ous greatness abounded in defects which had to be pointed
out, whereas we have but little adverse criticism for Aris-
totle. Secondly, Aristotle’s main defect is a dualism almost
identical with that of Plato, and what has been said of the
one need only be shortly applied to the other.
At bottom Aristotle’s philosophy is the same as Plato’s,
with some of the main defects and crudities removed. Plato
was the founder of the philosophy of the Idea. {332} But
in his hands, idealism was clogged with unessentials, and
overgrown with excrescences. His crude theory of the soul
as a thing mechanically forced in and out of the body, his
doctrines of reincarnation and recollection, the belief that
thisthingthe soul can travel to some place far away where
it will see thosethingsthe Ideas, and above all, what is
the root of all these, the confusion between reality and ex-
istence, with its consequent degradation of the universal to
a mere particular—these were the unessentials with which
Plato connected his essential idealism. To take the pure
theory of Ideas—albeit not under that name—to purge it
of these encumbrances and to cast them upon the rubbish
heap, to cleanse Plato’s gold of its dross, this was the task
of Aristotle. Thought, the universal, the Idea, form—call it
what you will—this is the ultimate reality, the foundation
of the world, the absolute prius of all things. So thought
both Plato and Aristotle. But whereas Plato began to draw
mental pictures of the universal, to imagine that it existed
apart in a world of its own, and so might be experienced
by the vision of the wandering soul, Aristotle saw that this
was to treat thought as if it were a thing, to turn it into a
mere particular again. He saw that the universal, though
it is the real, has no existence in a world of its own, but
only in this world, only as a formative principle of particu-
lar things. This is the key-note of his philosophy. Aristotle
registers, therefore, an enormous advance upon Plato. His
system is the perfected and completed Greek idealism. It is
the highest point reached in the philosophy of Greece. The
flower of all previous thought, the essence and pure distil-
lation of the Greek philosophic spirit, the gathering {333}
up of all that is good in his predecessors and the rejection
of all that is faulty and worthless—such is the philosophy
of Aristotle. It was not possible for the Greek spirit to ad-
vance further. Further development could be only decay.
And so, in fact, it turned out to be.Aristotle deserves, too, the credit of having produced the
only philosophy of evolution which the world has ever seen,
with the exception of that of Hegel; and Hegel was en-
abled to found a newer theory of evolution only by following
largely in the footsteps of Aristotle. This was perhaps Aris-
totle’s most original contribution to thought. Yet the fac-
tors of the problem, though not its solution, he took from
his predecessors. The problem of becoming had tortured
Greek thought from the earliest ages. The philosophy of
Heracleitus, in which it was most prominent, had failed to
solve it. Heracleitus and his successors racked their brains
to discover how becoming could be possible. But even if
they had solved this minor problem, the greater question
still remained in the background, what does this becoming
mean? Becoming for them was only meaningless change.
It was not development. The world-process was an end-
less stream of futile and purposeless events, “a tale, told by