We may sum up the character of Aristotle by saying that he was one of the sanest and most rounded men that ever lived.  As a philosopher, he stands in the front rank.  “No time,” says Hegel, “has a man to place by his side.”  Nor was his moral character inferior to his intellect.  No one can read his ‘Ethics,’ or his will (the text of which is extant), without feeling the nobleness, simplicity, purity, and modernness of his nature.  In his family relations, especially, he seems to have stood far above his contemporaries.  The depth of his aesthetic perception is attested by his poems and his ‘Poetics.’

The unsatisfactory and fragmentary condition in which Aristotle’s works have come down to us makes it difficult to judge of his style.  Many of them seem mere collections of notes and jottings for lectures, without any attempt at style.  The rest are distinguished by brevity, terseness, and scientific precision.  No other man ever enriched philosophic language with so many original expressions.  We know, from the testimony of most competent judges, such as Cicero, that his popular writings, dialogues, etc., were written in an elegant style, casting even that of Plato into the shade; and this is borne fully out by some extant fragments.

Greek philosophy culminates in Aristotle.  Setting out with a naive acceptance of the world as being what it seemed, and trying to reduce this Being to some material principle, such as water, air, etc., it was gradually driven, by force of logic, to distinguish Being from Seeming, and to see that while the latter was dependent on the thinking subject, the former could not be anything material.  This result was reached by both the materialistic and spiritualistic schools, and was only carried one step further by the Sophists, who maintained that even the being of things depended on the thinker.  This necessarily led to skepticism, individualism, and disruption of the old social and religious order.

Then arose Socrates, greatest of the Sophists, who, seeing that the outer world had been shown to depend on the inner, adopted as his motto, “Know Thyself,” and devoted himself to the study of mind.  By his dialectic method he showed that skepticism and individualism, so far as anarchic, can be overcome by carrying out thought to its implications; when it proves to be the same for all, and to bring with it an authority binding on all, and replacing that of the old external gods.  Thus Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty, a principle necessarily hostile to the ancient State, which absorbed the man in the citizen.  Socrates was accordingly put to death as an atheist; and then Plato, with good intentions but prejudiced insight, set to work to restore the old tyranny of the State.  This he did by placing truth, or reality (which Socrates had found in complete thought, internal to the mind), outside of both thought and nature, and making it consist of a group of eternal