Literary Notes.

European Philosophy.

THE LOGIC OF ARISTOTLE.

"Logic since the time of Aristotle, like pure geometry since the time of Euclid, is a finished science, which in all essentials has received neither improvement nor alteration."-EMANUEL KANT.

ARISTOTLE possessed an encyclopædic knowledge and a methodic mind. The powers of classification were developed in him in a super-eminent degree. He mastered all the science of his age, fitted its teachings together into systematic oneness, formed it into a consistent whole, and extended the dominion of thought over the multitudinous details of life, practice, analysis, and investigation. He was a systematizer. Destitute of the intense personality and the plastic energy of Plato, or of the practical controversial subtlety of Socrates, he yet displayed the diligence of a collector, the insight of an observer, the acuteness of an analyst, the comprehensiveness of a philosopher, and the testing power of a critic, combined with the singular originality of a creative intellect. In him the capacity of holding, in thought, the exhaustless variety of individual phenomena, and the ability to perceive and apply the universal principles which pervade, overmaster, and explain these positive realities, existed in a rare co-operative and mutually balanced activity. His observative powers comprehended every individuality of appearance and manifestation-all that sensation, experience, and reflection can furnish to the mind; but his profound speculative tendency enabled him to see in these particular forms of being the internal characters which brought them under the ultimate principles of thought, through which they become harmonized, organized, and thinkable.

Plato's wondrous imaginative energy shows itself in all the outgush of his thoughts; the strong personality and livingness of Socrates permeates all his inquiries and his doctrines; but Aristotle retires from ken and view, entirely suppresses his own individuality, and devotes himself exclusively to the matter of nature or the form of thought. Disconnected observations he methodizes, tests, and unifies; incomplete enumerations he extends, examines, and arranges, and then strives to bring these facts of real life into some constituted harmony of thought, and to subject nature, experience, and life to some pervading, vivifying, and intelligible principle.

The Aristotelic philosophy was thorough; it included nature, man, and God; it extended from the primary sensations of childhood to the noblest cognitions of the reason and the culminating achievements of art. In the early chapters of his Metaphysics we find a masterly sketch of the progressive development of knowledge-1863.

G

a sketch which, in our opinion, supplies the centre-light of the whole system of thought which constitutes his Philosophy. After postulating that the human mind, on receiving from sensation the elements of thought, is, by an irrepressible internal necessity, impelled from idea to idea along the whole course of a philosophy -if it be permitted unstifledly to prosecute its inborn tendency to reflectiveness, he shows how, from the observation of sensational experience, and the notice of the activities and empirical operations of consciousness, we ascend to the comprehension of generalsunderlying and forming the true essence of particulars or individuals -and pass by regular gradations from experimental acts to artistic endeavours, and from technical arts to reasoned sciences, and from the individual sciences to one universal, ultimate, all-inclusive metaphysic, which contains implicitly the ground and explanation of all possible science, art, experience, and sensation.

When employing itself in this instinctive philosophizing, the human mind comes into a certain sort of antagonism with outward objects. In this hostile attitude of thought and its external excitants, the mind may either remain in the seclusion of a mere speculative spectatorship, and, beholding phenomena flitting in infinite variousness around it, may strive to account to itself for the singular ongoings of external nature or the strange vagrancies of feeling, passion, and imagination they effect in it-may, in fact, contemplate or theorize upon the phenomenal manifestations of nature to sense and to thought; or else, having no definite aims and intents, it may deploy itself among phenomena, and take from them such pleasure, profit, instruction, or inducement, as they give, and so act, suffer, learn, and be led, as men in common life do; or yet again, it may, with predetermined purpose and reflective resoluteness, mingle itself with the throng of phenomena, question them as to their coming and going, their order, sequence, and effects, -their capacities, powers, and dispositions; and hence learn to govern and use them, or submit to their requirements, and adapt their efficiencies to the accomplishment of its own designs,—and thus give play and scope to its own faculties of research, discovery, invention, or creativeness.

These exertions of thoughtful energy-contemplation, action, and creativeness-correspond with the threefold division of philosophy into theoretical, practical, and poetical, or, as we should now call it, æsthetical. The theoretical and the practical sciences have been opposed to each other, and been admitted and maintained as validly distinct from the days of Aristotle to our own times. The third division was for ages disregarded and forgotten until revived in Germany by Lessing, Kant, Schiller, Schelling, &c., under the title of Esthetics, or the philosophy of art.

Science is the product of the activity of reason. To determine, therefore, the true internal laws of the reason is a necessary preliminary to the acquisition of duly demonstrated science, of trustworthy knowledge, of a sufficient philosophy. As an introduction

to and a basis for philosophy, an organon, or efficient instrument, a tentative and critical art, a rigorously examinative system of investigation, was requisite; and this Aristotle undertook to supply. Reason affirms or denies the absolute or necessary, and the contingent or relative connection of thought with thought. In doing so, it proceeds in accordance with certain definite forms, and under distinctly fixed laws-laws as imperatively operative in right thought as the rules of health in right bodily action; capable, too, like them, of instinctive activity, but like them also capable of intelligent investigation, systematic arrangement, and so of being made effective for general guidance in the practical duties of life. The intellective faculty (reason) is the beginning of science; and the operations of the intellective faculty (reasonings) are the means of science, and bring it into substantive existence. Science is organized truth, therefore the activity of the intellect, in accordance with its own inherent laws, results in and produces truth. Rightthinking is the efficient instrument of a sufficient philosophy; and the laws of right-thinking, when duly and truly systematized, constitute a primary science-one upon which all others depend; and result in an art by which, if the soul be guided while thinking, its operations will be such as shall bring before it the truth regarding the matter of investigation, so far as it is possible to be known or discerned.

To this investigative, instrumental, efficient science, Aristotle gave no distinct name. The Stoics, of which sect Zeno of Citium was the founder, first employed the word Logic as significative of the science of the laws of thought. Aristotle had no such pure idea of reasoning as a distinct and formal activity as this implies. With him logic meant the syllogistic expression of demonstrative thought; while dialectics signified the thorough examination by question and answer of any popular or prevalent idea, that out of it the truth might be eliminated, and the false elided. This want of a distinctive appellative for the science of argumentative discourse led the early commentators to collect together such treatises of the Stagyrite as seemed specifically devoted to that subject, and to name them the Organon of Aristotle-meaning thereby the efficient instrument of philosophizing.

In modern editions, the logical treatises of Aristotle-which are, however, merely a collection of separate compositions, dealing in some measure with the science of argumentation, and arbitrarily arranged to form a first philosophy-consist of six distinct works, of which four may be said to be devoted to pure, and two to applied, logie, viz. :

I. "The Categories," in which Aristotle arranges and explains the most general notions under which ideas may be classed. The categories are, as Bacon calls them, cautions against the confusion of definitions and divisions. They constitute an attempt to form a complete theory of classification. The Aristotelic categories are not only logical but metaphysical, and are intended by him to apply to things as well as words. Logically they may be resolved

into two main divisions-substance and attribute; and metaphysically they are reducible to two also-being and accident: but they may be, perhaps, most advantageously exhibited in the following form, in which the words printed in italics and followed by Greek terms in brackets are the names of the categories of Aristotle, viz.:— Substance. 1 [[ουσία.]

Being.

1.

S Attribute or
Accident

a Real

b In Relation 4
[Πρὸς τί]

Matter or Quantity 2 [Пógov.]
Form or Quality 3 [Пolor].
Action 5 [Ilouv].

Passion 6 [Πασχειν].

Where, Space [lov].
When, 8 Time [Пórε].

Posture, 9 Manner [Ketolai].
Possession, 10 Habit ["Exev].

These categories, which are a classification of objects as represented by words in or to the mind, were, we think, intended more as practical exemplifications of the clear light in which a well-trained mind could set its ideas, than an exhaustive classification of things and thoughts. Taken in this view, they are not amenable to the contemptuous criticism of Mill, the apologetic censure of Ritter, the condemnation of Bacon, or the emphatic rejection of Kant. A more elaborate, though scarcely more satisfactory table of the categories of thought has been propounded by Sir William Hamilton. But in regard to this early attempt to bring the immense diversity of phenomena into some sort of manageable classification, this attempt to dissect sensations and arrange them into usable forms, and to bundle up, as it were, the appearance of things into orderly groups, we may use the words of Aristotle himself, viz.,-" Perhaps the beginning of everything is the greatest, according to the common saying; and for this reason it is also the most difficult. For just as in its efficiency it is the most powerful, so, as to its magnitude, it is the least, and the most difficult to discover. When the beginning is once made, it is easy to add."

II. On Interpretation, as it is usually translated, or as it might be rendered, on the enunciation of reasoned thought. This is mainly a treatise on grammar, in so far as regards the nature and uses of nouns and verbs. Logic and grammar here take their way side by side. The management of this theme is so subtle, so acute and clear, that the old logicians said it was written with a pen dipped in pure intellect,-it dazzles the mind with its unmixed transparency of thought, expression, and criticism.

Logic begins its examinative process with enunciated thought, with knowledge claiming to be truth. It does so in a propositionin a decision of the intellective faculty, in a judgment. The judgment and its various forms are critically examined, the nature of speech is discussed, the qualities of affirmation and negation, contrariety and contradiction are determined, and the modes in which the mind regards reality, possibility, chance, necessity, contingency, &c., are noted. In some measure it would be advisable to read the Hermeneutics before the Categories.