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From a reference in Aristotle's "Ethics" it might seem as if he were best known as a sculptor in marble, but only three statues by him are expressly recorded to have been of marble, against a larger number of bronze His subjects were chiefly divinities, we hear of only one or two figures of human beings from his hands.
In the latter he has borrowed largely from the eighth and ninth books of Aristotle's Ethics. His treatise De Officiis was finished about the time he wrote his second Philippic, a circumstance which illustrates the great versatility of his mental powers. Of a work so extensively celebrated, it is enough to have mentioned the name.
Aristotle's work is, I am informed, in eight books: here is a bagatelle in twenty-five pages.
It was founded in the fourteenth century by the Count Palatine Ruprecht, and had in the first year more than five hundred students, all busily committing to memory, after the old scholastic wise, the rules of grammar versified by Alexander de Villa Dei, and the extracts made by Peter the Spaniard from Michel Psellus's Synopsis of Aristotle's Organon, and the Categories, with Porphory's Commentaries.
It was a fine and deep saying of Aristotle's that "the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor." That is the mark of genius, for, said he, it implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.
Thence to the Exchange about several businesses, and so home to dinner, and in the afternoon took my brother John and Will down to Woolwich by water, and after being there a good while, and eating of fruit in Sheldon's garden, we began our walk back again, I asking many things in physiques of my brother John, to which he gives me so bad or no answer at all, as in the regions of the ayre he told me that he knew of no such thing, for he never read Aristotle's philosophy and Des Cartes ownes no such thing, which vexed me to hear him say.
As far as Aristotle's own view is concerned there is no temporal beginning either of being or of motion. Both are eternal, and so is matter, the basis of all genesis and change. God is the eternal cause of the eternal motion of the world, and hence of the eternal genesis and dissolution, which constitutes the life of the sublunar world.
When Alexander died, of acute success, aged thirty-two, Aristotle's sustaining prop was gone. The Athenians never thought much of the Macedonians not much more than Saint Paul did, he having tried to convert both and failed. Athens was jealous of the power of Alexander: that a provincial should thus rule the Mother-Country was unforgivable.
Happy though it may be, this comparison is but a metaphor which perhaps facilitates the understanding of Aristotle's idea, but is not essential to his theory. For my part, I attach far greater importance to the character of relatum, and correlatum ascribed to the two terms mind and matter, and to the actualisation produced by their union. Let me add another point of comparison.
Aristotle's theory of poetry, which influenced so profoundly the criticism of the renaissance, was not followed by other classical treatises of the same scope. In fact, very little Greek or Roman literary criticism is concerned with poetical theory as compared with the keen interest of many critics in oratory.
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