]

[Footnote 672: "Gorgias," Secs. 74-76.]

[Footnote 673: "Phaedo," Secs. 130, 131.]

Independent of all other considerations, virtue is, therefore, to be
pursued as the true good of the soul. Wisdom, Fortitude, Temperance,
Justice, the four cardinal virtues of the Platonic system, are to be
cultivated as the means of securing the purification and perfection of
the inner man. And the ordinary pleasures, "the lesser goods" of life,
are only to be so far pursued as they are subservient to, and compatible
with, the higher and holier duty of striving after "the resemblance to
God."

CHAPTER XII.

THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_).

THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).

ARISTOTLE.

Aristotle was born at Stagira, a Greek colony of Thrace, B.C. 384. His
father, Nicomachus, was a physician in the Court of Amyntas II., King of
Macedonia, and is reported to have written several works on Medicine and
Natural History. From his father, Aristotle seems to have inherited a
love for the natural sciences, which was fostered by the circumstances
which surrounded him in early life, and which exerted a determining
influence upon the studies of his riper years.

Impelled by an insatiate desire for knowledge, he, at seventeen years of
age, repaired to Athens, the city of Plato and the university of the
world. Plato was then absent in Sicily; on his return Aristotle entered
his school, became an ardent student of philosophy, and remained until
the death of Plato, B.C. 348. He therefore listened to the instructions
of Plato for twenty years.

The mental characteristics of the pupil and the teacher were strikingly
dissimilar. Plato was poetic, ideal, and in some degree mystical.
Aristotle was prosaic, systematic, and practical. Plato was intuitive
and synthetical. Aristotle was logical and analytical. It was therefore
but natural that, to the mind of Aristotle, there should appear
something confused, irregular, and incomplete in the discourses of his
master. There was a strange commingling of questions concerning the
grounds of morality, and statements concerning the nature of science; of
inquiries concerning "real being," and speculations on the ordering of a
model Republic, in the same discourse. Ethics, politics, ontology, and
theology, are all comprised in his Dialectic, which is, in fact, the one
grand "science of the idea of the good." Now to the mind of Aristotle it
seemed better, and much more systematic, that