The metaphysics, or first philosophy, does in fact deal with the extreme abstractions or generalities of all sciences, It is a collection, partly of doubts and difficulties, partly of attempted solutions, upon these last refinements of the human mind. It includes many valuable comments on the philosophy of Plato and others anterior to or contem porary with A. The general terms and subtle distinctions which this treatise first brought to view, were highly prized throughout all the philosophy of the middle ages.
He appears in a very different light in his great work on animals. He has here amassed a stock of genuine observations, and also introduced a method of classification which continues to this clay as the most approved groundwork of zoological classifica tion. In this work we see perhaps, in the most advantageous light, the two great qualities of his mind, rarely coupled in the same individual—the aptitude for observa tion and logical method. The excellence shown in his various writings generally depends upon one or other of these qualities.
His organon or logic is his complete development of formal reasoning, and is the basis and nearly the whole substance of syllogistic or scholastic logic. reasoning, science he almost entirely created. Mr. Grote observes (History of Greece, part ii. chap. avid.) that " what was begun by Socrates, and improved by Plato, was embodied as a part of a comprehensive system of formal logic by the genius of A.; a system which was not only of extraordinary value in reference to the processes and controversies of its time, but which also, having become insensibly worked into the minds of instructed men, has contributed much to form what is correct in the habits of modern thinking. Though it has now been enlarged and recast by sonic modern authors (especially by Mr. John Stuart
Mill in his admirable System of Logic) into a structure commensurate with the vast increase of knowledge and extension of positive method belonging to the present day— we must recollect that the distance between the best modern logic and that of A. is hardly so great as that between A. and those who preceded him by a century—Empe doeles, Anaxagoras, and the Pythagoreans; and that the movement in advance of these latter commences with Socrates." A considerable portion of his writings relate to the human mind and body. In one of these, a short treatise on _Memory anal Recollection, he gave the first statement of the laws of association of ideas.
His treatises on rhetoric and poetics were the earliest development of a philosophy of criticism, and still continue to be studied. The same remark is applicable to his elabo rate disquisitions on ethics.
Perhaps one of his greatest works is his Politics, based upon a collection made by himself of 158 different constitutions of state; the collection itself being unhappily lost. Here we see the spirit of the inductive observer, which indeed is no less apparent in the works mentioned in the last paragraph. It is, however, a singular fact, that he gives no evidence of having read the historian Thucydides; and his only reference to Ilerodotus is on a point of natural history. Yet the narratives and descriptions contained in the works of both these writers are probably of as much value, and as much in point, in a political philosophy, as the very best observations made by himself.
The great current distinctions of matter and form, substance and quality, actuality and potentiality, arc due to A. See Grote's Aristotle, 1872.