but to consider him fatally defective on that
side of the mind, in respect to which incompleteness has been just
ascribed to Goethe. Whewell refers the errors of Aristotle not to a
neglect of facts, but to 'a neglect of the idea appropriate to the
facts: the idea of Mechanical cause, which is Force, and the
substitution of vague or inapplicable notions, involving only
relations of space or emotions of wonder.' This is doubtless true; but
the word 'neglect' implies mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in
Aristotle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but
sheer natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a
physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the
worst of attributes in a modern physical investigator--indistinctness
of ideas, confusion of mind, and a confident use of language which led
to the delusive notion that he had really mastered his subject, while
he had, as yet, failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put
words in the place of things, subject in the place of object. He
preached Induction without practising it, inverting the true order of
enquiry, by passing from the general to the particular, instead of
from the particular to the general. He made of the universe a closed
sphere, in the centre of which he fixed the earth, proving from
general principles, to his own satisfaction and to that of the world
for near 2,000 years, that no other universe was possible. His
notions of motion were entirely unphysical. It was natural or
unnatural, better or worse, calm or violent--no real mechanical
conception regarding it lying at the bottom of his mind.

He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, and proved that if it did
motion in it would be impossible. He determined _a priori_ how many
species of animals must exist, and showed on general principles why
animals must have such and such parts. When an eminent contemporary
philosopher, who is far removed from errors of this kind, remembers
these abuses of the _a priori_ method, he will be able to make allowance
for the jealousy of physicists as to the acceptance of so-called _a
priori_ truths. Aristotle's errors of detail, as shown by Eucken and
Lange, were grave and numerous. He affirmed that only in man we had
the beating of the heart, that the left side of the body was colder
than the right, that men have more teeth than women, and that there is
an empty space at the back of every man's head.

Th