Aristotle

And Arisṭū is the first who set up the last end as the furthest purpose, and laid out towards it a clear road, and made the arrival at it an art that is taught and acquired step by step.

” Aristotle, somewhere in his Ethics, calls speaking truth, the freedom of a great soul, and Plutarch says, that falsehood is the qualification of a slave.

as Aristotle joined the exercise of virtue with the prosperity of a complete life;

Plato outright called sophistic a "base art," and Aristotle, following him, declares it a kind of thievery, inasmuch as it plausibly filches the whole work of wisdom and professes a wisdom it has not practised.

Then Aristotle affirms an intellectual substance separate from bodies, which stands to human souls in the standing of light to sight;

Since, then, the birth of some living creatures is in the earth, of some in water, of some in air, it seems absurd to Aristotle to think that no living thing is generated in that part which is best fitted for generating living creatures.

It appears however that honor also, as was said in the first part of this work, has a certain virtue concerned with it, which may be held to bear the same relation to Greatness of Soul that Liberality bears to Magnificence.

and his words “alive in potency” mean that the soul is united with the body of the semen, which is alive in potency (4)

but if there is a certain fifth nature, first introduced by Aristotle, this belongs both to the gods and to souls.

Aristotle says that certain passions, if a man uses them well, serve as arms.

Arisṭū and those who followed him held that this endures so long as one keeps to the use of the means, which are the virtues confined between the extremes.

For I, seeing other cities ambitious about such things, supposed — I mean not only those in Asia and Syria and Cilicia, but these neighbouring ones close at hand, the city of the Nicomedians, that of the Nicaeans, these Caesareans, men noble and thoroughly Greek, but inhabiting a city far smaller than ours, and the men engaged in public affairs in each, even if they are at variance about other mat …

The remains of the Orators and the forensic commonplaces preserved by Aristotle in his Treatise on Rhetoric, show that questions of pure law were constantly argued on every consideration which could possibly influence the mind of the judges.

Aristotle, in a very clever phrase, in his work entitled the Politics, has said that the art of exchange is a completion of the independence which Nature requires.

that he found among those who came before him nothing but the Book of the Categories (al-Maqūlāt);

Man is a species, as Aristotle says;

But if I were to hold the atoms of Epicurus, and to see the numbers of Pythagoras, and to come upon the Ideas of Plato, and to seize the entelechies of Aristotle, I should perhaps find, even for these species, animals which I might oppose by the name of contrariety.

Aristotle records that Theseus, having gone to Scyros on a reconnaissance—reasonably, because of his kinship with Aegeus—died, thrust down from the rocks, Lycomedes who was reigning there having taken fright .

My tongue, indeed, was not accustomed to them;

For when that Stoic wise man of yours has told you those things syllable by syllable, there will come Aristotle pouring forth a golden river of speech, who says that he raves;

Yes, and as for Apollo, Aristotle reckons the first the son of Hephaestus and Athena — here, then, Athena is no longer a virgin;

And he left a special treatise on ‘Barbarian Customs’ (νόμιμα βαρβαρικὰ), now unfortunately lost.

Hence too the grievance of Aristotle, ill befitting a wise man, when he arraigns Nature:

For whether we believe the Greek poet that 'sometimes it is pleasant even to be mad,' or Plato that 'the man in possession of his senses has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry,' or Aristotle that 'no great genius has ever existed without a mixture of madness':

Let some one Lucanus see to it — he who does not spare even this substance, but, dissolving it after Aristotle's manner, substitutes for it something else, intending to raise up some third thing, neither soul nor flesh, that is, not a man, but perhaps a bear, in so far as he is a Lucanus.

On the other hand, all that interesting group of problems connected with the ideal form of government, much discussed in the days of Aristotle as in our own, is notably absent, never having been forced by the logic of events upon the mind of medieval Europe.