BOOK language as expressing what was known. He did VI. not contemplate any progress in science, nor anticiLITERARY pate its advancement, and therefore did not mean to HISTORYOF ENGLAND. frame any system for extending it: he felt himself to be living in an highly cultivated age, which had succeeded to other periods and nations, like the Egyptian and Ethiopian, the Phenician and the Chaldean, which had been all greatly celebrated for their wis dom and learning; and therefore he did not suppose that nature was not sufficiently known, nor foresee the immense additions which the last three centuries have made to it; nor, consequently, did he think of devising any means to promote the discovery of what he did not perceive to be deficient, nor believe to be penetrable by mortal intellect. Confining his view, or as he intended, extending it, to all that was then known of nature and man, he observed that all properties and words had reference to some particular thing, which he called a subject; there was always something to which his predicaments were applicable, or in which they inhered: something was substance; had quantity or quality, or relation; was in some place, time, or position, and was having, doing, or suffering; this something he called a subject; it was a fox, a vulture, a boy, or a horse, or any analogous thing that was spoken of. This subject was also, in his conception, a substance, not as we now usually mean by the term a solid substantial thing, but rather a subsisting thing. The Aristotelian substance may be considered to mean what the word subsistence may be used to express. Considering the word used to denote subsistences, or substances in this meaning, he perceived that many related to what our metaphysicians have usually called XI. OF THE LOSOPHY. abstract ideas; they did not signify any particular CHAP. subject or individual, as the brown horse in the field, or Socrates, or the elm-tree in that hedge, but were HISTORY general terms for all the individuals of these classes; SCHOLASas, a horse, a man, a tree; these terms, and the ideas TIC PRIor things which they implied, he called primary substances; his primary substances were therefore our general terms or abstract ideas; as a ship, a palace, a king, and not any particular king, palace, or ship. All other substances, that is, all really and visibly existing things, he named secondary substances; thus, winds or castle, the Thamès, Bonaparte, lord Nelson, or the duke of Wellington, would be some of his secondary substances; as, a fortress, a river, an emperor, an admiral, or a general, would be, in his philosophical vocabulary, primary ones. 1 He found other terms, also, like his primary substances, having reference to no precise individual object, yet to be applied to, or enumerated of them; as the word animal; he remarked, that many different classes of things were implied by it, as birds, beasts, fishes and insects, as well as men. He therefore distinguished these as comprising a separate body of words, and he named them genera, and the classes they comprehended, either of words or things, he called species; animal was a genus; and man, beast, and bird, were species of that genus, for, however dissimilar to each other, they all agreed in being animals. Another class of words and actual properties he found to be arrangeable under the term DIFFERENCES. Each species had some qualities which distinguished them from each other; as, that man is rational; so man and some animals are unlike others, in being HISTORY OF BOOK biped; as some creatures are in being pedestrian, VI. and others volatile; some are carnivorous, and others LITERARY feed on grass; all these distinctions he called differences. While again, each class of animals had something peculiarly and solely its own; as man's risibility; and these he called PROPRIUM. All the changeable actions and qualities of things, which might or might not be in them, or done by them, as their motions, positions, colors, &c. he named ACCIDENTS, because they were variable circumstances. But the ten things discriminated in his ten predicaments seemed to him to comprehend all known nature, and all the terms which language was using to express whatever we knew in it, and all that was doing in it. Every known thing, and every used term, was either a substance, which was his first predicament, or it expressed quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, action, suffering or having, which were his other nine categories or predicaments. Thus he considered himself to have classed all nature and all languages under these ten distinctions; and he proposed to his pupils to study nature and language in this classification. He cannot be justly accused for not having provided for the enlargement of knowlege, for he does not appear to have anticipated such a thing, and it did not come within his object. His aim was to lead his scholars to acquire and arrange what was known, and not to explore what was knowable. His system did not reach to the unknown, nor direct to it; it was applied to knowlege as it existed in his day; and as far as his system, is beneficial, it is equally applicable to all the knowlege that exists at any succeeding time, however greatly it may have been mul: tiplied, because the largest amount of it will still be CHAP. arrangeable under his categorical classifications. XI. OF THE SCHOLAS LOSOPHY. That Aristotle's Predicaments have this universal HISTORY applicability, will be manifest to all who study them. Whether it will be now useful to arrange our vast TIC PHI knowlege under his predicaments, and whether far more beneficial classifications have not since been constructed, and may not now be made, are different questions. Our improvements do not impeach his original in genuity, nor disprove the great benefits which it has, in former ages, occasioned to mankind. Like many laws, once very wise and useful, it has now become obsolete, and has been exceedingly abused and it would be absurd to praise in order to revive it. But let us be just to the departed genius to which we have been indebted, and not ridicule. and revile what we should not have been enabled to look down upon, if it had not existed and previously improved us.8 he 84 84 The remarks of Pere Rapin on Aristotle's Ethics deserve to be inserted. Tho the morals of Aristotle have the same foundation, the same principles, the same economy, with those of Plato; and tho, as Tully remarks, there is no essential difference between the one and the other, yet it must be confessed, that Aristotle formed this whole doctrine into a more regular body, not only by distinguishing the characters of public and private virtue, the prudence of a civil governor and that of the master of a family, but likewise by establishing, in his books to Nicomachus, the two things which make the very life and soul of morality, a last end or happiness, and the means of attaining it. In the first book, proves that there is such an ultimate happiness, which man is capable of enjoying. In the next eight which follow, he shews the way how to arrive at this happiness. And in the tenth and last, he declares that this happiness consists in the most noble actions of human nature, as conversant about the most excellent object. These are Aristotle's morals, the most accurate and complete, and the best methodized, of all the heathen systems. Every thing is there disposed in so artful a manner, and the several parts are so nicely connected with each other and have all so direct a tendency to the main end, that this must be acknowleged for one of the most accomplished pieces of antiquity. For it turns altogether on that admirable method of analysis so familiar to this great author, who, by that art, reduces the end to the means, in the same manner as we VI. BOOK refer the parts to the whole, or the effects to the cause. And tho in his third book of Ethics he declares, that it is impossible to observe an exact method on this subject, by reason of common infirmity and instability, and the changeable nature of human actions, yet he is still regular to admiration. But nothing has so much advanced the glory of Aristotle's morals as the general polity of the world, there being scarce any wellregulated government but what is founded on this bottom; for which reason it was studiously declined by Machiavel, as too good and virtuous to enter into his schemes, who advanced no other arts of empire but those of falsehood and villany. LITERARY |