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They both attempt to evoke that ideal standard which human thought proposes to itself. This function is their effective essence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely endows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic is only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which obliges them to inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world.
Measured by one test of power, viz., by the number of books written directly for or against himself, to say nothing of those which he has indirectly modified, there is no philosophic writer whatsoever, if we except Aristotle, who can pretend to approach Kant in the extent of the influence which he has exercised over the minds of men.
Plotinus derives everything from God, who through his powers or activities pervades all. The different gradations of being are static in Aristotle, dynamic in Plotinus. Plotinus assumes an absolute cause, which he calls the One and the Good. This is the highest and is at the top of the scale of existence.
His disciples, on the other hand, seemed to me to bear a strong resemblance to the apostles, who disagreed immediately after their Master's death, when each manifestly recognized only a limited view as the right one. Neither the keenness of Aristotle nor the fulness of Plato produced the least fruit in me.
The Doctrine of the Mean here takes a form in which it has impressed subsequent thinkers, but which has less importance than is usually ascribed to it. Aristotle tries to show that this is the case in regard to every virtue named and recognised as such, but his treatment is often forced and the endeavour is not very successful.
A mill-wheel seemed to go round in his head, and he blamed Aristotle the heathen, who had seduced him in his youth, and taught him to split hairs about simple matters. He felt also that Paul could not help him, since such was his teaching. Feeling quite crushed, he knelt down again on his praying stool, and implored God to take him out of this world of lying deceit and uncertainty.
Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go.
Telepathy from the sitter will hardly account for the following, especially the strange turn at the end, which is signally dreamlike. "I being fond, very fond of writers of ancient history, etc., felt a strong desire to see Dante, Aristotle and several others. Question it no more. I am Shakespeare." June 4, 1897.
Does this mean that what we call the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says in one passage, is only a mutilated male.
It is necessary, since we cannot have a perfect life without friends, as Aristotle expresses it in the eighth book of Ethics; and the seed of the greater number of friendships seems to be sown in the first age of life, because in it a man begins to be gracious or the contrary.
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