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He called himself the Son of Man; in the only recorded prayer He gave to His disciples, there was no hint that prayer should be directed to Himself; it was all centred upon the Father. Here again the Aristotelian method, the delight in analysis, the natural human desire to make truth precise and complete, had intruded itself.
It will be remembered that dissatisfied with the proofs for the existence of God advanced by the Mutakallimun, Maimonides, in order to have a firm foundation for the central idea of religion, tentatively adopted the Aristotelian notion of the eternity of motion and the world.
The same proposition appears in Schiller's paper on Tragic Art , closely connected with the former. This article contains views of the affection of pity that seem to approximate the Aristotelian propositions about tragedy. His views on the sublime are expressed in two papers, "The Sublime" and "The Pathetic," in which we trace considerable influence of Lessing and Winckelmann.
His method, in general, of quieting the doubts of the "perplexed" is the old one as old as Philo and beyond of regarding Biblical phrases as metaphors and allegories, containing an esoteric meaning beside or opposed to the literal. Accordingly he lays the greatest stress on the explanation of Scriptural "homonyms," as he calls them, borrowing an Aristotelian term.
Telesius maintained that the Aristotelian doctrine must be replaced by an unprejudiced empiricism; that nature must be explained from itself, and by as few principles as possible. Beside inert matter, this requires only two active forces, on whose interaction all becoming and all life depend.
Finally in the Metaphysics we have an analysis of the fundamental notions of being, of the nature of reality and of God. The Jews did not get all this in its purity for various reasons. In the first place it was only gradually that the Jews became acquainted with the wealth of Aristotelian material.
A course of Aristotelian study might profitably be prescribed to every person who thinks of talking in public; he would at least learn how to respect himself and his audience, however ignorant and powerful it may be; he would tend to use words in an exact sense instead of indulging in the wild vagueness of speech which is so common and so dangerous.
He was the Humboldt of his day, and gave great attention to physics. In eight books he developed the general principles of natural science known to the Greeks. On the basis of the Aristotelian researches, the Alexandrian physicians carried out extensive inquiries in physiology. Herophilus discovered the fundamental principles of neurology, and advanced the anatomy of the brain and spinal cord.
With Bleak House, which I read as a student of philosophy at Oxford beginning to be familiar with Aristotelian canons, I felt my enjoyment mellowed by a somewhat more measured judgment. From that time onward Charles Dickens threw himself into a great variety of undertakings and many diverse kinds of publication.
Again and again the old metaphysical laws have been forced aside by observation; as, for example, when Kepler showed that the planetary orbits are not circular, and Galileo's telescope proved that the spot-bearing sun cannot be a perfect body in the old Aristotelian sense.
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