source. Forecasts of this man, indeed, we find in all Greek literature
from Homer down,--in Heraclitus, Sophocles, etc. , and especially, as we
have seen, in Pythagoras;--but it is now for the first time that he
finds full expression, and tries to play a conscious part. In him we
have the promise of the future Church.
But to return to the first of our two questions, How does a man become a
sage? We found the answer to be, By the dialectic method. Of this,
however, not all men have the inclination to avail themselves, but only
a chosen few, to whom the gods have granted the inspiration of Love
(? ? ? ? )--a longing akin to madness (? ? ? ? ? ), kindled by physical beauty,
but tending to the Supreme Good. This good, as we shall see, consists in
the vision (? ? ? ? ? ? ) of eternal truth, of being, as it is. The few men
who are blessed with this love are the divinely appointed reformers and
guides of mankind, the well-being of which depends upon submission to
them. The dialectic method is the process by which the inspired mind
rises from the beauty of physical things, which are always particulars,
to the beauty of spiritual things, which are always universals, and
finally to the beauty of the Supreme Good, which is _The Universal_. The
man who has reached this last, and who sees its relation to all other
universals, so that they form together a correlated whole, sees all
truth, and is the sage. What we call universals Plato called "ideas"
(? ? ? ? ? = forms or species). These ideas he regards as genera, as
numbers, as active powers, and as substances, the highest of which is
God.
Two things are especially notable in connection with this theory: (1)
that it involves that Oriental ascetic view of life which makes men turn
away from the sensible world, and seek their end and happiness in the
colorless world of thought; (2) that it suggests a view of the nature of
God which comes perilously near to Oriental pantheism. Plato, indeed,
nowhere denies personality of God; but neither does he affirm it, and he
certainly leaves the impression that the Supreme Being is a force acting
according to a numerical ratio or law. It would be difficult to
overestimate the influence of these two views upon the subsequent course
of Greek education and life. The former suggested to the super-civic man
a sphere of activity which he could flatter himself was superior to the
civic, viz. a sphere of contemplation; while the second, by blurring, or
rather ignoring, the essential elements of personality in God, viz.
consciousness, choice, and will, left no place for a truly religious or
moral life. This explains why Platonism, while it has inspired no great
civic movement, has played such a determining part in ecclesiasticism,
and why, nevertheless, the Church for ages was compelled to fight the
tendencies of it, which it did in great measure under the aegis of
Plato's stern critic, Aristotle.
We are now ready to take up our second question: How can the sage
organize human life, and secure a succession of sages to continue his
work after him? Plato has given two widely different answers to this
question, in his two most extensive works, (1) the _Republic_, written
in his earlier life, when he was under the influence of Heraclitus,
Parmenides, and Socrates, and stood in a negative attitude toward the
real world of history, (2) the _Laws_, written toward the end of his
life, when he became reconciled, in part at least, to the real world and
its traditional beliefs, and found satisfaction and inspiration in the
teachings of Pythagoras. His change of allegiance is shown by the fact
that in the _Laws_, and in them alone, Socrates does not appear as a
character. We shall speak first of the _Republic_, and then point out
wherein the _Laws_ differs from it.
When Plato wrote his _Republic_, he was deeply impressed with the evils
and dangers of the social order in which he lived. This impression,
which was that of every serious man of the time, had in his case
probably been deepened by the teaching and the tragic death of Socrates.
The dangers were, obviously, the demoralization of Athenian men and
women, and the consequent weakening and dissolution of the social bonds.
The evils, as he saw them, were (1) the defective education of children,
(2) the neglect of women, (3) the general disorganization of the State
through individualism, which placed power in the hands of ignorance and
rapacity, instead of in those of wisdom and worth. The _Republic_ is a
scheme for removing these evils and averting the consequent dangers. It
is the Platonic sage's recipe for the healing of society, and it is but
fair to say that, of all the Utopian and aesthetic schemes ever proposed
for this end, it is incomparably the best. It proposes nothing less than
the complete transformation of society, without offering any hint as to
how a selfish and degraded people is to be induced to submit thereto. In
the transformed society, the State is all in all; the family is
abolished; women are emancipated and share in the education and duties
of men; the State attends to the procreation and education of children;
private property is forbidden. The State is but the individual writ
large, and the individual has three faculties, in the proper development
and coordination of which consists his well-being: the same, therefore,
must be true of the State. These faculties are (1) intellect or reason,
(? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? , etc. ), (2) spirit or courage (? ? ? ? ? ,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ), (3) desire or appetite (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ). The first resides in the head, the second in the heart,
the third in the abdomen. The first is peculiar to man, the second he
shares with the animals, and the third with both animals and plants. The
proper relation of these faculties exists when reason, with clear
insight, rules the whole man (Prudence); when spirit takes its
directions from reason in its attitude toward pleasure and pain
(Fortitude); when spirit and appetite together come to an understanding
with reason as to when the one, and when the other, shall act
(Temperance); and, finally, when each of the three strictly confines
itself to its proper function (Justice). Thus we obtain the four
"cardinal virtues. " As existing in the individual, they are relations
between his own faculties. It is only in the State that they are
relations between the individual and his fellows. Rather we ought to
say, they are relations between different classes of society; for
society is divided into three classes, marked by the predominance of one
or other of the three faculties of the soul. _First_, there is the
intelligent class,--the philosophers or sages; _second_, the spirited
class,--the military men or soldiers; _third_, the covetous class,--men
devoted to industry, trade, and money-making. The well-being of the
State, as of the individual, is secure only when the relations between
these classes are the four cardinal virtues; when the sages rule, and
the soldiers and money-makers accept this rule, and when each class
strictly confines itself to its own function, so, for example, that the
sages do not attempt to fight, the soldiers to make money, or the
money-makers to fight or rule. In the Platonic ideal State, accordingly,
the three classes dwell apart and have distinct functions. All the power
is in the hands of the philosophers, who dwell in lofty isolation,
devoted to the contemplation of divine ideas, and descending only
through grace to mingle with human affairs, as teachers and absolute
rulers, ruling without laws. Their will is enforced by the military
class, composed of both sexes, which lives outside the city, devoting
itself to physical exercises and the defence of the State. These two
classes together constitute the guardians (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ) of the State, and
stand to each other in the relation of head and hand. They produce
nothing, own nothing, live sparingly, and, indeed, cherish a sovereign
contempt for all producing and owning, as well as for those who produce
and own. They find their satisfaction in the performance of their
functions, and the maintenance of virtue in the State. What small amount
of material good they require is supplied to them by the industrial
class, which they protect in the enjoyment of the only good it strives
after or can appreciate, the good of the appetites. This class, of
course, has no power, either directive or executive, being incapable of
any. It is, nevertheless, entirely happy in its condition of tutelage,
and, as far as virtue can be predicated of sensuality, virtuous, the
excesses of sensuality being repressed by the other two classes. Indeed,
the great merit which Plato claims for his scheme is, that it secures
harmony, and therefore happiness, for all, by placing every individual
citizen in the class to which by nature he belongs, that is, in which
his nature can find the fullest and freest expression compatible with
the well-being of the whole. Such is Plato's political scheme, marked by
the two notorious Greek characteristics, love of harmony and contempt
for labor. It is curious to think that it foreshadowed three modern
institutions--the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the standing army, and the
industrial community, in which, however, the relations of power demanded
by Plato are almost reversed, with (it is only fair to say) the result
which he foresaw.
In trying to answer the question, By what means shall these classes be
sundered? Plato calmly assumes that his scheme is already in full
operation among grown people, so that the only difficulty remaining is
with regard to the children. And this is completely met by his scheme of
education. The State or, let us say at once, the philosophic class,
having abolished the family, and assumed its functions, determines what
number and kind of children it requires at any given time, and provides
for them as it would for sheep or kine. It brings together at festivals
the vigorous males and females, and allows them to choose their mates
for the occasion. As soon as the children are born, they are removed
from their mothers and taken charge of in State institutions, where the
feeble and deformed are at once destroyed.
Any children begotten without
the authority of the State share the same fate, either before or after
birth. Those whose birth is authorized, and who prove vigorous, are
reared by the State, none of them knowing, or being known by, their
parents. But they by no means suffer any diminution of parentage on that
account; for every mature man regards himself as the father, and every
mature woman regards herself as the mother, of all the children born
within a certain time, so that every child has thousands of fathers and
mothers, all interested in his welfare; and the mothers, being relieved
from nearly all the duties of maternity, share equally with the men in
all the functions of the State.
The system of education to which the children of the State are subjected
is, to a large extent, modelled after that of Sparta, especially in
respect to its rigor and its absolutely political character. It
contains, however, a strong Ionic or Athenian element, notably on the
intellectual and aesthetic side. It may fairly claim to be intensely
Hellenic. It accepts the time-honored division of education into Music
and Gymnastics, making no distinct place for Letters, but including them
under Music. It demands that these two branches shall be pursued as
parts of a whole, calculated to develop, as far as may be, the
harmonious human being, and fit him to become part of the harmonious
State. I have said "as far as may be," because Plato believes that only
a small number of persons at any given time can be reduced to complete
harmony. These are the born philosophers, who, when their nature is
fully realized, no longer require the State, but stand, as gods, above
it. In truth, the State is needed just because the mass of mankind
cannot attain inner harmony, but would perish, were it not for the outer
harmony imposed by the philosophers. This is a sad fact, and would be
altogether disheartening, were it not for the belief, which Plato seems
to have derived from Pythagoras and the Egyptians, that those human
beings who fail to attain harmony in one life, will have opportunities
to do so in other lives, so long as they do not, by some awful and
malignant crime or crimes, show that they are utterly incapable of
harmony. Plato's scheme of political education, therefore, requires, as
its complement, the doctrines of individual immortality, of probation
continued through as many lives as may be necessary, and of the
possibility of final and eternal blessedness or misery. In fact, Plato
has a fully-developed eschatology, with an "other world," consisting of
three well-defined parts,--Elysium, Acheron, and
Tartarus,--corresponding to the Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell of
Catholic Christianity; with one important difference, however, due to
the doctrine of metempsychosis. While the Christian purgatory is a place
or state of purgation for souls whose probation is over forever, Acheron
is merely a place where imperfect souls remain till the end of a
world-period, or aeon, of ten thousand years, when they are again allowed
to return to life and renew their struggle for that complete harmony
which is the condition of admission to the society of the gods.
It is from this eschatology that Plato derives the moral sanctions which
he employs in his State. It is true that no one has insisted with
greater force than he upon the truth that virtue is, in and for itself,
the highest human good; he believed, however, that this could be
appreciated only by the philosopher, who had experience of it, and that
for the lower orders of men a more powerful, though less noble, sanction
was necessary. Accordingly, he depicts the joys of Elysium in images
that could not but appeal to the Hellenic imagination, and paints
Tartarus in gruesome colors that would do honor to a St. Ignatius.
In order fully to understand the method of Plato's political education,
we must revert to Chapter III of Book I. There we saw that, according to
the Greeks, a complete education demanded three things, (1) a noble
nature, (2) training through habit, (3) instruction. For the first Plato
would do what can be done by artificial selection of parents; for the
second, he would depend upon music and gymnastics; for the third, upon
philosophy. In these last two divisions we have the root of the mediaeval
_trivium_ and _quadrivium_. The Platonic pedagogical system seeks to
separate the ignoble from the noble natures, and to place the former in
the lowest class. It then trains the noble natures in music and
gymnastics, and, while this is going on, it tries to distinguish those
natures which are capable of rising above mere training to reflective or
philosophic thought, from those which are not. The latter it assigns to
the military class, which always remains at the stage of training, while
the former are instructed in philosophy, and, if they prove themselves
adepts, are finally admitted to the ruling class, as sages. Any member
of either of the higher classes who proves himself unworthy of that
class, may at any time be degraded into the next below.
As soon as the children are accepted by the State, their education under
State nurses begins. The chief efforts of these for some time are
directed to the bodies of the children, to seeing that they are healthy
and strong. As soon as the young creatures can stand and walk, they are
taught to exert themselves in an orderly way and to play little games;
and as soon as they understand what is said to them, they are told
stories and sung to. Such is their first introduction to gymnastics and
music. What games are to be taught, what stories told, and what airs
sung to the children, the State determines, and indeed, since the
character of human beings depends, in great measure, upon the first
impression made upon them, this is one of its most sacred duties. Plato
altogether disapproves of leaving children without guidance to seek
exercise and amusement in their own way, and demands that their games
shall be such as call forth, in a gentle and harmonious way, all the
latent powers of body and mind, and develop the sense of order, beauty,
and fitness. He is still more earnest in insisting that the stories told
to children shall be exemplifications of the loftiest morality, and the
airs sung to them such as settle, strengthen, and solemnize the soul. He
follows Heraclitus in demanding that the Homeric poems, so long the
storehouse for children's stories, shall be entirely proscribed, on
account of the false ideals which they hold up both of gods and heroes,
and the intimidating descriptions which they give of the other world.
Virtue, he holds, cannot be furthered by fear, which is characteristic
only of slaves. He thinks that all early intellectual training should be
a sort of play. The truth is, the infant-school of Plato's _Republic_
comes as near as can well be imagined to the ideal of the modern
kindergarten.
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 noble from the ignoble. As soon as a
child shows plainly that it belongs by nature to the lowest class, they
consign it to that class, and its education by the State practically
ceases. Of course these officers know from what class 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 class after childhood the
State leaves to take care of itself, persuaded that appetite will always
find means for its own satisfaction. The nobler 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 Heraclitean 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 assigned to the soldier
class, and start on a course of higher education in military training,
while those who evince great intellectual ability become novices in the
ruling class, 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 aptitude for higher studies are drafted
off into the lower public offices, while those who do, pass 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 class. They are now free men; they have reached the goal of
existence; their life is hidden with God; they are free from the prison
of the body, and only remain in it voluntarily, and out of gratitude 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 institutions 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 title suggests, in a way almost
obtrusive, the change of attitude 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 assume an
all-important place. In writing the _Laws_, moreover, he exchanges
allegiance to Socrates and ideas for allegiance to Pythagoras and the
gods. 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
gods, its ethical notions, its traditions. In these, as embodied in
institutions, 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 class) 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 assisted 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 reassembled 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 classes 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 unobjectionable 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 Euboea, 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 manuscripts 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 nobility,
kindliness, and justice of his nature.
CHAPTER II
ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY
Platon revait; Aristote pensait. --Alfred de Musset.
Are God 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 God
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 God a living being, eternal, best; so that life and
duration, uniform and eternal, belong to God; for this is
God. --_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, Heraclitus, 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.
I, increases for men, as life advances, not through beauties, but
through virtues. Such, Socrates, to the best of my recollection, was the
first conversation I had with my wife. '"
Ischomachus goes on and tells how, in subsequent conversations, he
taught his wife the value of order, "how to have a place for everything,
and everything in its place," how to train a servant, and how to make
herself attractive without the use of cosmetics or fine clothes. But
enough has been quoted to show what the ideal family relation among the
Athenians was, and what education was thought fitting for girls and
women. Just as the man was merged in the citizen, so the woman was
merged in the housewife, and they each received the education and
training demanded by their respective duties. If Athenian husbands had
all been like Ischomachus, it is clear that the lives of wives might
have been very happy and useful, and that harmony might have reigned in
the family. But, unfortunately, that was not very often the case. Wives,
being neglected, became lazy, wasteful, self-indulgent, shrewish, and
useless, while their husbands, finding them so, sought in immoral
relations with brilliant and cultivated _hetaerae_, or in worse relations
still, a coarse substitute for that satisfaction which they ought to
have sought and found in their own homes. Thus there grew up a condition
of things which could not fail to sap the moral foundations of society,
and which made thoughtful men turn their attention to the question of
woman's education and sphere of duty.
CHAPTER III
PLATO
All human laws are nourished by the one divine law; for it
prevaileth as far as it listeth, and sufficeth for all and surviveth
all. --Heraclitus
Though reason is universal, the mass of men live as if they had each
a private wisdom of his own. --_Id. _
ANTIGONE. . . . But him will I inter;
And sweet 'twill be to die in such a deed,
And sweet will be my rest with him, the sweet,
When I have righteously offended here.
For longer time, methinks, have I to please
The dwellers in yon world than those in this;
For I shall rest forever there. But thou,
Dishonor still what's honored of the gods.
--Sophocles, _Antigone_.
The circle that gathered round Isaiah and his household in these
evil days, holding themselves apart from their countrymen,
treasuring the word of revelation, and waiting for Jehovah, were
indeed, as Isaiah describes them, "signs and tokens in Israel from
Jehovah of hosts that dwelleth in Mount Zion. " The formation of this
little community was a new thing in the history of religion. Till
then no one had dreamed of a fellowship of faith dissociated from
all national forms, maintained without the exercise of ritual
services, bound together by faith in the divine word alone. It was
the birth of a new era in the Old Testament religion, for it was the
birth of the conception of the _Church_, the first step in the
emancipation of spiritual religion from the forms of political
life,--a step not less significant that all its consequences were
not seen till centuries had passed away. --W. Robertson Smith,
_Prophets of Israel_.
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit. --Lowell.
That which is to be known I shall declare, knowing which a man
attains immortality--the beginningless Supreme Brahma that is said
to be neither Aught nor Naught. --_Bhagavad Gita. _
The only Metaphysics which really and immediately sustains Ethics is
one which is itself primarily ethical, and made of the staff of
Ethics. --Schopenhauer.
In answer to the burning question, How can Athens be brought back to
moral life and strength? Socrates had answered, "By finding a new moral
sanction. " He had even gone further, and said: "This sanction is to be
found in correct thinking, in thinking whole thoughts, which, because
they are whole, are absolutely true, being the very principles according
to which God governs the world. " This is, obviously, a mere formal
answer. If it was to be of any real service, three further questions had
to be answered: (1) How can whole thoughts be reached? (2) What do they
prove to be when they are reached? (3) How can they be applied to the
moral reorganization of human life? Plato's philosophy is but an attempt
to answer these questions. It therefore naturally falls into three
divisions, (1) _Dialectics_, including Logic and Theory of Knowledge,
(2) _Theoretics_, including Metaphysics and Physics, (3) _Practics_,
including Ethics and Politics.
It is obvious that any attempt to reform society on Socratic principles
must proceed, not from society itself, but from some person or persons
in whom these principles are realized, and who act upon it from without.
These persons will be the philosophers or, rather, the sages. Two
distinct questions, therefore, present themselves at the outset: (1) How
does a man become a sage? (2) How can the sage organize human life, and
secure a succession of sages to continue his work after him? To the
first of these questions, dialectics gives the answer; to the second,
practics; while theoretics exhibits to us at once the origin and the
end, that is, the meaning, of all existence, the human included. In the
teaching of Plato we find, for the first time recognized and exhibited,
the extra-civic or super-civic man, the man who is not a mere fragment
of a social whole, completely subordinated to it, but who, standing
above society, moulds it in accordance with ideas derived from a higher
source. Forecasts of this man, indeed, we find in all Greek literature
from Homer down,--in Heraclitus, Sophocles, etc. , and especially, as we
have seen, in Pythagoras;--but it is now for the first time that he
finds full expression, and tries to play a conscious part. In him we
have the promise of the future Church.
But to return to the first of our two questions, How does a man become a
sage? We found the answer to be, By the dialectic method. Of this,
however, not all men have the inclination to avail themselves, but only
a chosen few, to whom the gods have granted the inspiration of Love
(? ? ? ? )--a longing akin to madness (? ? ? ? ? ), kindled by physical beauty,
but tending to the Supreme Good. This good, as we shall see, consists in
the vision (? ? ? ? ? ? ) of eternal truth, of being, as it is. The few men
who are blessed with this love are the divinely appointed reformers and
guides of mankind, the well-being of which depends upon submission to
them. The dialectic method is the process by which the inspired mind
rises from the beauty of physical things, which are always particulars,
to the beauty of spiritual things, which are always universals, and
finally to the beauty of the Supreme Good, which is _The Universal_. The
man who has reached this last, and who sees its relation to all other
universals, so that they form together a correlated whole, sees all
truth, and is the sage. What we call universals Plato called "ideas"
(? ? ? ? ? = forms or species). These ideas he regards as genera, as
numbers, as active powers, and as substances, the highest of which is
God.
Two things are especially notable in connection with this theory: (1)
that it involves that Oriental ascetic view of life which makes men turn
away from the sensible world, and seek their end and happiness in the
colorless world of thought; (2) that it suggests a view of the nature of
God which comes perilously near to Oriental pantheism. Plato, indeed,
nowhere denies personality of God; but neither does he affirm it, and he
certainly leaves the impression that the Supreme Being is a force acting
according to a numerical ratio or law. It would be difficult to
overestimate the influence of these two views upon the subsequent course
of Greek education and life. The former suggested to the super-civic man
a sphere of activity which he could flatter himself was superior to the
civic, viz. a sphere of contemplation; while the second, by blurring, or
rather ignoring, the essential elements of personality in God, viz.
consciousness, choice, and will, left no place for a truly religious or
moral life. This explains why Platonism, while it has inspired no great
civic movement, has played such a determining part in ecclesiasticism,
and why, nevertheless, the Church for ages was compelled to fight the
tendencies of it, which it did in great measure under the aegis of
Plato's stern critic, Aristotle.
We are now ready to take up our second question: How can the sage
organize human life, and secure a succession of sages to continue his
work after him? Plato has given two widely different answers to this
question, in his two most extensive works, (1) the _Republic_, written
in his earlier life, when he was under the influence of Heraclitus,
Parmenides, and Socrates, and stood in a negative attitude toward the
real world of history, (2) the _Laws_, written toward the end of his
life, when he became reconciled, in part at least, to the real world and
its traditional beliefs, and found satisfaction and inspiration in the
teachings of Pythagoras. His change of allegiance is shown by the fact
that in the _Laws_, and in them alone, Socrates does not appear as a
character. We shall speak first of the _Republic_, and then point out
wherein the _Laws_ differs from it.
When Plato wrote his _Republic_, he was deeply impressed with the evils
and dangers of the social order in which he lived. This impression,
which was that of every serious man of the time, had in his case
probably been deepened by the teaching and the tragic death of Socrates.
The dangers were, obviously, the demoralization of Athenian men and
women, and the consequent weakening and dissolution of the social bonds.
The evils, as he saw them, were (1) the defective education of children,
(2) the neglect of women, (3) the general disorganization of the State
through individualism, which placed power in the hands of ignorance and
rapacity, instead of in those of wisdom and worth. The _Republic_ is a
scheme for removing these evils and averting the consequent dangers. It
is the Platonic sage's recipe for the healing of society, and it is but
fair to say that, of all the Utopian and aesthetic schemes ever proposed
for this end, it is incomparably the best. It proposes nothing less than
the complete transformation of society, without offering any hint as to
how a selfish and degraded people is to be induced to submit thereto. In
the transformed society, the State is all in all; the family is
abolished; women are emancipated and share in the education and duties
of men; the State attends to the procreation and education of children;
private property is forbidden. The State is but the individual writ
large, and the individual has three faculties, in the proper development
and coordination of which consists his well-being: the same, therefore,
must be true of the State. These faculties are (1) intellect or reason,
(? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? , etc. ), (2) spirit or courage (? ? ? ? ? ,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ), (3) desire or appetite (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ). The first resides in the head, the second in the heart,
the third in the abdomen. The first is peculiar to man, the second he
shares with the animals, and the third with both animals and plants. The
proper relation of these faculties exists when reason, with clear
insight, rules the whole man (Prudence); when spirit takes its
directions from reason in its attitude toward pleasure and pain
(Fortitude); when spirit and appetite together come to an understanding
with reason as to when the one, and when the other, shall act
(Temperance); and, finally, when each of the three strictly confines
itself to its proper function (Justice). Thus we obtain the four
"cardinal virtues. " As existing in the individual, they are relations
between his own faculties. It is only in the State that they are
relations between the individual and his fellows. Rather we ought to
say, they are relations between different classes of society; for
society is divided into three classes, marked by the predominance of one
or other of the three faculties of the soul. _First_, there is the
intelligent class,--the philosophers or sages; _second_, the spirited
class,--the military men or soldiers; _third_, the covetous class,--men
devoted to industry, trade, and money-making. The well-being of the
State, as of the individual, is secure only when the relations between
these classes are the four cardinal virtues; when the sages rule, and
the soldiers and money-makers accept this rule, and when each class
strictly confines itself to its own function, so, for example, that the
sages do not attempt to fight, the soldiers to make money, or the
money-makers to fight or rule. In the Platonic ideal State, accordingly,
the three classes dwell apart and have distinct functions. All the power
is in the hands of the philosophers, who dwell in lofty isolation,
devoted to the contemplation of divine ideas, and descending only
through grace to mingle with human affairs, as teachers and absolute
rulers, ruling without laws. Their will is enforced by the military
class, composed of both sexes, which lives outside the city, devoting
itself to physical exercises and the defence of the State. These two
classes together constitute the guardians (? ? ? ? ? ? ? ) of the State, and
stand to each other in the relation of head and hand. They produce
nothing, own nothing, live sparingly, and, indeed, cherish a sovereign
contempt for all producing and owning, as well as for those who produce
and own. They find their satisfaction in the performance of their
functions, and the maintenance of virtue in the State. What small amount
of material good they require is supplied to them by the industrial
class, which they protect in the enjoyment of the only good it strives
after or can appreciate, the good of the appetites. This class, of
course, has no power, either directive or executive, being incapable of
any. It is, nevertheless, entirely happy in its condition of tutelage,
and, as far as virtue can be predicated of sensuality, virtuous, the
excesses of sensuality being repressed by the other two classes. Indeed,
the great merit which Plato claims for his scheme is, that it secures
harmony, and therefore happiness, for all, by placing every individual
citizen in the class to which by nature he belongs, that is, in which
his nature can find the fullest and freest expression compatible with
the well-being of the whole. Such is Plato's political scheme, marked by
the two notorious Greek characteristics, love of harmony and contempt
for labor. It is curious to think that it foreshadowed three modern
institutions--the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the standing army, and the
industrial community, in which, however, the relations of power demanded
by Plato are almost reversed, with (it is only fair to say) the result
which he foresaw.
In trying to answer the question, By what means shall these classes be
sundered? Plato calmly assumes that his scheme is already in full
operation among grown people, so that the only difficulty remaining is
with regard to the children. And this is completely met by his scheme of
education. The State or, let us say at once, the philosophic class,
having abolished the family, and assumed its functions, determines what
number and kind of children it requires at any given time, and provides
for them as it would for sheep or kine. It brings together at festivals
the vigorous males and females, and allows them to choose their mates
for the occasion. As soon as the children are born, they are removed
from their mothers and taken charge of in State institutions, where the
feeble and deformed are at once destroyed.
Any children begotten without
the authority of the State share the same fate, either before or after
birth. Those whose birth is authorized, and who prove vigorous, are
reared by the State, none of them knowing, or being known by, their
parents. But they by no means suffer any diminution of parentage on that
account; for every mature man regards himself as the father, and every
mature woman regards herself as the mother, of all the children born
within a certain time, so that every child has thousands of fathers and
mothers, all interested in his welfare; and the mothers, being relieved
from nearly all the duties of maternity, share equally with the men in
all the functions of the State.
The system of education to which the children of the State are subjected
is, to a large extent, modelled after that of Sparta, especially in
respect to its rigor and its absolutely political character. It
contains, however, a strong Ionic or Athenian element, notably on the
intellectual and aesthetic side. It may fairly claim to be intensely
Hellenic. It accepts the time-honored division of education into Music
and Gymnastics, making no distinct place for Letters, but including them
under Music. It demands that these two branches shall be pursued as
parts of a whole, calculated to develop, as far as may be, the
harmonious human being, and fit him to become part of the harmonious
State. I have said "as far as may be," because Plato believes that only
a small number of persons at any given time can be reduced to complete
harmony. These are the born philosophers, who, when their nature is
fully realized, no longer require the State, but stand, as gods, above
it. In truth, the State is needed just because the mass of mankind
cannot attain inner harmony, but would perish, were it not for the outer
harmony imposed by the philosophers. This is a sad fact, and would be
altogether disheartening, were it not for the belief, which Plato seems
to have derived from Pythagoras and the Egyptians, that those human
beings who fail to attain harmony in one life, will have opportunities
to do so in other lives, so long as they do not, by some awful and
malignant crime or crimes, show that they are utterly incapable of
harmony. Plato's scheme of political education, therefore, requires, as
its complement, the doctrines of individual immortality, of probation
continued through as many lives as may be necessary, and of the
possibility of final and eternal blessedness or misery. In fact, Plato
has a fully-developed eschatology, with an "other world," consisting of
three well-defined parts,--Elysium, Acheron, and
Tartarus,--corresponding to the Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell of
Catholic Christianity; with one important difference, however, due to
the doctrine of metempsychosis. While the Christian purgatory is a place
or state of purgation for souls whose probation is over forever, Acheron
is merely a place where imperfect souls remain till the end of a
world-period, or aeon, of ten thousand years, when they are again allowed
to return to life and renew their struggle for that complete harmony
which is the condition of admission to the society of the gods.
It is from this eschatology that Plato derives the moral sanctions which
he employs in his State. It is true that no one has insisted with
greater force than he upon the truth that virtue is, in and for itself,
the highest human good; he believed, however, that this could be
appreciated only by the philosopher, who had experience of it, and that
for the lower orders of men a more powerful, though less noble, sanction
was necessary. Accordingly, he depicts the joys of Elysium in images
that could not but appeal to the Hellenic imagination, and paints
Tartarus in gruesome colors that would do honor to a St. Ignatius.
In order fully to understand the method of Plato's political education,
we must revert to Chapter III of Book I. There we saw that, according to
the Greeks, a complete education demanded three things, (1) a noble
nature, (2) training through habit, (3) instruction. For the first Plato
would do what can be done by artificial selection of parents; for the
second, he would depend upon music and gymnastics; for the third, upon
philosophy. In these last two divisions we have the root of the mediaeval
_trivium_ and _quadrivium_. The Platonic pedagogical system seeks to
separate the ignoble from the noble natures, and to place the former in
the lowest class. It then trains the noble natures in music and
gymnastics, and, while this is going on, it tries to distinguish those
natures which are capable of rising above mere training to reflective or
philosophic thought, from those which are not. The latter it assigns to
the military class, which always remains at the stage of training, while
the former are instructed in philosophy, and, if they prove themselves
adepts, are finally admitted to the ruling class, as sages. Any member
of either of the higher classes who proves himself unworthy of that
class, may at any time be degraded into the next below.
As soon as the children are accepted by the State, their education under
State nurses begins. The chief efforts of these for some time are
directed to the bodies of the children, to seeing that they are healthy
and strong. As soon as the young creatures can stand and walk, they are
taught to exert themselves in an orderly way and to play little games;
and as soon as they understand what is said to them, they are told
stories and sung to. Such is their first introduction to gymnastics and
music. What games are to be taught, what stories told, and what airs
sung to the children, the State determines, and indeed, since the
character of human beings depends, in great measure, upon the first
impression made upon them, this is one of its most sacred duties. Plato
altogether disapproves of leaving children without guidance to seek
exercise and amusement in their own way, and demands that their games
shall be such as call forth, in a gentle and harmonious way, all the
latent powers of body and mind, and develop the sense of order, beauty,
and fitness. He is still more earnest in insisting that the stories told
to children shall be exemplifications of the loftiest morality, and the
airs sung to them such as settle, strengthen, and solemnize the soul. He
follows Heraclitus in demanding that the Homeric poems, so long the
storehouse for children's stories, shall be entirely proscribed, on
account of the false ideals which they hold up both of gods and heroes,
and the intimidating descriptions which they give of the other world.
Virtue, he holds, cannot be furthered by fear, which is characteristic
only of slaves. He thinks that all early intellectual training should be
a sort of play. The truth is, the infant-school of Plato's _Republic_
comes as near as can well be imagined to the ideal of the modern
kindergarten.
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 noble from the ignoble. As soon as a
child shows plainly that it belongs by nature to the lowest class, they
consign it to that class, and its education by the State practically
ceases. Of course these officers know from what class 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 class after childhood the
State leaves to take care of itself, persuaded that appetite will always
find means for its own satisfaction. The nobler 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 Heraclitean 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 assigned to the soldier
class, and start on a course of higher education in military training,
while those who evince great intellectual ability become novices in the
ruling class, 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 aptitude for higher studies are drafted
off into the lower public offices, while those who do, pass 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 class. They are now free men; they have reached the goal of
existence; their life is hidden with God; they are free from the prison
of the body, and only remain in it voluntarily, and out of gratitude 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 institutions 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 title suggests, in a way almost
obtrusive, the change of attitude 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 assume an
all-important place. In writing the _Laws_, moreover, he exchanges
allegiance to Socrates and ideas for allegiance to Pythagoras and the
gods. 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
gods, its ethical notions, its traditions. In these, as embodied in
institutions, 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 class) 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 assisted 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 reassembled 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 classes 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 unobjectionable 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 Euboea, 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 manuscripts 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 nobility,
kindliness, and justice of his nature.
CHAPTER II
ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY
Platon revait; Aristote pensait. --Alfred de Musset.
Are God 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 God
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 God a living being, eternal, best; so that life and
duration, uniform and eternal, belong to God; for this is
God. --_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, Heraclitus, 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.
