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Updated: April 30, 2025
That great naturalist wrote to Ogle in 1882: 'From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.
But those accents are all in the wrong, and Ephorus is wholly in fault. For those who pass over the paeon, do not perceive that a most delicate, and at the same time most dignified rhythm is passed over by them. But Aristotle's opinion is very different, for he considers that the heroic rhythm is a grander one than is admissible in prose, and that an iambic is too like ordinary conversation.
It is formed of five shelly, wedge-shaped pieces, each ending in a hard, triangular tooth. The whole mouth is a conical box, called by naturalists "Aristotle's lantern." The shell is hardly thicker than that of a hen's egg, and is even more fragile.
One is reminded of Aristotle's theory of Catharsis, according to which the soul was purged of strong or bad passions by listening to vivid representations of them on the stage. So, by the forcing method we deprecate, the soul is given just enough religious stimulus to act as an inoculation against deeper and more serious interest later.
We read, too, Harriet Martineau's translation of the works of Auguste Comte, and found the part on woman most unsatisfactory. He criticises Aristotle's belief that slavery is a necessary element of social life, yet seems to think the subjection of woman in modern civilization a matter of no importance.
The ancients perceived that there were differences of kind among these creatures, and even in Aristotle's time the sciences of zoölogy and botany had attained the point where there were considerable treatises on those subjects. It was not, however, until a little more than a century ago that men began accurately to describe and classify these species of the organic world.
To clear the field for this inquiry, it will be well first of all to insist on a distinction which is mostly discounted in significance because taken for granted. We speak o Aristotle's Katharsis as the Tragic Emotion, forgetting that to-day Tragedy and the Tragic are no longer identical.
I suggest, then, that the modern tendency to take lightly Aristotle's demand that the drama should have a "beginning, a middle, and an end," arises from the nature of things, and implies, not necessarily, nor even probably, a decline in craftsmanship, but a new intimacy of relation to life, and a new sincerity of artistic conscience.
Aristotle's definition is as follows:<1> "Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play: in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions."
This new outburst of philosophical studies was due to the recovery of many hitherto unknown works of Aristotle, and as a consequence classical studies were completely neglected and Chartres was deserted for Paris. We have seen that the contemporaries of Abailard knew none but Aristotle's logical works, and these only in part and in Latin translations.
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