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In a very different spirit did the Aristotelians receive the "Sidereal Messenger" of Galileo. The principal professor of philosophy at Padua resisted Galileo's repeated and urgent entreaties to look at the moon and planets through his telescope; and he even laboured to convince the Grand Duke that the satellites of Jupiter could not possibly exist.
It was in one of his letters that I first found the apothegm, "Men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians," a happy drawing of the line which separates the hard-headed scientific thinker of to-day from the thinkers of all other classes. William Ferrell, a much older man than myself, entered the office about the same time as I did.
In this pernicious class were many Aristotelians, such as Pomponatius; many philosophers and wits, such as Bodin, Rabelais, Montaigne; many Italians, as Leo X., Bembo, Bruno. Miracle-evidence began to fall into discredit during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
He maintained, that all bodies would fall through the same height in the same time, if they were not unequally retarded by the resistance of the air: and though he performed the experiment with the most satisfactory results, by letting heavy bodies fall from the leaning tower of Pisa, yet the Aristotelians, who with their own eyes saw the unequal weights strike the ground at the same instant, ascribed the effect to some unknown cause, and preferred the decision of their master to that of nature herself.
Apart from this supreme and first stimulus nothing would in fact be moving. The Aristotelians claimed simply to be analysing the nature of physical motion as they perceived it, and to find the necessity of perpetually applied divine stimulation implicit in it.
Thus, a technical definition helps to expound the artificial classification from which it grows; but ordinary definition cannot expound, as the Aristotelians fancied it could, the natural classification of things, i.e. explain their division into kinds, and the relations among the kinds: for the properties of every kind are innumerable, and all that definition can do is to state the connotation of the name.
And so he condemns the philosophers, though he cannot help using their method and even their fundamental doctrines, so far as they are purely theoretical and scientific. He is willing to go the full length of the Aristotelians only in the unity and incorporeality of God, though here too he vindicates sense perception to God, i. e., the knowledge of that which we get through our sense organs.
If, however, we regard less the topics on which these two illustrious men wrote, than the special service rendered by each of them to intellectual progress, we may not unfittingly compare the work of Locke the descent from metaphysics to psychology to the noble purpose of redeeming logic from the superstition of the Aristotelians, and exalting it to something higher than a mere verbal exercise for school-boys.
At the same time he insists that philosophy and reason are not adequate means for the solution of all problems, and that the actual solutions as found in the writings of the Aristotelians of his day are in many cases devoid of all demonstrative value.
Examination will show that the Aristotelians did mean something by this distinction, and something important; but which, being but indistinctly conceived, was inadequately expressed by the phraseology of essences, and the various other modes of speech to which they had recourse.
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