THERE is a natural sequence in the processes of social culture which is well illustrated by the history of Moral Philosophy among the Greeks. The man of action comes before the man of literature, the man of literature before the man of science. In Greek ethics Socrates was the man of action, Plato the man of literature, and Aristotle the man of science. Not, of course, that Plato was merely the literary man, in the trivial modern sense of that word; he was eminently the philosopher--not merely φιλόλογος but φιλόσοφος--but he put forth his philosophy in a popular form; he addressed himself to the imagination as well as the reason; he appealed, as we would say, to the general public; and speaking to men in a human way, on the most interesting of human topics, through the medium of language artistically handled, he falls manifestly under the broad category of the literary as opposed to the scientific man, who works on a special subject, and with a special faculty. But Aristotle was pre-eminently, and with very marked features, the man of knowledge; he came with the dissecting knife in hand and addressed himself to those who were willing to make special dissections with him for the mere purpose of knowing, and drew a broad line of { 128} demarcation between the speculative and the practical world. Nevertheless the Stagirite was something more than a knowing machine; he was a man, and by virtue of his Hellenic birth also a citizen. He could not therefore avoid occupying to a certain extent the province of the practical man; and so it has come to pass that in three great works, the _Ethics_, the _Politics_, and the _Rhetoric_, he has transported himself from the teacher’s chair, and entered into competition with Socrates and Plato as a preacher of social morals and a guide to civic conduct. This was well both for him and for us: well for him, because mere knowing can never exhaust the riches of a nature so essentially practical as that of man: well for us, because otherwise we could scarcely have imagined the phenomenon of an intellect at once so complete in all the categories of scientific cognition, and so strongly marked with all the sagacity that belongs to the so-called practical man, the man of society, the man of business, the accomplished citizen. And it is to this walking out into the realm of common life, instead of confining himself like so many erudite Germans within the limits of a library or a laboratory, that Aristotle owes no small part of the influence which he has so long exercised, not only in the schools but among intelligent men of all classes. In ancient times, when Moral Philosophy was justly regarded as the principal part of that wisdom which it concerns all men to possess, the Philosopher of the Lyceum never would have been able to assert his place as a public teacher alongside of Socrates and Plato had he bestowed only a secondary consideration on the grand arts of living and governing. As it was, the poet-philosopher of the Academy could not but remain { 129} the more popular and the more effective moral teacher of the two; but if Plato was more attractive and more interesting, and by these qualities commanded a wider audience, it was a great consolation to the lesser circle of the Stagirite’s disciples that, though in his discourses on moral matters he was more angular and more severe, he was at the same time more shrewd, more sagacious, and more practical. The reputation which Aristotle thus maintained among ancient Greeks and Romans, both as a speculator and as a wise guide in the conduct of life, was increased rather than diminished when brought into contact with the new moral force of Christianity. No doubt Plato at first was the natural vestibule through which the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria entered the temple of Christian faith; but after that faith, partly in league with Plato, and partly in spite of Plato, had achieved its natural triumph, Aristotle, the clear, cold, and keen, but by no means devout master of all knowledge, by a sort of reaction, as it should seem, in the middle ages began to assert an exclusive dominance in the schools, both of Christian Europe and, through the Arabians, in the East. To all who were anxious for clear and exact knowledge in matters visible and tangible, the Stagirite was the only guide. As the high priest of science he acted in those days of sacerdotal direction as the natural complement of faith, not as its antagonist; and for this reason he is praised by Dante among the solemn forms of the mighty dead that pace through the dim halls of the unseen world, as