United States or Vanuatu ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At Phaselis he stayed some time, and finding the statue of Theodectes, who was a native of this town and was now dead, erected in the marketplace, after he had supped, having drunk pretty plentifully, he went and danced about it, and crowned it with garlands, honoring not ungracefully in his sport, the memory of a philosopher whose conversation he had formerly enjoyed, when he was Aristotle's scholar.
He was likewise fond of literature and of reading, and we are told by Onesikritus that he was wont to call the Iliad a complete manual of the military art, and that he always carried with him Aristotle's recension of Homer's poems, which is called 'the casket copy, and placed it under his pillow together with his dagger.
In this hypothesis everything depends on the shape of the atoms; for earth it is cubical and for fire it is pyramidal. To-day physicists are again discussing the structure of the atom, and its shape is no slight factor in that structure. Plato's guesses read much more fantastically than does Aristotle's systematic analysis; but in some ways they are more valuable.
But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some value, less or more.
Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State, that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to the goal.
He certainly comes up to Aristotle's standard, where he says: 'The object of the poet is not to treat the True as it really happened, but as it should have happened. And now the story. I left myself indulging in reveries concerning the expected sight of my invisible charmer. The appointed hour came. I was quite excited.
Collecting together all the results of ancient speculation, he so combined them into a co-ordinate system that for a thousand years he reigned supreme in the schools. From a literary point of view, Plato was doubtless his superior; but Plato was a poet, making philosophy divine and musical, while Aristotle's investigations spread over a far wider range.
Honour, I conceive, is, in a phrase of Aristotle's, duty "with a bloom on it." Readers of his Letters, and of his Biography by his cousin, Mr. Balfour; readers of his essays, and of his novels, must see that he was keenly interested in cases of conscience; in the right course to steer in an apparent conflict of duties.
Most political questions are concerned with the construction and expression of the general will, and with attempts to ensure that the political machinery made to express the general will shall not be exploited for private or sectional ends. Aristotle's mixed constitution springs from a recognition of sectional interests in the state.
He sets out by defining truth according to Aristotle's description of it in these fourteen dreaded books of his metaphysics. Again he tells us, "he is most admired by those who best understand him;" and once more refers us to these fourteen books.
Word Of The Day