onnexion with Aristotle, he is now a long way from himself and from the
beginnings of his own philosophy. At the time of his death he left his
system still incomplete; or he may be more truly said to have had
no system, but to have lived in the successive stages or moments of
metaphysical thought which presented themselves from time to time. The
earlier discussions about universal ideas and definitions seem to have
died away; the correlation of ideas has taken their place. The flowers
of rhetoric and poetry have lost their freshness and charm; and a
technical language has begun to supersede and overgrow them. But the
power of thinking tends to increase with age, and the experience of life
to widen and deepen. The good is summed up under categories which are
not summa genera, but heads or gradations of thought. The question of
pleasure and the relation of bodily pleasures to mental, which is hardly
treated of elsewhere in Plato, is here analysed with great subtlety. The
mean or measure is now made the first principle of good. Some of these
questions reappear in Aristotle, as does also the distinction between
metaphysics and mathematics. But there are many things in Plato which
have been lost in Aristotle; and many things in Aristotle not to be
found in Plato. The most remarkable deficiency in Aristotle is the
disappearance of the Platonic dialectic, which in the Aristotelian
school is only used in a comparatively unimportant and trivial sense.
The most remarkable additions are the invention of the Syllogism, the
conception of happiness as the foundation of morals, the reference of
human actions to the standard of the better mind of the world, or of
the one 'sensible man' or 'superior person.' His conception of ousia,
or essence, is not an advance upon Plato, but a return to the poor and
meagre abstractions of the Eleatic philosophy. The dry attempt to reduce
the presocratic philosophy by his own rather arbitrary standard of the
four causes, contrasts unfavourably with Plato's general discussion of
the same subject (Sophist). To attempt further to sum up the differences
between the two great philosophers would be out of place here. Any
real discussion of their relation to one another must be preceded by an
examination into the nature and character of the Aristotelian writings
and the form in which they have come down to us. This enquiry is not
really separable from an investigation of Theophrastus as well as
Aristotle and o