nothing of the agreement. But no man is a judge of his own
deeper relations to his predecessors and contemporaries. It
is only in after years, when the hubbub of controversy has
settled down into the silence of the past, that the histo-
rian can see the true perspective, and can penetrate the
relations of each great man to the time in which he lived.
Plato was the founder of idealism, and his idealism was
in many respects crude and untenable. It was the special
mission of Aristotle to clear away these crudities, and so
develop Platonism into a tenable philosophy. And it was
natural that he should emphasize the crudities, which he
had to fight so hard to overcome, rather than that sub-
stratum of truth which Plato had already developed, and
which therefore required no special treatment at his hands.
It was the differences between himself and his predecessor
which were most obvious to him, and it was inevitable that
he should adopt a thoroughly polemical attitude towards
his master.
But if the agreement was more deep-seated than the differ-
ences, and lay in the recognition of the Idea as the {257}
absolute foundation of the world, the differences were none
the less very striking. In the first place, Aristotle loved
facts. What he wanted was always definite scientific knowl-
edge. Plato, on the other hand, had no love of facts and
no gift for physical enquiries. And what disgusted Aris-
totle about the system of Plato was the contempt which
it poured upon the world of sense. To depreciate objects
of sense, and to proclaim the knowledge of them valueless,
was a fundamental characteristic of all Plato’s thinking.
But the world of sense is the world of facts, and Aristotle
was deeply interested in facts. No matter in what branch of
knowledge, any fact was received by Aristotle with enthusi-
asm. To Plato it appeared of no interest what the habits of
some obscure animal might be. That alone which should be
pursued is the knowledge of the Idea. And he went so far as
to deny that knowledge of the sense-world could properly
be described as knowledge at all. But the habits of animals
appeared to Aristotle a matter worthy of investigation for
its own sake. Francis Bacon in his “Novum Organum” has
many contemptuous references to Aristotle. And the gist
of them all is that Aristotle had no regard for facts, but
theorized a priori out of his head, and that instead of pa-
tiently investigating the facts of nature, he decided, upon
so-called “rational” grounds, what nature ought to do, and
squared the facts with his theories.It was natural for Bacon to be unjust to him. He, with
the other thinkers of his time, was engaged upon an uphill
fight against scholasticism, then dominant, which claimed
to represent the true teaching of Aristotle. And it was true
that the schoolmen theorized a priori, {258} and ignored
facts, or, what was worse, appealed to the writings of Aris-
totle to decide questions of fact which should have been
decided by an appeal to nature. And Bacon not unnatu-
rally confounded Aristotle with these modern Aristotelians,
and attributed to him the faults that were really theirs.
But no man was ever keener on facts than Aristotle as is
proved by his treatises upon animals, which contain evi-
dences of astonishing patience and laborious work in the
collection of facts. It is true, however, that even in the do-
main of facts, Aristotle, like all the ancients, was guilty of