greatest permanency and power to our religious character. By means of his works, we seek to know the man, the living personality of Socrates, or Aristotle, and to be assimilated to his greatness, and gain the uses of his philosophy. By words and works, recorded for these purposes, by pens more graphic than Plato's or Xenophon's, because guided by inspiration, we seek to know the only true God, even Jesus Christ whom he has sent, which is eternal life.

The works of Aristotle have not all been preserved; but even those that remain embrace a wonderful variety, and comprehensiveness of topics. Being written, too, with great terseness of expression, with scarce a superfluous word, and never an unnecessary illustration, resembling in this respect that singular monument of compactness and strength, the analogy of Butler, they are not to be judged by the standards of modern composition. Some have thought all we have were "Esoteric," or merely heads of lectures. One class of his works, called in modern times "The Organon," has produced commentaries more ponderous in bulk than all his surviving volumes! One page of his Politics has more in it, than the entire productions of whole sessions of the American Congress. His small volume of Rhetoric has supplied the Quinctilians and Ciceros, of ancient, and the Blairs "et id omne genus" of modern times, with materials. Many a flashy article of criticism, in celebrated reviews, has been derived, often at second or third hand, from his Poetics, an ingot from his mine, or a little solid lump of gold thrown out from his crater, and washed down by various catastrophies to our level and times, attenuated to the extreme, and gilding an amazing surface of thought, for the admiration of the uninitiated, on the principle "omne ignotum pro mirifico!" Like the "Mechanique Celeste" of La Place, which, it is said, we do not know the fact, only two or three contemporaries ever mastered, the Logic of Aristotle, not a very large thing after all in size, has sometimes not been fully comprehended, even by those who have enacted the hugest elucidations thereof!

The extant works of Aristotle, (the Bibliomaniac adds, with a sigh, "many of the most important are lost,") according to the edition generally esteemed the best, are the follow

ing, viz: Organon; Rhetorica et Poetica; Ethica ad Nichomachum; Ethica Magna; Politica et Economica; Animalium Historia; De Animalium partibus; Physicæ Auscultationes; De Cœlo; De Generatione et Conceptione; De Meteoris; De Mundo; Parva Naturalia; Varia Opuscula; Aristoteli, Alexandri et Casci Problemata; Aristoteli et Theophrasti Metaphysica. Several of these are incomplete.*

Logic and ethics, politics and poetics, heaven and the animal kingdom, meteors, man and metaphysics, embrace a wide range of topics, and give full scope for developing mental characteristics. The man who wrote on these, three hundred years before the Christian era, and so impressed his mind on them, as to make them studied and valuable in all the interval till now, was truly no ordinary man.

We believe in original differences of mental capacities. "God fashioneth," we are told, "all hearts alike." All, therefore, possess equally the elements of responsibility and a proper humanity. But He doth not fashion all brains alike. He, the original and sovereign proprietor, gives to one man "ten talents," to another only "one," "working severally as he will in each," and saying to all, "occupy till I come." Whether phrenology be true or not, there must be something in the size, structure or correlative proportions of different brains, which predestinates a man for a hero or a philosopher, rather than a harlequin or an idiot. John Foster, in his Essay on Decision of Character, suggests, that there must be somewhat of the lion in the composition of one who has this trait in perfection, and Isaac Taylor has, somewhere, a remark very similar, in regard to "the power of rebuke." The sovereignty of God adjusts the degree of original endowment. Man's virtue and duty consists in faithful development and proper application. Modern science has measured the calibre of the brain of Cuvier, Depuytren and Webster, but we have no record of such an operation, and therefore can have no benefit of such means in regard to Aristotle. We must be content with the a posteriori process in arriving at the peculiarities of his mind. In the first place, judging from the immense mass of facts and observations contained in his physics and natural history,

• Encyclopedia Americana. Vol. II. Art. Aristotle.

we may safely infer that Aristotle was distinguished by a large share of the perceptive faculties-the quality of mind which adapts for a minute, accurate and extensive observation. What Cicero so felicitously called the "cognitio rerum," and which underlies usually the elements of all intellectual superiority though it may be directed to different departments, and qualify for different works of eminence, Aristotle possessed and exercised to an extent almost unparalleled; whether he directed his observations to the material or the mental world, studied the facts of natural history, or the evanescent exercises and states of the human soul, he received a clear, strong impression of the thing, just as it was. He was a close and diligent observer of natural objects, actual facts and the phenomena of the physical and mental world. He acted from the very beginning, as we all do, and were designed to do, on the common sense principle, which his after philosophy only confirmed; that they were realities, not delusions.* He received, in one sense, "the kingdom of God, as a little child." To his latest years he did the same, maugre all the influences of Pyrrhonism, previously so popular, and the ultra-idealism he encountered. He was "the father of the faithful," in the school of common sense. We all do just as Aristotle did, till we become entangled in the mazes of speculation and philosophy. When a man works his weary way through these labyrinths, as all thinkers must do, "through much tribulation," he emerges from them only established more firmly in the soundness of his original convictions. What he acted upon at first, from the strength of original impressions arising from the Divine constitution, he acts upon afterwards as in accordance with the decisions of the profoundest philosophy. "The things of the kingdom of God," in the highest sense, are to be received, treated and become established in the soul of every intelligent believer, by an analogous process. Received in the spirit of little children at first, they are to be put to the severest tests, tried by all the principles of the deepest philosophy, and then inwrought as realities, to be questioned and suspected no more

• Aristotle says, "What appears true to all, is true."

Bacon says we must receive science as we do the kingdom of God, as little children.

than the objects and facts of the physical world. Aristotle gathered up an immense mass of facts from careful observation of nature, and close analysis of his own self-conscious exercises and emotions. The extent and precision of these can only be properly apprehended or appreciated by actual perusal, and cannot be adequately conveyed, without giving particulars. Any one can judge of the fields explored from the titles of his works already given. But the patience and perseverance of the philosopher can be known only by the few whose leisure or taste enable them to follow him in the details. In his Rhetoric, Poetics and Ethics, he seems to have used almost every important fact in the history of antecedent times. Many modern anecdotes, with names only altered, had their origin in his pages, in the way of illustration. The judicious Hooker, citing one of Aristotle's treatises, calls him "the most judicious philosopher, whose eye scarce any thing did escape, which was to be found in the bosom of nature."* How much the judiciousness of Hooker himself, was derived from one whom he so highly estimated, may be readily inferred by all. How often is a student of Aristotle, who may have plumed himself on his originality, tempted to utter the ancient curse on those "qui ante nos nostra scripserunt!" "Aristotle," says a German philosopher, "takes his station at the head of all the empirical philosophers of antiquity for extent of knowledge, skillfulness of inquiry and admirable principles of investigation."

Nearly allied to powers of observation or strong perceptive faculties in all vigorous minds, is the power or faculty of analysis, or as some prefer to term it, abstraction. This is indispensable to, but altogether distinguishable from, generalization or the synthetical power. Aristotle's faculty of analysis must have been very striking, if it is fair, as we think it is, to infer the existence and degree of this power from its results in the processes of his generalization, which will come presently to be considered. It is a serious defect or infelicity in some minds, otherwise excellent, that the analytical preponderates over the synthetical element. They give us processes, which are comparatively valueless, instead of results. They tell us how they

Hooker, Eccl. Pol. B. viii. Chap. ii. (12.)

have got at their conclusions, which is often a useless tax on time and patience, rather than what they have obtained. Some otherwise excellent and instructive writers are obnoxious on this point. For teachers and children the first method may be most valuable; but scholars and thinkers desiderate and prefer altogether the latter. A rare combination of excellences is necessary, in one and the same work, to satisfy the wants of both these classes. Usually it is better to settle first the order of minds to be addressed, and then give unity of design and adaptedness to the execution. If we had the "exoteric" writings of Aristotle, according to the idea suggested above, or his popular lectures, we might have seen more fully the evidences of his power of analysis. We must now, however, be contented with the inferential proof of their possession in the works of almost sybilline brevity and condensation which have been preserved.

The other element of philosophical genius, the faculty of generalization, belonged to Aristotle in an extraordinary degree. Hence we remark again, another striking peculiarity of Aristotle was the faculty of order, the great element of the genius of classification. His famous Categories were like drawers in a cabinet. As regularly as when he received specimens from his illustrious pupil, he may be supposed to have labeled and arranged them, so when he returned from his own wide travels over the domain of thought, he disposed of his treasures, each in its right place, the categorical shelf where it legitimately belonged, and where he knew he could put his finger on it just when it was needed. This genius for classification exists in other minds very strikingly. But what forever forbids their rising above mediocrity of character and power, is the fact, that they are content to classify only the smallest articles. Every thing is in admirable order, but after all, as the countryman said of a very tidy little store, "There isn't much in it, anyhow." Aristotle had something to classify, as well as a genius for classification. He would probably have disdained to keep a book of autographs, gathered from all ages, countries and personages, labeled from A to 2, or relics of the same extensive variety, scoriæ, tattered rags and dead men's fingers placed in the same alphabetical and unphilosophical