ARISTOTELIANISM. Aristotle, son of Nicomachus and Phaestis, was born in Stagira, a small city in Macedonia, His father was a physician and friend of Amintas, father of Philip. [1] The premature death of Nicomachus caused Aristotle to fall into the hands of a certain Proxenus, who took charge of his education and gave him the principles of all the arts and all the sciences. For this, Aristotle was so grateful that he raised statues to him after his death, and took care of his son Nicanor, whom he instructed in all the liberal arts, as his tutor had done with him. We know little of the manner in which he spent the early years of his youth. If we are to believe Epicurus, Athenaeus, and Aelius, he had received a very poor education from his tutor, and to confirm it they say that, when left to his own devices, he dissipated his entire patrimony, and out of libertinism embraced a military career: not having succeeded in this, he was subsequently obliged, to earn a living, to exercise a small trade in scented powders, and to sell remedies. But there are those who reject the testimony of these three philosophers, known in any case for their animosity and the satirical darts they launched against everyone whose merit offended them, and appeal to Ammonius, who relates this oracle of Apollo which was addressed to him: Go to Athens and devote yourself to the study of philosophy: you will need more to be held back than to be pushed . The oracles must have been very idle then to respond to such interrogations.

The great reputation that Plato had acquired attracted all foreigners to place themselves under his tutelage. Aristotle therefore came to the Academy. But from the first days he appeared there less as a disciple than as a superior genius. He was ahead of everyone studying with him; the names they gave him were mind and intelligence . To his natural talents he added an insatiable ardor for learning everything and immense reading which had him perusing all the books of the Ancients. His passion for books went so far that he paid as much as three talents for the books of Speusippus. Strabo says of him that he was the first to have the idea of constituting a library. His vast reading is apparent enough in the works we still have by him. How many opinions of the Ancients did he rescue from the oblivion in which they would be buried today if he had not unearthed them and exposed them in his books with as much judgment as variety? It could be wished that his good faith in their exposition had equaled his great erudition. If we are to believe Ammonius, he remained for twenty years under the tutelage of Plato, whose memory he honored with an altar he erected to him and on which he had these lines engraved:

There are many other proofs of his love for his master, like the funeral oration he composed for him and a thousand epigrams in which he did justice to his great talents. But there are those who maintain that all these testimonies of Aristotle’s attachment are belied by the quarrel that erupted between him and Plato. The master indeed often took pleasure in mortifying his disciple; he would reproach him among other things for too much affectation in his speech and too much magnificence in his apparel. Aristotle for his part never ceased to scoff at his master, and to tease him on every occasion that presented itself. These dissensions went so far that Plato preferred to him Xenocrates, Speusippus, Amiclas, and others whom he affected to receive better than him, and from whom he had no secrets. It is even reported that Aristotle chose the moment when Xenocrates had made a trip to his home country to visit Plato, who was being escorted by a large number of his disciples; that he took advantage of the absence of Speusippus, who was then ill, to provoke Plato, who was losing his memory to old age, to dispute him; he asked him a thousand sophistic questions, some more embarrassing than others, shrewdly enveloped him in the seductive traps of his subtle dialectic, and obliged him to abandon to him the field of battle. It is added that when Xenocrates had returned three months later from his travels, he was most surprised to find Aristotle in the master’s place; that he asked the reason, and having heard in reply that Plato had been forced to yield the strolling place, [3] he went to find Aristotle, and found him surrounded by a great number of highly esteemed men with whom he was tranquilly discussing philosophical questions; that he had greeted him very respectfully, without giving him any mark of his astonishment; but that after assembling his fellow disciples, he reproached Speusippus forcefully for leaving Aristotle master of the battlefield; that he had attacked Aristotle, and had obliged him in turn to yield a place for which Plato was more worthy than he.

Others say that Plato was sorely annoyed that while he was alive Aristotle should have made himself the leader of the party, and set up in the Lyceum a school entirely opposed to his own. He compared him to those vigorous children who beat their nurses after they have fed on their milk. The author of all these rumors so disadvantageous to Aristotle’s reputation is a certain Aristoxenus, excited against him by the spirit of vengeance, according to the report of Suidas, because Aristotle had preferred Theophrastus to him and had designated him to be his successor. It is not plausible, as Ammonius remarks, that Aristotle could have dared to eject Plato from the place where he taught to make himself its master, and formed during his lifetime a school contrary to his own. The considerable influence of Chabrias and of Timothy, both of whom had been at the head of the armies, and who were related to Plato, would have halted such an audacious enterprise. Although Aristotle had been a rebel who dared to combat Plato’s teaching while he was alive, we see that even since his death he had always spoken of him in terms that showed how highly he esteemed him. It is true that the Peripatetic school is quite opposed to the Academic school; [4] but it will never be proved that it began before Plato’s death; and if Aristotle abandoned Plato, he was only enjoying the right of philosophers: he made the friendship he owed his master to yield to the love we owe even more to truth. It could be, however, that in the ardor of dispute he was tactless with his master; but that can be forgiven as the fire of youth and the great vivacity of mind that carried him beyond the limits of a moderate dispute.

Plato at his death left the government of the academy to his nephew Speusippus. Shocked by this preference, Aristotle decided to travel, and visited the principal cities of Greece, getting to know everyone from whom he could gain some instruction, not even disdaining the sort of men who make sensual pleasure their sole occupation and who at least provide pleasure if they do not instruct.

During the course of these travels, Philip, king of Macedonia, and a good judge of men’s merit, wrote to him of his intention to put him in charge of his son’s education. He wrote: “I thank the gods less for giving him to me than for having him born during your lifetime; I trust that through your counsels he will become worthy of you and of me.” Aulus Gellius, book IX . What an honor for a philosopher to see his name linked to that of a hero such as Alexander the Great! And what more flattering reward could there be for his efforts, than to hear that same hero often recite: “I owe my life to my father, but I owe to my preceptor the art of conducting myself; if I reign with some glory, I owe it all to him.”

It is likely that Aristotle lived at the court of Alexander, and there enjoyed all the prerogatives that were due him until the time when the prince, destined to conquer the better part of the world, took the war into Asia. The philosopher, feeling himself useless, then struck out again for Athens. There he was received with great distinction, and was given the Lyceum in order to found a new philosophical school. Although attention to his studies thoroughly occupied him, he did not fail to enter into all the movements and quarrels which then were agitating the various states of Greece. He is even suspected of having known about the unhappy conspiracy of Antipater, who had Alexander poisoned in the prime of his life, and in the midst of the most reasonable expectations of subjecting the whole world. [5]

Meanwhile, Xenocrates, who had succeeded Speusippus, was teaching the doctrine of Plato in the academy. Aristotle, who had been his disciple while he was alive, became his rival after his death. That spirit of emulation led him to take a different path to renown, by taking over a domain that no one had yet occupied. Although he did not claim the status of legislator, he nevertheless wrote books of laws and politics out of pure opposition to his master. He observed in truth the old method of double doctrine [6] which was so in vogue at the academy, but with less reservation and discretion than those who had preceded him. The Pythagoreans and the Platonists even made of this method a secret of their schools; but it seems that Aristotle wanted to make it known to everyone by indicating in public the distinction that should be made between these two kinds of doctrines; indeed, he explains himself forthrightly and in the most dogmatic manner against the punishments and rewards of an afterlife. Death, he says in his treatise on Ethics, is of all things the most frightening; it is the end of our existence, and after it man has neither anything good to hope for, nor harm to fear.

In his old age Aristotle was attacked by a priest of Ceres who accused him of impiety and had him brought before the judges. As this accusation could have disagreeable sequels, the philosopher deemed it best to withdraw secretly to Chalcis. In vain did his friends try to stop him: Let us prevent, he cried to them on leaving, let us prevent a second blow being dealt to philosophy. The first no doubt was the execution of Socrates, who could be regarded as a martyr to the unity of God in the law of nature, if he had not had the weakness, to please his compatriots, or ordering as he died that a cock be sacrificed to Asclepius. Aristotle’s death is diversely reported. Some say that, in despair because he could not figure out the cause of the ebb and flow that can be felt in the Euripus strait, he cast himself into it with these words: Since Aristotle has never been able to contain [ comprendre ] Euripus , let Euripus then contain him . [7] Others relate that after bearing his misfortune for some time, and struggling, so to speak, against calumny, he poisoned himself in order to die as Socrates had died. Still others hold that he died a natural death, extenuated by too little sleep and consumed by working too hard: that is the sentiment of Apollodorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Censorinus, and Laërtius. The latter, to prove his indefatigable activity in work, reports that when felt obliged to rest, he would hold in his hand a bronze sphere leaning against the rim of a basin, so that the sound it made in falling into the basin could wake him up. He gave up the ghost invoking the universal cause, the supreme Being he was going to meet. The Stagirians owed too much to Aristotle not to render great honors to his memory. They took his body to Stagira, and on his tomb they raised an altar and a sort of temple which they called by his name so it would be an eternal monument to the freedom and other privileges which Aristotle had obtained for them either from Philip or from Alexander. If we believe Origen, Book I against Celsus , Aristotle had given cause for the reproaches of impiety which made him abandon Athens for exile in Chalcis. In private conversations he was not cautions enough: he dared to maintain that offerings and sacrifices are entirely useless, that the gods pay little attention to the superficial pomp that dazzles in their temples. It was a sequel to his sentiment that providence does not extend as far as sublunary things. The principle he leaned on to support a system so favorable to impiety comes down to this: God sees and knows only what he has always seen and known; contingent things are not within his purview; the earth is the land of changes, of generation and of corruption; therefore, God has no power there. He limits himself to the land of immortality, to things that are of his incorruptible nature. Aristotle, to assure man’s freedom, believed he could not do better than to deny providence: did it take more to arm the self-interested priests of paganism against him? They rarely forgave, especially those who wanted to diminish their rights and prerogatives.

Although Aristotle’s life was always very tumultuous, both at the Lyceum and at Philip’s court, the number of his works is nevertheless prodigious: we can find their titles in Diogenes Laërtius, and still more correctly in Hieronymus Gemusaeus, physician and professor of philosophy in Basel, who composed a treatise entitled De vita Aristotelis, et ejus operum censura . Still we are not sure we have them all; it is even probable that we have lost several of them, since Cicero in his conversations cites passages that are not found today in the works of his which we still have. It would be a mistake to conclude, as some have done, that in this flurry of books bearing the name of Aristotle, and which are commonly considered his, there are perhaps none of which the supposition is not likely. Indeed, it would be easy to prove, if one wished to take the trouble, the authenticity of Aristotle’s works by the authority of profane authors, descending century to century down from Cicero to our own. Let us be content with the authority of clerical writers. It will doubtless not be denied that Aristotle’s works existed at the time of Cicero, since that writer speaks of several of his works, and names others than the ones he wrote on the nature of the gods, some which we still have, or at least which we think we still have. Christianity began not long after the death of Cicero. So let us follow all the Fathers since Origen and Tertullian; let us consult the most illustrious clerical authors in all centuries, and see whether the works of Aristotle were known to them. The writings of these two first clerical writers are filled with passages, with quotations of Aristotle, either to refute them or to oppose them to those of some other philosophers. These passages are found today, with a few exceptions, in the works of Aristotle. Is it not natural to conclude that the ones we do not find have been taken from some writings which have not come down to us? Why, if Aristotle’s works were supposed, would we see some and not the others? Would the first of them have been placed there to keep us from being aware of the supposition? This same reason ought to have made the others included. It is visible that it is this lack and this want of certain passages that prove that the works of Aristotle are truly his. If among the great number of passages of Aristotle which the early Fathers have related, some have been taken from works which are lost, why would it be impossible for those which Cicero placed in his conversations on the nature of the gods to have been taken from the same works? It would be impossible to have the slightest proof of the contrary, since Cicero did not cite the books from which he took them. Saint Justin wrote a considerable work on Aristotle’s physics: there we find exactly, not only the principal sentiments, but even an infinite number of passages from the eight books of that philosopher. Aristotle is mentioned in almost all the other works of Saint Justin. Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine assure us in twenty places in their works that they have read the books of Aristotle: they refute them, they cite passages, and we see that those passage are found in the writings we still have, and that these refutations are perfectly in conformity with the sentiments they contain. Now let us continue, and jump to the sixth century. Boethius, who was alive at the start, often speaks of the surviving books of Aristotle, and mentions his principal sentiments. Cassiodorus, who was a contemporary of Boethius, but who died much later, having lived until nearly the seventh century, is another irreproachable witness to the works of Aristotle. He informs us that he had written ample commentaries on Aristotle’s book on Interpretation , and composed a book on division, which is explained in Logic after the definition, and that his friend the Patrician Boethius, whom he calls a magnificent man , which was a title of honor at that time, had translated the introduction of Porphyry, the categories of Aristotle, his book on interpretation, and the eight books of the Topics. If from the seventh century I pass on to the eighth and ninth, I find Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, praised profusely by all ancient and modern scholars: this man, whose erudition was profound, and whose knowledge of antiquity was as vast as it was secure, ratifies the testimony of Saint Justin, and tells us that the books he had written on Aristotle’s physics were still in existence; that the philosopher’s books had also been preserved, and gives us word for word their substance. We know that Saint Bernard, in the twelfth century, rose up so strongly against Aristotle’s philosophy that he had his metaphysics condemned by a council; nevertheless, shortly thereafter, it triumphed again; and Peter Lombard, Albert the Great, and Saint Thomas cultivated it with care, as we shall see in the rest of this article. It is found almost in its entirety in their works. But which are the ones to whom the supposition of Aristotle’s works appeared probable? A flock of semi-scholars bold to decide what they do not understand, and who are known only by those who are obliged by their kind of work to talk about the good as well as the bad writers. The most considerable author to have tried to make some of Aristotle’s surviving works suspect is Iamblichus, whose pretension was to reject the categories; but his contemporary authors and the ablest modern critics have derided him. A certain Andronicus of Rhodes, who was apparently the Hardouin of his century, [8] had also rejected as presumed the books of the Interpretation: these are the scholars on whose authority the books of Aristotle are regarded as apocryphal. But a scholar who is better than all of them, and who is a very competent judge in this matter, is M. Leibniz: the reader will allow me to put him up against them. Here is the way he speaks in the second volume of his Epistles, p. 115 in the Leipzig edition of 1738: “It is time to return to the errors of Nizolius: this man claimed that we no longer had today the genuine works of Aristotle; but I find pitiful the objection which he bases on the passages of Cicero, and it could never make the slightest impression on my mind. Is it very surprising that a man overwhelmed with cares, responsible for public business, as was Cicero, did not quite understand the true meaning of certain opinions of a very subtle philosopher, and could have been mistaken in skimming them lightly? Who is the man who can imagine that Aristotle could have called God the ardor of heaven ? Anyone who believes that Aristotle spoke such an absurdity must necessarily also conclude that he was mad; yet we see from the works that have survived that Aristotle was a great genius. Why then do they want to substitute by force, against all reason, a mad Aristotle for the wise Aristotle? It is a very new and very singular critical genre to judge the supposition of writings of an author generally regarded by all great men as a superior genius by a few absurdities that are not in them; so in order for the works of such a subtle and profound philosopher not to pass for supposed, we shall henceforth have to find in them all the mistakes and impertinences that have been lent to him either by inadvertence or by malice. It is well to remark, moreover, that Cicero was the only one we know to have attributed those sentiments to Aristotle; as for me, I am quite persuaded that all the works we have of Aristotle’s are surely by him; and although some have been regarded as supposed, or at least as suspect, by Jean-François Pic, Pierre Ramus, Patricius, and Naudé, I am none the less convinced that those books are genuinely by Aristotle. I find in them all a perfect continuity and a harmony that unifies them; I find in them the same hypothesis always properly followed and always well supported; I see in them, finally, the same method, the same sagacity and the same deftness.” [9] It is hardly surprising that in the number of fourteen or fifteen thousand commentators who have worked on Aristotle’s writings, there have been some who, to give themselves a grand critical air and show that they had finer taste than the others, have believed they must regard some particular book as supposed among those of the Greek philosopher; but what can ten or twelve persons who have thought that against more than fourteen thousand whose sentiment on the works of Aristotle is quite different? Moreover, none of them has ever maintained that they were all supposed; each of them, following his own caprice and fantasy, has adopted some and rejected the others, a palpable proof that fantasy alone has dictated their decision.

At the head of Aristotle’s works are those that deal with the art of oratory and poetics; it is likely they are the first works he wrote. He destined them for the education of the prince who had been entrusted to him. There are excellent things to be found in them, and they are still regarded today as masterpieces of taste and philosophy. An assiduous reading of the works of Homer had formed his judgment and given him an exquisite taste of fine literature; never did anyone so plumb the human heart or better understand the invisible forces that stir it. By the power of his genius he had opened to himself a sure path to the sources of true beauty; and if today you want to say something good about Rhetoric or Poetics, you find yourself obliged to repeat him. We do not fear to say that it is these two works that most honor his memory: see a more detailed judgment of them at the two articles that bear their names. Next come his treatises on ethics. The author maintains there the character of an upright man who is infinitely agreeable; but by misfortune he warms rather than heats; he is accorded only a sterile admiration, and one does not return to anything one has read. The ethics is dry and barren when it offers only general views and metaphysical propositions, more suited to embellishing the mind and charging the memory than to touching the heart and changing the will. Such is in general the spirit that prevails in this philosopher’s book on ethics. Here are a few of his precepts, with the turn he gives them.

1. Man’s happiness consists neither in pleasures, nor in wealth, nor in honors, nor in power, nor in nobility, nor in the speculations of philosophy, but rather in the habits of mind that make it more or less perfect. 2. Virtue is full of charms and attractions; thus a life which goes from virtue to virtue could only be a very happy one. 3. Although virtue is self-sufficient, yet it cannot be denied that it finds powerful support in favor, wealth, honors, hereditary nobility, and corporeal beauty; and that all these things contribute to its greater flourishing, and thereby increase the happiness of man. 4. All virtue finds itself placed at the mean between a bad deed by excess and another bad deed by omission: thus courage holds the mean between fear and audacity; liberality, between avarice and prodigality; modesty, between ambition and arrogant eschewal of honors; magnificence, between too-mannered pomp and sordid sparing; gentleness, between anger and insensitivity; popularity, between misanthropy and base flattery, etc., whence it can be concluded that the number of vices is twice the number of virtues, since every virtue is always neighboring two vices that are its opposites. 5. He distinguishes two kinds of justice, one universal and the other individual: universal justice tends to preserve civil society by the respect it inspires for all the laws; individual justice, which consists in giving every man his due, is of two kinds, distributive and commutative. Distributive justice dispenses functions and recompenses in keeping with the merit of each citizen, and has geometric proportion as its rule; commutative justice, which consists in an exchange of things, gives to each his due, and maintains an arithmetic proportion in everything. 6. We make friends with someone either for the pleasure we get from associating with that person, or for the benefit that comes from it, or for that person’s merit based on virtue or excellent qualities. The last is a perfect friendship: benevolence is not, properly speaking, friendship, but it leads to friendship, and in a way prepares it.

Aristotle succeeded much better in his logic than in his ethics. There he discovers the principal sources of the art of reasoning; he penetrates the inexhaustible depth of man’s thoughts; he sorts out his thoughts, shows the connection they have between them, follows them in their aberrations and oppositions, and finally brings them back to a fixed point. Assuredly, if one could attain the outer limit of mind, Aristotle would have attained it. Is it not an admirable thing that through different combinations which he made of all the forms that mind can assume in reasoning, he has so bound it by the rules he traced for it that it cannot diverge from them without reasoning inconsistently? But his method, although praised by all philosophers, is not with its flaws: 1. He extends himself too much, and in so doing repels. His books on categories and interpretation could be reduced to a few pages; their meaning is drowned in too great an abundance of words. 2. He is obscure and self-conscious: he wants the reader to anticipate him, and with him to produce his thoughts. However able one is, one can hardly flatter oneself that one has fully understood him, witness his analytics, where the whole art of the syllogism is taught. All the parts that compose his Logic are dispersed in the different articles of this Dictionary: that is why, in order not to bore the reader with needless repetition of the same things, we have chosen to refer the reader to those articles.

Let us now move on to Aristotle’s physics; and in the examination we are going to make of it, let us take as guide the famous Louis Visès, [10] who has arranged in the most methodical order the different works where it is dispersed. He begins with the eight books of natural principles, which appear rather a compilation of different papers than a work laid out on a single plan. These eight books deal in general with the extended body which is the object of physics, and in particular with the principles and everything that connects to those principles, such as motion, place, time, etc. Nothing is more involved than all this long detail; the definitions make less intelligible things that by themselves would have seemed clearer and more evident. Aristotle first reproaches the philosophers who have preceded him, and in a rather harsh manner, some for having allowed too many principles, others for allowing only one; for his part he establishes three, which are matter , form , and privation . Matter, according to him, is the general subject on which nature operates, an eternal subject at the same time, which will never cease to exist; it is the mother of all things, which aspires to motion, and ardently hopes that form will come to join with it. It is not too clear what Aristotle meant by this primitive matter which he defines as that which is neither who, nor of a certain size, nor which, nor any of that by which being is determined . Did he speak thus of matter only because he was accustomed to putting a certain order in his thoughts and began by envisaging things with a global view before descending into the particular? If it is only that he meant, in other words if in his mind primitive matter had no other foundation than this method of arranging ideas or conceiving things, he said nothing we cannot grant him; but in this case this matter is no more than a being of imagination, a purely abstract idea; it exists no more than the flower in general, man in general, etc. Not that we do not see philosophers today who, taking from Aristotle their manner of considering things in general before getting to their species, and passing from their species to their individuals, maintain quite stolidly, and even with a sort of obstinacy, that the universal is in every particular object: that the flower in general, for example, is a reality truly existent in every jonquil and every violet. It appears to others that by primitive matter Aristotle did not understand simply the body in general, but a uniform dough from which everything was to be built, an obedient wax which he regarded as the common foundation of bodies, as the ultimate limit to which every body returned when it decayed; it was the magnificent block of La Fontaine’s sculptor:

Un bloc de marbre étoit si beau, A block of marble was so fine

Qu’un Statuaire en fit l’emplette : That a sculptor purchased it:

Qu’en fera, dit-il, mon ciseau ? What will my chisel make of it? he said,

Sera-t-il dieu, table ou cuvette ?  [11] Will it be a god, a table, or a basin?

Smash this god of marble, and what is left in your hands? Pieces of marble. Break the table or the basin and it is still marble; it is the same basically everywhere; these things differ only by an exterior form. Such is the case for all bodies: their mass is essentially the same, and they differ only in shape, quantity, repose, or in motion, all of which are accidental things. This idea which we owe to Aristotle has appeared so convincing to all philosophers, ancient and modern alike, that they have generally adopted it; but this idea of general matter into which all bodies return in final decomposition is belied by experience: it if were true, here is what should happen to it. As motion brings out of that wax an animal, a piece of wood, a mass of gold, it also, by suppressing their temporary form, should return them to their primordial wax. Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, and the Scholastics say so; but that is not what happens. The organized body dissolves into different masses of skin, hair, flesh, bones, and other mixed bodies. The mixed body reduces to water, sand, salt, and earth; but with the strongest solvents, with the most intense fire, you will not cause these simple bodies to change. The sand remains sand, iron remains iron, refined gold no longer changes; dead earth will always be earth; and after all the trials and torments imaginable, you will find them ever the same. Experience goes no further: the elements are each separately admirable pieces of work that cannot change, in order that the world, which is composed of them, may receive changes through their admixtures, and nevertheless be durable as the principles that are its foundation. See the article Chemistry.

As for form, which is Aristotle’s second principle, he regards it as a substance, an active principle that constitutes bodies and, in a manner of speaking, subjects matter. It follows that there must be as many natural forms that are born and die in turn as there are primitive and elementary bodies. As for privation, says Aristotle, it is not a substance; it is even in some respects a sort of nothingness. Indeed, every body that receives such a form must not have it previously; it must even have one that is absolutely contrary. Thus the dead become alive, and the living, dead.

These three principles being established, Aristotle goes on to the explanation of causes, which he treats in a rather distinct manner, but almost without saying anything about the first cause, which is God. Some have taken occasion both from the definition he gives of nature, and from the unlimited power he attributes to it, to say that he underestimates this first cause; but we will exonerate him of atheism later in this article. Nature, according to him, is an effective principle, a plenary cause, that makes all bodies in which it resides capable by themselves of motion and rest, which cannot be said of bodies in which it resides only by accident, and which belong to art: those have nothing except by borrowing, and, if I dare put it this way, second hand. Let us continue: all bodies having in them this force, which in a sense cannot be obliterated, and this tendency toward motion which is always equal, are substances genuinely deserving of that name. Nature is consequently another of Aristotle’s principles; it is what produces the forms, or rather that which divides and subdivides itself into an infinite number of forms, according to the needs matter requires it. This deserves special attention, and enables the philosopher to explain all the changes that occur to bodies. There is none that is perfectly at rest, because there is none that does not make an effort to move. He concludes therefrom that nature inspires some kind of necessity in matter. Indeed, it is not up to nature to receive such and such a form: it is subjected to receiving all the forms that turn up and succeed one another in a certain order, and in a certain proportion. This is the famous entelechy which has so inconvenienced commentators, and which caused the Scholastics to utter so many outlandish things.

After explaining what is the efficient cause, what is the principle of all the force which is scattered through the universe, Aristotle goes further into its matter, and tries to develop what motion is. It is evident that there he makes great efforts of ingenuity, but his efforts conclude with a very obscure definition, one that has even become famous for its obscurity. The more Aristotle advances, the more territory he takes in: the finite and the infinite, the void and atoms, space and time, place and the bodies contained in it; everything appears before his eyes; he confuses nothing, one proposition leads him to the next; and although it is in very rapid fashion, one can always sense a sort of linkage.

The doctrine that is included in the two books on generation and corruption is necessarily linked to what we have already developed of his principles. Before Socrates, it was believed that no being perished, and no being ever reproduced; that all the changes that occur in bodies are nothing but new arrangements, a different distribution of the parts of matter that compose those same bodies. All that was recognized in the universe was growth and dimensions, combinations and divisions, mixtures and separations. Aristotle rejected all these ideas, though simple and therefore rather plausible, and established generation and corruption properly so called. He recognized that new beings were formed in the bosom of nature, and that those beings in turn perished. Two things led him to this thought: one, he imagined that in all bodies the subject or matter is something uniform and constant, and that those bodies, as we have already observed, differ only in form, which he regarded as their essence; the other, he maintained that opposites always arise from their opposites, like white from black, whence it follows that the form of white must be eradicated before that of black is established. To complete the illumination of this system, I shall add two further remarks. The first is that generation and corruption have no relation to the other modifications of bodies such as growth and reduction, transparency, hardness, liquidity, etc.; in all these modifications the first form does not disappear, although it may infinitely diversify. The other remark follows from this one: as the whole play of nature consists of generation and corruption, only simple and primitive bodies are subject to it; they alone receive new forms and undergo countless metamorphoses; all other bodies are just mixtures, and so to speak intertwinings of these first ones. Although nothing is more chimerical than this side of Aristotle’s system, that is nevertheless what most struck the Scholastics, and what occasioned their barbaric and unintelligible expressions. From it were born substantial forms, entities, modalities, and reflexive intentions, etc., all terms which, evoking no idea, vainly perpetuate disputes and the need to dispute.

Aristotle does not contain himself within a single general theory, but descends into a very large number of explanations of particular physics, and one can say that there he is cautious and watches his step more than in all the rest, that he does not give full flight to his imagination. In the four books on meteors, according to Father Rapin’s judicious reflection, he illuminated more effects of nature than all the modern philosophers combined.  [12] This abundance must serve him in lieu of some merit, and certainly as some excuse. Indeed, through all the mistakes that he made for want of experience, and some of the discoveries that chance has presented to the moderns, one perceives that he follows rather well the thread of nature, and intuits things that certainly owed their being known to him. For example, he details with great skill everything related to aqueous meteors, such as rain, snow, hail, dew, etc. He gives a most ingenious explanation of the rainbow, and which basically is not too different from that of Descartes; [13] he defines the wind as an air current, and makes it clear that its direction depends on an infinite number of foreign and little-known causes, which prevents, he says, giving them a general system.

One can relate to particular physics what the same philosopher published on the history of animals. Here is the advantageous judgment made of it by M. de Buffon in the first discourse of the Natural History: [14] “Aristotle’s history of animals is perhaps still today the best thing we have in this genre, and we could only wish that he had left us something equally complete on vegetables and minerals. But the two books on plants that some attribute to him do not resemble it, and indeed are not by him. See Scaliger’s Commentary . [15] It is true that botany was not much honored in his time; the Greeks and Romans did not even regard it as a science that should exist by itself as a separate subject; they considered it only relative to agriculture, gardening, medicine and the arts. And although Theophrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, knew of more than five hundred kinds of plants, and Pliny cites more than a thousand, they speak of it only to teach us how to grow things, or to tell us that some plants enter into the composition of drugs, that others have uses in the arts, that others serve to embellish our gardens, etc.: in a word, they consider them only for the uses we can make of them, and did not take the trouble to describe them accurately.

“They knew the history of animals better than that of plants. Alexander gave orders and made very considerable expenditures to collect animals and bring them from every land, and put Aristotle in a position to observe them well. It seems from his work that he perhaps knew them better, and under more general views, than we do today. Finally, although the moderns have added their discoveries to those of the Ancients, I do not see that we have modern works on natural history that we can rate above Aristotle and Pliny. But as the natural bias one has for one’s own times could persuade that what I have just said is being put forward boldly, I shall in few words set forth the plan of Aristotle’s work.

“Aristotle begins his history of animals by establishing general differences and resemblances between the different sorts of animals instead of dividing them by small individual characteristics as the moderns have done. He relates historically all the facts and observations that bear on general relations and perceptible characteristics. He draws these characteristics from form, color, size, and all the exterior qualities of the whole animal, and also from the number and position of its parts, the size, movement, and form of its members; the similar or different relations that are found in the same parts compared, and he gives examples everywhere to make himself better understood. He also considers the differences between animals based on their way of living, their actions, their behavior, their habitations, etc. He speaks of the parts which are common and essential to animals, and those that can be missing and which indeed are missing in some species of animals. The sense of touch, he says, is the only thing that should be regarded as necessary, and which no animal must lack; and as this sense is common to all animals, it is not possible to give a name to the part of their body in which the faculty of feeling resides. The most essential parts are those through which the animal takes its nourishment, those that receive and digest that nourishment, and those by which it expels the excess. He next examines the varieties of animal generation: those of their members, and of the different parts which serve their natural functions. These general and preliminary observations make a picture all parts of which are interesting; and the great philosopher also says that he has presented them in this way to give a foretaste of what should follow, and to stimulate the attention which the individual history of every animal, or rather every thing, requires.

“He begins with man, and describes him first, more because he is the best-known animal than because he is the most perfect; and to make his description less dry and more intriguing, he tries to derive ethical knowledge as he surveys the physical relations of the human body, and he indicates men’s characteristics from the features on their faces. To have a good understanding of physiognomy would indeed be a science very useful to anyone who had acquired it; but can it be derived from natural history? So he describes man with all his outer and inner parts, and this description is the only one that is complete; instead of each animal in particular, he makes them all known by the relation all the parts of their body have with those of man’s body. When, for example, he describes the human head, he compares it to the heads of all the animal species. The same applies to all the other parts. To the description of the human lung he relates historically everything that was known about animal lungs, and gives the history of those that lack them. When he comes to the generative parts he relates all the varieties of animals in their manner of coupling, conceiving, carrying, and giving birth. When he comes to blood, he gives the history of the animals that have none; and thus, following this pattern of comparison in which, as we see, man serves as model, and presenting only the differences there are between animals and man, and between each part of animals and each part of man, he purposely eliminates all individual description, he thereby avoids any repetition, he accumulates facts, and does not write a single superfluous word. In this way he has included in a small volume an infinite number of different facts, and I do not think it is possible to reduce to more basic terms everything he had to say on this matter, which seems to lend itself so little to this precision that it required a genius like his to preserve its order and clarity at the same time. This work of Aristotle’s was to my eyes like a table of contents that might have been extracted with the greatest care from several thousand volumes filled with descriptions and observations of all sorts; it is the most scholarly abridgement ever made, if science is indeed the history of facts. And even if one were to suppose that Aristotle had drawn from all the books of his time what he put into his own, the outline of the work, its organization, the choice of examples, the appropriateness of the comparisons, and a certain turn in the ideas which I would be inclined to call the philosophical character , leave no doubt for a moment that he was himself much richer than those from whom he would have borrowed.”

These are new doctrines. We have seen that the matter that makes up all bodies is necessarily the same, according to Aristotle, and that it owes all the forms it takes in succession only to the different combination of its parts. He was content to derive from it four elements: fire, air, water, and earth, although he was free to derive many more. Apparently he believed that they sufficed to form what we see. The beauty of the heavens, however, made him suspect that they could well be made of something more beautiful. As a result, he formed a quintessence for the constructing of heavens: philosophers have for all time believed that when they have invented a new word they have discovered a new thing, and that what they arrange neatly in their thought must immediately be likewise in nature; but neither Aristotle’s authority nor that of other philosophers, nor the neatness of their ideas, nor the pretended self-evidence of their arguments, guarantee us anything real. Nature may be quite different. Whether or not this reflection be true, Aristotle believed that in this universe there were only five kinds of bodies: the first ones, which are matter that forms all the celestial bodies, move in circles, and the four others, of which all sublunary bodies are composed, have a motion in a straight line. The fifth essence has neither lightness nor heaviness; it is incorruptible and eternal; it always follows an equable, uniform motion; whereas of the four elements, the first two are heavy and the other two light. The first two descend downward and are pushed toward the center; the other two tend upwards and take their place on the circumference. Although their places are thus specified and assigned by right, they can nonetheless change them, and do indeed change, which comes from their extreme facility in transforming themselves into each other, and communicating their movements to each other.

That supposed, Aristotle asserts that the entire universe is not equally governed by God, even though he is the general cause of everything. The heavenly bodies, what is composed of the fifth essence, earns his cares and his attention, but he is not involved with what is lower than the moon, what relates to the four elements. The whole earth escapes his providence. Aristotle, says Diogenes Laërtius, believed that the divine power regulated celestial things, and those of the earth were governed by a sort of sympathy with heaven. By following the same argument, one proves using Aristotle that the soul is mortal. Indeed, God not being witness to its conduct, can neither punish nor reward it; if he did, it would be by caprice and without any knowledge. Besides, God does not wish to be involved in human actions; if he did, he would foresee them, and man would not be free; if man were not free, everything would be well arranged on earth. But everything that happens here below is full of changes, variations, disasters, and woes; therefore, man makes his own decisions, and God has no power over him. Another reason that made Aristotle deny the immortality of the soul is the sentiment he shared with all the other Philosophers that our soul was a portion of the deity from which it had been detached, and that after a certain number of revolutions through different bodies it would join with it again and be lost in it, the way a drop of water goes back to become part of the Ocean when the vase holding it happens to shatter. The eternity they attributed to the soul was precisely what destroyed its immortality. See the article Soul, where we have developed at greater length this idea of the ancient Greek philosophers.

The false ideas which Aristotle had come up with concerning motion had led him to believe in the eternity of the world. Motion, he said, must be eternal; thus the heaven or the world in which motion is must be eternal. Here is the proof. If there was a first motion, as every motion supposes a moving object, that object must absolutely be either engendered or eternal, yet at rest because of some obstacle. However that may be, an absurdity follows from it: for if that first moving object is engendered, it is therefore engendered by motion, which consequently will be prior to the first one; and if it has been eternally at rest, the obstacle could not have been lifted without motion, which once more has been prior to the first. To this reason Aristotle adds several others to prove the eternity of the world. He maintained that God and nature would not always be what is best if the universe were not eternal, since God having judged from all time that the arrangement of the world was good, he would have put off producing it for all prior eternity. Here is another of his arguments on the same subject: if the world was created, it can be destroyed, for everything that has had a beginning must have an end. The world is incorruptible and inalterable, therefore it is eternal. Here is the proof that the world is incorruptible: if the world can be destroyed, it must be by him who created it; but he does not have the power, which Aristotle proves as follows. If we suppose that God is able to destroy the world, then we must know whether the world was perfect; if it was not, God could not have created it, since a perfect cause can produce nothing imperfect, and for that God would have had to be defective, which is absurd. If on the contrary the world is perfect, God cannot destroy it, because wickedness is contrary to his essence, and it is the hallmark of the essence of an evil being to wish to do harm to good things.

We can now make a judgment on Aristotle’s doctrine on the deity. It is a mistake for some to have accused him of atheism for having believed the world eternal, for otherwise the same reproach should be made to almost all the ancient Philosophers, who were corrupted by the same error. Aristotle was so far from atheism that he represents God to us as an intelligent and immaterial being, the prime mover of all things, who himself cannot be moved. He even decided in formal terms that if in the universe there were only matter, the resulting world would be without a first and original cause, and consequently it would be necessary to allow a progression of causes to infinity: an absurdity which he himself refutes. If I am asked what I think of Aristotle’s creation, I shall answer that he allowed for one, even with respect to matter, which he believed to have been produced. He differed from his master Plato in that he believed the world to be a natural and impetuous emanation of the deity, much as light is an emanation of the sun, whereas according to Plato the world was an eternal and necessary, but intentional and premeditated, emanation of a cause all-wise and all-powerful. Both of these creations, as you see, entail the eternity of the world, and are quite different from that of Moses, where God is so free with respect to the production of the world, that he could have left eternally nonexistent.

But if Aristotle is not an atheist in the sense that he attacks the deity directly and as if head-on, and nevertheless recognizes no other universe than this one, we can say that he is an atheist in a broader sense, because the ideas he forms of the deity tend indirectly to overturn and destroy it. Indeed, Aristotle represents God to us as the prime mover of all things; but at the same time he wants the motion that God imprints on nature not to be the effect of his will, but to flow from the necessity of his nature: a monstrous doctrine that removes God’s freedom and the world’s dependency with respect to its creator. For if God is tied and bound in his operations, he then cannot do other than what he does, and the way he does it: the world is thus as eternal and necessary as he is. On the other hand, Aristotle’s God can be neither immense nor everywhere present, because it is as if he were fixed in the highest heaven where motion begins, to communicate itself from there to the inferior heavens. Lost for all eternity in the contemplation of his divine perfections, he does not deign to inform himself about what takes place in the universe; he lets it run as chance will take it. He does not even think about the other intelligences that, like him, are occupied making the spheres to which they are attached turn. He is in the universe what the primum mobile is in a machine: he puts everything in motion, and does so necessarily. A God so far from men cannot be honored by their prayers nor appeased by their sacrifices, neither punish vice, nor reward virtue. What good would it do men to honor a God who does not know them, who does not even know if they exist, whose providence is limited to putting in motion the first heaven to which he is attached? The same is true of the other intelligences that contribute to the universe’s motion, like the different parts of a machine, where several springs are subordinated to a first one which imprints their motion on them. Add to this that he believed our souls mortal, and rejected the doctrine of eternal punishments and rewards, which was a sequel, as we have observed above, to the monstrous opinion that made of our souls so many portions of the deity. Judge after that whether Aristotle could be very devoted to the gods. Is it not amusing to see that even in the Church’s finest periods there have been men so prepossessed, and no less impious than foolish, some to raise the books of Aristotle to the dignity of divine text, others as to place his portrait alongside that of Jesus Christ? In later centuries and even since the renaissance of letters in Italy, they did not hesitate to place him among the blessed. We have two explicit works on this matter, one attributed to the theologians of Cologne and entitled On the salvation of Aristotle , [16] the other composed by Lambert Dumont, professor of philosophy, and published under this title: The most probable theory regarding the salvation of Aristotle, both by various proofs drawn from Holy Scripture and from the testimonies taken from the most sound theologians ; [17] Even though there is no question from the exposition of his system that he did not have a sound idea of the deity, and that he did not know the nature of the soul at all, nor its immortality, nor the end for which it is born. It is assumed in these two works as a clear and evident principle that he had an anticipated knowledge of all the mysteries of Christianity, and that he was filled with a natural force. To what excesses has the determined desire to Christianize ancient philosophers not given birth? Those whose mind is turned in that direction would not do badly to read the excellent treatise of the Italian Jean-Baptiste Crispus who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This treatise is full of a fine and delicate critique and the author’s discernment shines on every page. It is entitled: On the precautions that must be taken in studying the pagan philosophers . [18]

While Aristotle had temples, there were many infidels who mocked his divinity; some regarded him as the genius of nature, and almost as a god; but the others scarcely deigned to give him the title of physicist. Neither the panegyrists nor the critics have spoken as they should, the former having too much exaggerated the philosopher’s merit, and the latter having reproached him too categorically. The scorn for him these last centuries comes from the fact that instead of the originals, which no one was reading because they were in Greek, they consulted the Arabic and Scholastic commentators, in whose hands we cannot doubt that the philosopher had lost many of his features. Indeed, they lent him the most monstrous ideas and made him speak an unintelligible language. But whatever harm all these aberrations and chimeras did him, fundamentally he is not responsible for them. Must a master suffer from the extravagance of his disciples? Those who have read his works in the original have done him more justice. They have admired in him a lofty mind, varied and profound knowledge, and general views; and if he did not push research on physics as far as is done today, it is because that science can only be perfected with the aid of experiments, which depends, as we see, on time. Yet I shall admit after the famous chancellor Bacon, [19] that the essential flaw of Aristotle’s philosophy is that it accustoms one little by little to skipping over the obvious and putting words in the place of things. We can still reproach him for the obscurity he affects everywhere, and with which he surrounds his subjects. I cannot do better, nor make known what we should think of Aristotle’s merit, than in relating here the ingenious parallel which Father Rapin made with Plato, who has always been regarded as one of the greatest philosophers.  [20] Here is more or less the way he expresses himself: The qualities of mind were extraordinary in both of them; their genius was lofty and capable of great things. It is true that Plato’s mind is more finished, and Aristotle’s vaster and deeper. Plato has a lively and abundant imagination, fertile in inventions, ideas, expressions, and figures, producing a thousand different turns of phrase, a thousand new colors, and all agreeable at each item. But after all, it is often nothing but imagination. Aristotle is hard and dry in everything he says, but there are reasons behind what he says, although he says it dryly. His diction, as pure as it is, is somehow austere, and his natural or affected obscurities repel and weary readers. Plato is delicate in everything he thinks and everything he says; Aristotle not at all so, in order to be more natural; his style is simple and consistent, but succinct and nervous. Plato’s is grand and lofty, but loose and diffuse; the latter always says more than he should; the former never says enough, and always leaves more to think about than he says. The one surprises the mind and dazzles it with a striking and florid style; the other illuminates and instructs with a precise and solid method; and as Plato’s arguments are more direct and simpler, Aristotle’s arguments are more ingenious and confused. Plato communicates wit by the fecundity of his own, and Aristotle communicates judgment and reason by the impression of good sense that appears in everything he says. Finally, Plato most often thinks only of speaking well, and Aristotle thinks only of thinking well, examining the subjects, seeking their principles, and from the principles drawing out infallible consequences; whereas Plato, giving himself more freedom, embellishes his discourse and pleases more, but by his excessive desire to please, he allows himself to be too much taken with his own eloquence; he is figurative in everything he says. Aristotle is always in possession of himself; he calls things quite simply by their name; as he does not rise and never goes astray, he is also less subject to falling into error than Plato, who makes all those who attach themselves to him do just that: for he seduces by his manner of instructing, which is too agreeable. But although Plato excelled in all parts of eloquence, and was a perfect orator in the view of Longinus, and Aristotle is not eloquent at all, the latter ordinarily gives substance and body to his discourse, whereas the former only gives it color and grace.

When the unjust persecutions of the priests of Ceres forced Aristotle to withdraw to Chalcis, he named Theophrastus as his successor and willed him his manuscripts. His whole life long the philosopher enjoyed a very great reputation; they compared the gentleness of his eloquence to the wine of Lesbos, which was his native land. Born gentle and obliging, he spoke advantageously of everyone, and men of letters especially found in his generosity a support both sure and endearing. He knew how to emphasize their merit even when they were forgetting it, or rather when out of excess modesty they seemed unaware of it. While Theophrastus was thus distinguishing himself in Athens, Sophocles son of Amphiclides enacted a law by which it was forbidden to all philosophers to teach publicly without express permission from the senate and the people. The death penalty was even prescribed for all who did not obey this regulation. The philosophers, indignant at such a violent procedure, all withdrew from Athens, and left the field free to their rivals and enemies, I mean to the rhetors and other scholars of the imagination. While these were enjoying their triumph, a certain Philo, who had been a friend of Aristotle, and made a profession of knowing nothing about the fine arts, composed an apology in favor of the philosophers who had withdrawn. This apology was attacked by Demochares, a man of credit, and son of a sister of Demosthenes. Bitter criticism was not spared in his refutation, and above all he drew an odious portrait of all the philosophers then living, and all the more odious that it was less resembling. What he thought should serve his cause ruined it, and doomed it irrevocably: the people, having gotten over their first ire, abolished Sophocles’s indecent law and condemned him to a fine of five talents. Tranquil days returned to Athens, and reason with them; the philosophers began their exercises anew.

The Lyceum lost much by the death of Theophrastus, but although fallen from its former splendor, people continued to teach there. The teachers were Demetrius of Phalereus, Strato called the Physicist , Lyco, Aristo of the island of Cea, Critolaus, and Diodorus, who lived toward the end of the one hundred sixtieth olympiad. [21] But of all these teachers, there was only Strato who offered something new, and attracted to himself the interest of other philosophers; for all that is known about the ones I have just named are their names, their dates of birth and death, and that they were successors of Aristotle at the Lyceum.

Strato did not make a point of following pure Peripatetics. He made innovations in it; he overturned the doctrine of the existence of God. He recognized no other divine power than that of nature, and without illuminating very much what that nature basically could be, he regarded it as a force spread throughout and essential to matter, a sort of sympathy that binds all bodies and holds them in equilibrium, like a power which, without itself decomposing, had the marvelous secret for varying beings infinitely; like a principle of order and regularity that eminently produces all that can be produced in the universe. But is there anything more foolish than to say that a nature that feels nothing, knows nothing, conforms perfectly to eternal laws; that it has an activity that never leaves the paths that must be followed; and that in the multitude of faculties with which it is endowed, there is none that does not fulfill its functions with strict regularity? Can one conceive of laws that have not been established by an intelligent cause? Can one conceive of any that can be executed regularly by a cause that does not know them, and does not even know it is itself in the world? Metaphysically speaking, this is the weakest point in Stratonism. It is an insoluble objection, a reef from which he cannot free himself. All the atheists who came after Strato, dazzled by speeches which are seductive in detail although frivolous, embraced his system. It is this system especially that Spinoza has renewed in our times, and to which he has given the appearance of a geometric form, the more surely to impress those who have the imprudence to let themselves be caught in the traps he sets for them. Between these two systems, I see no difference except that Spinoza made of the whole universe just one single substance, a doctrine he had borrowed from Xenophanes, Melissus, and Parmenides, whereas Strato recognized as many substances as there were molecules in matter. Except for that difference, they thought precisely the same thing. See the article Spinozism and the article Hylozoism, where Strato’s system is the most developed.

On the restorers of Aristotle’s philosophy . Never was philosophy so cultivated as under the Roman emperors; it was seen on the throne as well as in the chairs of the sophists. This taste at first seemed to be a sign of rapid progress, but in reading the history of those times one is soon undeceived. Its decadence followed that of the Roman empire, and the barbarians delivered the last blow to the one no less than to the other. The peoples long stagnated in the crassest ignorance; a dialectic whose finesse consisted in the ambiguity of words and in distinctions with no meaning was then the only thing in honor.  [22] True genius comes through, and good minds, once they turn inward, soon perceive whether they have been put on the true path that leads to truth. In the renaissance of letters, some scholars who had learned Greek and knew the force of Latin undertook to provide an exact and correct version of the works of Aristotle, whose disciples even said many bad things about them, having in their hands nothing but barbaric translations that represented rather the Teutonic spirit of the translators than the fine genius of the philosopher. That did not suffice, however, to repair the damage entirely. The works of Aristotle had to be made common: it was the duty of princes, since all they had to do was to make certain expenditures. Their willingness answered to the utility: at great cost they had several manuscripts brought in from the Orient and placed them in the hands of those who were versed in the Greek language to translate them. Paul V acquired much glory thereby;  [23] no one is unaware how much letters owe to that pontiff. He loved scholars, and many things about Aristotle’s philosophy especially appealed to him. The scholars multiplied, and with them the translations; they had recourse to interpreters for passages that were difficult to understand. Until then only Averroes had been consulted; he was where all scholarly disputes went to be shattered. Subsequently he was found to be barbarous, and as taste had become purer, men of learning sought a more subtle and elegant interpreter. So they chose Alexander, who was reputed in the Lyceum to be the purest and most exact interpreter. Averroes and he were incontestably the two leaders of Peripatetics, and they had contributed to that school’s great renown; but their teachings on the nature of the soul were not orthodox: for Alexander thought it mortal; Averroes admitted it was in truth immortal, but he meant only the universal soul in which all men participate. These opinions were very widespread at the time of Saint Thomas, who refuted them forcefully. The school of Averroes assumed the dominant role in Italy. The sovereign pontiff Leo X thought he must halt the course of these two opinions so contrary to the teachings of Christianity. At the Lateran Council which he had called, he had the teaching of Averroes condemned as impious. “Inasmuch as in our times,” said the sovereign pontiff, “those who sow chaff in the Lord’s field have disseminated many errors, in particular on the nature of the rational soul, saying it is mortal, or that one and the same soul gives life to the bodies of all men, or when others, partially restrained by the Gospel, have dared advance that these sentiments could be defended in philosophy only, thinking they could make a division between faith and reason, we have believed it was incumbent on our pastoral vigilance to halt the progress of these errors. We condemn them, the holy council approving our censure, and we define that the rational soul is immortal, and that every man is given life by a soul which is his own, individually distinguished from others. And as truth cannot be opposed to itself, we forbid the teaching of whatever is contrary to the truths of the Gospel.” The doctors believed that the Church’s thunder was not enough to make scholars abandon these dangerous sentiments. They therefore opposed to them the philosophy of Plato as very capable of remedying the damage; others for whom the philosophy of Aristotle was very attractive, and yet who respected the Gospel, tried to reconcile it with Plato’s. Others, finally, cushioned Aristotle’s words and bent them to the dogmas of religion. I think the reader will not be displeased to find here those who distinguished themselves in these sorts of disputes.

Among the Greeks who abandoned their country and who came to transplant letters, so to speak, into Italy, Theodorus Gaza was one of the most famous.  [24] He had been taught all the sentiments of the different philosophical schools. He was a great physician, a learned theologian, and above all was well versed in literature [ belles lettres ]. He was from Thessalonica; the victorious arms of Amurat, who was ravaging the whole Orient, made him flee to Italy.  [25] Cardinal Bessarion welcomed him as a friend and ordained him a priest. He translated Aristotle’s history of animals and the problems of Theophrastus on plants. His translations pleased him so much that he claimed to have rendered Aristotle into a Latin as fine as Aristotle had himself written in Greek. Although he passes for one of the best translators, we must admit with Erasmus that one can detect a Greek accent in his Latin, and that he shows himself a little too much imbued with the opinions of his time. Cosmo de’ Medici joined with Cardinal Bessarion to help him. Gratified by their generosity, he could have led an agreeable and easy life, but economy was never his flaw; the avidity of certain petty Greeks and Bruttians never left him enough to parry the blows of fortune. He was reduced to extreme poverty, and that was when, to relieve his misery, he translated the history of animals which I have mentioned. He dedicated it to Sixtus IV. All his expectations of fortune were founded on this dedication: but he was most deceived, for he got no more than the small present of a hundred pistoles. It made him so indignant, and he was so angry that such hard and useful labor was so ill paid, that he threw the money into the Tiber. He retired among the Bruttians, where he would have died of hunger if the duke of Ferraro had not given him some assistance. He died soon thereafter, devoured by woes, leaving a memorable example of the reversals of fortune.

George of Trebizond devoted himself, as Gaza had, to the philosophy of the Peripatetics.  [26] He was a Cretan by birth, and called himself Trebizond only because that was the land of his paternal ancestors. He went over to Italy while the Council of Florence was being held, and when they were negotiating the reunification of the Greeks with the Latins. He went first to Venice, and from there to Rome, where he taught rhetoric and philosophy. He was one of the most zealous defenders of Peripatetic philosophy, and could not bear anything that even slightly attacked it. He wrote with great bitterness and bile against those of his time who followed the philosophy of Plato, and thereby attracted many enemies. Nicholas V, his protector, disapproved of his conduct, despite his inclination for Aristotle’s philosophy. His most redoubtable adversary was Cardinal Bessarion, who took up the pen against him and refuted him under the title The slanderer of Plato . [27] Yet he had an enemy even more to be feared than Cardinal Bessarion: it was misery and poverty; this dispute, unfortunately for him, cut off all the channels by which he obtained supplies. The scholar’s pen, if it is not to be directed by the rich, must at least not annoy them; he must first assure his means before philosophizing, in the manner of astronomers, who when they must raise their heads very high to observe the stars, first make sure of their feet. He therefore died a martyr to Peripatetics. Posterity more readily forgives his insults to the Platonists of his time than the inaccuracy of his translations. Indeed, attention, erudition, and, even worse, good faith, are wanting in his translations of Plato’s laws and Aristotle’s history of animals. Often he even took the liberty of adding to the text, altering it, or omitting something important, as one will readily see by looking at the translation he gave us of Eusebius.

We have been able to see so far that scholars were divided at the renaissance of letters between Plato and Aristotle. The two sides fought a vicious war. Plato’s devotees could not abide that their master, the divine Plato, should find a rival in Aristotle; they thought that barbarism alone could have given pre-eminence to his philosophy, and that, since a new day was shining on the learned world, Peripatetics should disappear. The Peripatetics for their part defended their master with no less zeal. Volumes were written on each side, where you will more easily find insults than good reasons; so that if in certain of them you switched the names, you would find that rather than being against Plato, they were against Aristotle; and that is so because insults are common to all schools, and defenders and aggressors can only differ amongst themselves when they give reasons.

On recent Aristotelico-Scholastic philosophers . The disputes of the bilious scholars of which we have just spoken taught the world nothing: they appeared, on the contrary, likely to plunge it back into the barbarity from which it had emerged some time earlier. Several scholars made every effort to divert those who were addicted to the miserable scholastic subtleties which consist more in words than in things. They developed with great art the vanity of this method: their lessons corrected a few of them, but there remained a certain contamination that was long felt. Some theologians even spoiled their books by mixing these sorts of subtleties into good arguments, which are evidence of the solidity of their minds. What happened is what always does: they went from one extreme to the other. They wanted to get over just saying words, and tried to say only things, as if those things could be said clearly without following some kind of method. This is the extreme to which Luther went: he tried to banish all scholasticism from theology. Hieronymus Angestus, a Parisian theologian, rose against him, and showed him that it was not the syllogisms which were bad in themselves, but the use being made of them. Will anyone indeed say that the geometric method is wrong and must be banished from the world because Spinoza used it to attack the existence of God, which raison allows? Must the scholastic be banished because some theologians have abused it? Experience, since Luther, has taught us that good use could be made of it; he could convince himself of that by reading Saint Thomas. The Church’s definition, in any case, put this question beyond dispute. According to Brucker, that definition made by the Church to maintain scholastic theology was harmful to good philosophy; [28] it thus came about that whereas in all the universities which no longer obeyed the court of Rome a reasonable philosophy was being dictated, [29] in those on the contrary which had not dared shake off the yoke, barbarity still prevailed. But one must be quite blinded by prejudice to think such a thing. I believe that the university of Paris was the first to dictate the good philosophy; and to go back to the source, is it not our Descartes who was the first to stake out the route that leads to the good philosophy? What change then did Luther make in philosophy? He wrote only on points of theology. Is it enough to be a heretic to be a good philosopher? Do we not find a good philosophy in the memoirs of the Academy? Yet there is nothing that the Roman Church cannot admit to. In a word, the great philosophers can be very good Catholics. Descartes, Gassendi, Varignon, [30] Malebranche, Arnaud, and the celebrated Pascal, prove this truth better than all our reasons. If Luther and the Protestants are opposed specifically only to scholastic theology, we shall see by those we are about to discuss whether their opinion has the slightest foundation.

At the head of the scholastics we should no doubt place Saint Thomas and Peter Lombard, but we are speaking of a much more recent time: we are speaking here of the scholastics who lived around the time of the celebration of the Council of Trent. [31]

Domingo de Soto was one of the most famous. [32] He was born in Spain of poor parents; his poverty held back his studies; he went to study in Alcalá de Naris; his master there was Thomas of Villanova; from there he came to Paris, where he took a doctorate; he went back to Spain, and took the habit of Saint Dominic in Burgos. Soon after, he succeeded Thomas of St. Victor in a philosophy chair in Salamanca. [33] He acquired such a great reputation that Charles V deputized him to the Council of Trent to attend in the capacity of theologian. The court and the sight of the great wearied him; the philosophy chair had much greater attraction for him, and so he returned to perform its functions, and died soon after. Besides the books on theology that made him so famous, he wrote commentaries on Aristotle and on Porphyry. He also wrote a treatise on Law and Justice in seven books, [34] in which there are excellent things and arguments that indicate a very fine mind. François Folet, whom we shall mention next, was his disciple.

Francisco de Vitoria lived about the same time as Domingo Soto. He was born in Cantabria; he did his studies in Paris, where he too donned the habit of Saint Dominic. He was sent as professor of theology to Salamanca, where he became very famous; there he composed among other works his books on civil and ecclesiastical power. It is asserted by several people that they were very useful to Grotius in the writing of his law of war and peace; [35] even Grotius’s avenger seems to agree on that. Indeed, we find many views in this treatise, and many ideas that are so analogous to certain ideas of Grotius that it would seem unlikely they had not occasioned them.

Báñes was another of the most celebrated theologians of the university of Salamanca. [36] He was subtle, and ordinarily found in the Church Fathers only what he had already thought, so everything seemed to incline to his sentiments. He maintained new opinions, believing his only merit was to have discovered them in the Fathers. Almost everyone regards him as the first inventor of physical premotion, [37] with exception of the school of Saint Thomas, who attribute it to Saint Thomas himself. But in truth I should like to know why the Dominicans obstinately refuse to Báñes the merit of exercising them for so long. If Saint Thomas is the first inventor of physical premotion, it will not acquire more certainty than if it was Báñes: it is not men who make opinions good, but the reasons with which they defend them; and whatever the different schools say, the opinions they defend owe their origin neither to written nor to oral tradition. There is none that does not bear the name of its author, and consequently the character of novelty; yet all seek out their evidence in Scripture and the Fathers, who never had the first idea of their sentiments. It is not that I disapprove of speaking of Scripture in these theological questions, but I would simply wish that pains be taken to show that what is in Scripture and the Fathers is in no way opposed to the new opinion one wishes to defend. It is only fair that what one defends not contradict Scripture and the Fathers; and when I say the Fathers, I am speaking of them insofar as they state the tradition, and not with respect to their individual opinions, because after all I am not obliged to be a Platonist with the first Fathers of the Church. All schools should say: here is a new opinion that can be defended, because it does not contradict Scripture and the Fathers, and not waste time making passages say what they cannot say. It would take too long to name here all the theologians which the order of Saint Dominic has produced; everyone has known from all time that this order had made theology its principal study, and in that they follow the spirit of their institution; for it is certain that their founder Saint Dominic was more a polemical preacher than an ethical preacher, and he took on companions only in that view. The order of Saint Francis had very famous scholastics; the first among them is the famous Scot, surnamed the subtle doctor . [38] He made his merit consist in contradicting Saint Thomas in everything; in him one finds nothing but vain subtleties and a metaphysics that everyone of good sense rejects, yet he is at the head of the school of Saint Francis. Among the Cordeliers Scot is a respectable authority. In addition, to think differently from him is not allowed; and I daresay that a man who knew perfectly everything he wrote would know nothing. Let me be allowed to make some reflections here on this mania of the different orders to defend the systems that someone in their order discovered. You have to be a Thomist among the Jacobins, a Scotist in the order of Saint Francis, a Molinist with the Jesuits. It is at once evident that this not only retards the progress of theology, but brings it to a complete stop; it is not possible to think better than Molina among the Jesuits, since you have to think like him. How is it that men who today mock the respect everyone once had for the arguments of Aristotle dare not speak otherwise than Scot in one situation, and Molina in another? But man for man, philosopher for philosopher, Aristotle was as good as any of them. Men who take a bit of pride in reasoning should respect only the faith and what the Church commands us to respect, and otherwise give rein to their genius. Does anyone believe that if among the Jesuits people had not been constrained, someone would not have found a sentiment easier to defend than those of Molina? If the heads of the old schools of philosophy we now deride had been members of some order, we would still be seeing their sentiments defended. God be thanked, what concerns hydrostatics, hydraulics, and the other sciences has not been turned over to esprit de corps and society [ de société ], [39] for the effects of air would be attributed to horror of a vacuum. It is most singular that for a hundred and fifty years it has been forbidden in so many orders to think, and permitted only to know the thoughts of a single man? Is it possible that Scot thought enough to fill the heads of all the Franciscans that will ever exist? I am very far from that sentiment, I who believe that Scot did not think at all: Scot then spoiled the minds of everyone in his order. Jean Ponsius professed theology in Paris according to the sentiments of his master Scot. It is useless to portray those who distinguished themselves among the Franciscans, because they are all cast in the same mold: they are all Scotists.

The order of Cîteaux also has had its theologians. Manrique is the most famous of them that I know;  [40] what distinguished him from most purely scholastic theologians is that he had plenty of wit, and an eloquence that charmed everyone who heard him. Philip IV called him to the court. He did much honor to the university of Salamanca to which he belonged, indeed they called him Atlas ; it is he who wrote the annals of Cîteaux, and several works on philosophy and scholastics.

The Cistercian order also produced Jean Caramuel Lobkowitz, [41] one of the most singular spirits that ever has been. He was born in Madrid in 1607. In his earliest youth his mind betrayed him: they discovered what he was, and then could judge what Caramuel would someday be. At a time when nothing can hold our attention, he devoted himself single-mindedly to mathematics. The most difficult problems did not discourage him, and when his comrades were off playing, he meditated, he studied a planet to calculate its revolutions. What is said of him is scarcely credible. After his [completing his course in] theology, he left Spain and went to the Netherlands, where his knowledge astonished everyone. His active mind was always busy, and always with new things, for novelty had many charms for him. His rare merit got him into the Aulic Council, but the splendor of the court did not dazzle him. He loved study, precisely not for advancement, but for the pleasure of knowing, and so he abandoned the court and withdrew to Bruges, and soon after took his vows in the order of Cîteaux. Next he went to Louvain, where he did a master of arts degree, and in 1630 he donned the doctor’s cap. Ordinary studies were not enough for a man like Caramuel: he learned Oriental languages, and above all Chinese; his desire for knowledge extended much farther than all that can be learned. In a word, he had determined to become a living encyclopedia. He wrote a work the title of which was Doubtful Theology ; [42] in it he put all the objections of atheists and the ungodly. This book cast suspicions on his faith, and he went to Rome to justify himself. He spoke so eloquently and manifested such vast erudition before the pope and the sacred college that everyone seemed spellbound. He might have received the honor of a cardinal’s hat if he had not spoken a little too freely about the vices that reigned at the court of Rome; he was however made bishop. His immoderate desire for learning did not help his judgment; and as on all the sciences he wanted to clear new paths for himself, he ran into many obstacles; his strong imagination often led him astray. He wrote on all sorts of subjects; and what usually happens: we have not a single good work of his. Had he only written two little volumes, might his reputation have been more secure?

The Jesuit society has enormously distinguished itself in scholastic theology. It can take pride in having had the greatest theologians. We shall not pause long on them, because while they have had great men, some among them have been busy praising them. This society extends its views over everything, and never did a Jesuit of merit remain unknown.

Vasquez is one of the most subtle they have ever had. [43] At the age of twenty-five he taught philosophy and theology. He attracted admiration in Rome and everywhere he manifested the facility of his mind. The great talents with which nature had endowed him showed without his help; his natural modesty and that of his condition did not prevent his being recognized as a great man. His reputation was such that he dared not give his name for fear of receiving too many honors, and his name and merit were never learned except from the brother who accompanied him everywhere.

Suarez justly merited his reputation as the greatest scholastic who has ever written. [44] In his works one finds great penetration, great precision, profound knowledge: what a shame that this genius was a captive of the system adopted by the society. He wanted to make one of his own, because his mind asked only to create; but as he could not distance himself from Molinism, all he did, so to speak, was to give an ingenious turn to the old system.

Arriaga, more esteemed in his time than he deserved, was successively professor and chancellor of the university of Prague. [45] He was thrice deputized to the courts of Urban VIII and Innocent X. His mind was more adept at quarreling than at metaphysics; all you find in him is trivia, almost always difficult because they are not understood; few real difficulties. He spoiled many young men to whom he passed this finicky mind; some waste their time reading him. You cannot say of him what one says about many books, that you have learned nothing by reading them: you learn something in Arriaga, which would be capable of twisting the finest and apparently most judicious mind.

Scholastic theology is so linked to philosophy that it is usually believed that it has contributed much to the progress of metaphysics; good ethics, especially, has appeared in a new light; our most common books on ethics are better than those of the divine Plato, and Bayle was right to reproach the Protestants for disparaging scholastic theology so. [46] Bayle’s apology for scholastic theology is the best lance one can throw at the heretics who attack it. Bayle, it could be said, spoke elsewhere against this method, and scoffed at the barbarity that reigns in the Catholic schools, without for that scolding scholastics in general. I do not esteem Arriaga, and will not read him; and I will read Suárez with pleasure in certain places, and with fruit almost everywhere. One must not apply to the method what ought to be said only of some individuals who have made use of it.

On philosophers who have followed the true philosophy of Aristotle. We have already seen Peripatetics have a rival in Platonism; it was even plausible that the school of Plato would grow every day with the deserters from that of Aristotle, because Plato’s sentiments accord much better with Christianity. There was another thing in its favor, which is that almost all the Fathers are Platonists. This reason does not hold today, and I know that in philosophy the Fathers should have no authority; but at a time when philosophy was treated like theology, which is to say at a time when an authority put an end to all disputes, it is certain that the Fathers had to have greatly influenced the choice to be made between Plato and Aristotle. The latter prevailed, and in the century when Descartes appeared there was such veneration for the sentiments of Aristotle that the self-evidence of all Descartes’s reasons could scarcely manage to get him some followers. By the method they then followed, it was impossible to overcome barbarity; they did not reason to discover new truths and contented themselves with knowing what Aristotle had thought. They sought the meaning of his books as scrupulously as Christians seek to understand the meaning of the Scriptures. Catholics were not the only ones who followed Aristotle; there were many followers among the Protestants, despite Luther’s declamations; it is because they preferred following Aristotle’s sentiments to having none at all. If Luther, instead of declaiming against Aristotle, had offered a good philosophy and opened a new path, like Descartes, he would have succeeded in being rid of Aristotle, because you cannot destroy one opinion without substituting another for it: the mind is unwilling to lose anything.

Pierre Pomponatius was one of the most celebrated Peripatetics of the sixteenth century.  [47] Mantua was his homeland. He was so small that he was more like a dwarf than an ordinary man. He did his studies in Padua; his progress in philosophy was so great that in little time he was able to teach it to others. So he opened a school in Padua; he explained to young men the true philosophy of Aristotle, and compared it with that of Averroes. He acquired a great reputation which became a burden because of the enemies it attracted to him. Achillinus, then a professor in Padua, could not stand such praise;  [48] his learned and arrogant bile caught fire: he attacked Pomponatius, but as a pedant, and Pomponatius responded as a polite man. The gentleness of his character put everyone in his camp, for one does not willingly march under the flag of a pedant: so he won the victory, and Achillinus won nothing but the shame of trying to suffocate great talents at birth. Yet it must be admitted that although the writings of Pomponatius were elegant compared to those of Achillinus, they still bespeak the barbarity of their times. War forced him to leave Padua and retire to Bologna. As he professed precisely the same doctrine as Aristotle, and Aristotle seems to diverge in some places from what the faith teaches us, he attracted the hatred of the zealots of his time. All the frocked hornets tried to sting him, said a contemporary writer, but he protected himself from their darts by protesting that he submitted to the judgment of the Church, and meant to speak of Aristotle’s philosophy only as something problematic. He became very wealthy, some said by a triple marriage he made, and others by his knowledge alone. He died of urine retention at the age of sixty-three. Pomponatius was a true Pyrrhonian, and one can say that he had no god but Aristotle: he laughed at everything he saw in the Gospel and in the sacred authors; he tried to cast a certain obscurity on all the dogmas of the Christian religion. According to him, man is not free, or God does not know future things, and in no way enters into the course of events; in other words, according to him, Providence destroys freedom; or if you want to preserve freedom, you have to deny Providence. I do not understand how his apologists claimed that he maintained this only as a philosopher, and that as a Christian he believed all the dogmas of our religion. Who does not see the frivolousness of that distinction? The libertinism of his mind can be sensed in all his writings; there is almost no point of truth in our religion that he did not attack. The opinion of the Stoics on a blind destiny seems to him more philosophical than the Christians’ Providence; in a word, everywhere his impiety manifests itself. He opposes Stoics to Christians, and by no means makes the latter reason as forcefully as the former. Unlike the Stoics he did not admit an intrinsic necessity; it is not, he said, by our nature that we are necessitated, but by a certain arrangement of things that is wholly foreign to us: yet it is difficult to know his exact opinion on that matter. He finds insurmountable difficulties in the sentiment of the Peripatetics, the Stoics, and the Christians on predestination; yet he concludes by denying Providence. All these impieties are to be found in his book on destiny. He is neither more wise nor more reasonable in his book on enchantments. The extravagant love he had for the philosophy of Aristotle caused him to commit extraordinary follies. In this book one finds fantasies that do not suggest a very steady head; we shall offer a fairly detailed extract. This work is very rare, and the reader will perhaps not be displeased to find here before his eyes what he could only with great difficulty obtain for himself. Here then are this philosopher’s propositions.

1. Demons know things neither by their essence nor by the essence of known things, nor by anything that is distinguished from demons.

2. Only fools attribute to God or to demons the effects of which they do not know the causes.

3. Man holds the mean between eternal things and things created and corruptible, which is why virtues and vices are not found in our nature, which includes only the seeds of virtues and vices.

4. The human soul is all things , since it contains both sensation and perception.

5. Although sentiment and what is sensible are by the act itself in the soul alone, according to their spiritual being, and not according to their real being, yet nothing prevents spiritual kinds from themselves really producing the things of which they are kinds, if the agent is capable of it, and if the patient is sound of body [ bien disposé ]. [49] Pomponatius treats this item at great length, because he means to show thereby that the force of the imagination is such that the extraordinary effects that are described can be attributed to it. He attributes all the movements of bodies that produce extraordinary phenomena to the imagination; as example he cites illusions, and what happens to pregnant women. [50]

6. Although by the kinds that are received in the soul and by the passions, surprising effects occur, nothing prevents similar effects from occurring in foreign bodies; for it is certain that the patient being disposed outside as well as inside, the agent has enough control over it to produce the same effects.

7. Demons move bodies immediately with a local motion, but cannot immediately cause an alteration in bodies; for alteration comes about by the natural bodies that are applied by the demons to the bodies they wish to alter, and this secretly or overtly. With these principles alone Pomponatius makes his demonstration.

8. From this it follows that many things have occurred according to the ordinary course, by unknown causes, and which have been regarded as miracles, or as the work of demons, whereas they were nothing of the sort.

9. Hence it follows that if it is true, as reliable persons say, that there are herbs, stones, or other things that can dispel hail, rain, and winds, and that we can use them; as men can find that naturally, since that is in nature, they will be able to make hail cease and rain end without any miracle.

10. Hence he concludes that numerous persons have passed for magicians and for having intercourse with the devil whereas they believed perhaps with Aristotle that there were no demons; and that for the same reason many have passed for saints because of the things they performed, who yet were nothing but rascals. Now if one objects that there are some who make signs that are sacred by themselves, like the sign of the cross, and others do the opposite, he replies that it is to amuse the people, unable to believe that learned persons have studied so much to increase the evil that is on earth. With such principles, this unbelieving philosopher easily overturns all miracles, even those of Jesus. But in order not to appear without religion, and thereby avoid dangerous prosecutions (for he was in Italy), [51] he says that if there are in the Old Testament or the New miracles of Jesus or of Moses that can be attributed to natural causes, but it is said there that they are miracles, we must believe it, because of the Church’s authority. He himself raises the objection that there are numerous effects that could not be attributed to natural causes, such as the resurrection of the dead and the restoration of sight to the blind; but he replies that the histories of pagans tell us that demons have done similar things, and that they have made the dead escape from hell, and have shown them back on earth, and that the blind have been healed by the virtue of certain herbs. He tries to destroy these responses as a Christian, but does it in a way that makes his disbelief more manifest; for he says that these are poor responses, because the theologians assert them, and subsequently he manifests great scorn for the theologians.

It is surprising, says Pomponatius, that as great a philosopher as Aristotle should not have recognized the operation of God or of demons in the events that are cited if that had been real. This casts a doubt on this question; one can tell that Pompanatius exaggerates the difficulty as much as he can; he makes a monster of it, and his reply only serves to confirm more and more the philosopher’s. He provides the reason why Aristotle denied the existence of demons: because, he says, one can find no proof of these follies in sensible things, and they are moreover opposed to natural things. And as one alleges countless examples of things brought about by demons, after protesting that it is only according to the sentiment of Aristotle that he is going to speak, and not his own, he says, first, that God is the universal cause of material and immaterial things: not only the efficient cause, but also the final, exemplary, and formal cause, in a word the archetype of the world. Second, of all created and corruptible corporeal things, man is the noblest. Third, in nature there are men who depend on each other, so as to help each other. Fourth, this is practiced variously, depending on the degree of dependency. Fifth, although God is the cause of everything, according to Aristotle, yet he cannot bring about anything on earth and its surroundings except by the mediation of the celestial bodies, which are his necessary instruments: whence Pomponatius concludes that the explanation of everything that occurs on earth can be found in heaven. There are men who know these things better than others, either from study or from experience, and those men are regarded by ordinary people as either saints or magicians. With that Pomponatius undertakes to respond to everything supernatural that anyone opposes to him. This series of propositions makes it clear enough that Pomponatius is not without foundation accused of the impiety of the Peripatetics. Here again in the following propositions is how he explains himself.

God knows all things, himself in his essence, and creatures in his omnipotence.

God and spirits cannot act on bodies, because a new motion could be produced by an immobile cause only by the mediation of the former motion.

God and spirits therefore move understanding and will as prime movers, but not without the intervention of the celestial bodies.

The will is partly material, because it cannot act without bodies, and partly immaterial, because it produces something that is higher than bodies: for it can choose, it is free.

Prophets are disposed by their nature and the principles of their generation, although in a distant manner, to receive the impressions of the divine spirit; but the formal cause of the knowledge of future things comes to them from the celestial bodies. Such were Elijah, Daniel, Joseph, and all the soothsayers of the Gentiles.

God is the cause of everything, which is why he is the source of prophesies; but he adapts to the disposition of the person he inspires, and to the arrangement of the celestial bodies. Now the order of the heavens perpetually varies.

Health miraculously restored to a sick person comes from the patient’s imagination; that is why, if bones reputed to be those of a saint were the bones of a dog, the patient would all the same be cured; it even often happens that the relics that perform the most wonders are but the sad remains of a man who soul is burning in hell. The cure also comes sometimes from a particular disposition of the patient.

Prayers offered ardently to ask for rain have often been effective by the force of imagination of those who were asking it; for the winds and the elements have a certain analogy, a certain sympathy with such a degree of imagination, and obey it. That is why prayers do nothing unless they come from the heart, and are fervent.

Following this sentiment, it is not believable that a man born under a certain constellation can command the winds and the sea, cast out demons, and perform, in a word, all sorts of wonders.

To deny that God and the spirits are the cause of all the physical harm that occurs is to overturn the order that consists in diversity.

Since neither God nor heavenly bodies can force the will to move towards an object, they also cannot be the cause of moral evil.

Certain dispositions of bodies, however, influence moral evil; but then it ceases to be moral evil and becomes vice by nature.

Astrologers always say things that agree with reason and good sense. Man, by the force he contains, can be changed into a wolf, a pig, assume, in a word, all sorts of forms.

All that begins must have an ending; it is thus not surprising that oracles have ceased.

The ancient law, according to the order, required oracles;  [52] the new one wants none, because it is a different arrangement: different habits had to be contracted.

As it is very difficult to forget an old habit to acquire a new one, it follows that miracles were necessary to get the new law adopted and the old one abandoned.

When the order of the heavens begins to change, everything will change here below; we see that miracles were at first weak, and religion also; the miracles became more surprising and the religion grew; the miracles ceased, and religion diminishes. Such is the order of the heavens: it varies and it will vary so much that this religion will cease to be right for men.

Moses performed miracles; pagans also, and also Mohammed and Jesus. That is necessary because there could be no considerable change in the world without the help of miracles.

The nature of miracles does not consist in being outside the sphere of ordinary things, but in the fact that it is a rare effect of which the cause is unknown, although it really is found in nature.

There you have the impiety of Pomponatius in a nutshell. He thinks he cushions it by saying that Jesus must be preferred to Aristotle and Plato: “And although all the miracles that have occurred can be naturally explained, one must nevertheless believe they have been performed supernaturally in favor of religion, because the Church wishes us to believe that.” His maxim was to speak like everyman, and to think like a philosopher, which is to say that he was Christian in his words and impious in his heart. He says: “I speak in a place for philosophers, who are the only men who are on earth; because as for the others, I regard them as simple figures that serve to fill the voids in the universe.” What need is there to refute what we have just read? Does it not suffice to have placed it before our eyes? Pomponatius had several disciples, among whom we find Hercule de Gonzague, [53] who was later a cardinal, and who had such regard for his master that he had him buried in the tomb of his ancestors. It appears from a letter of Jules Scaliger that he was a disciple of Pomponatius. [54]

Augustin Niphus was the most redoubtable adversary of Pomponatius. He was one of the most famous Peripatetics of his era. He was born in Calabria, although some have believed he was Swiss. It is true that Niphus himself was the cause of this mistake, for he called himself Swiss because he had long lived in that country, and had married there. His father remarried after losing Niphus’s mother; his mother-in-law was cruel and unjust; she pressed her loathing so far that Niphus, although very young, was obliged to abandon his father’s house. He fled to Naples, where he had the good fortune to encounter a Swiss who liked him, regarded him as one of his own children and gave him the same education. He was sent to study in Padua; there he studied the philosophy of the Peripatetics and devoted himself to medicine. According to the custom of the times in Italy, those who did not embrace the clerical state combined the study of medicine with the study of philosophy: that is why Niphus was in his times both a good physician and a celebrated philosopher. His master had been a Peripatetic very attached to the opinions of Averroes, especially to the one about the existence of a single soul. He had contributed so many arguments to prove this sentiment that the common people and the petty philosophers adopted it with him; in this way that opinion spread throughout Italy. He had also gone farther than Averroes: he maintained among other things that there were no other immaterial substances than those that gave motion to the celestial spheres. Niphus did not examine subsequently whether what his master had taught him was well founded; he sought only the means most capable of defending the master’s opinions. With that in mind, he wrote his book on understanding and on demons. [55] This work caused much commotion; the monks protested loudly against the errors it contained; they roused such a violent tempest against him that he had all the trouble in the world not to shipwreck. That made him subsequently wiser and more prudent. He taught philosophy in all the most famous academies of Italy, and where Achillinus and Pomponatius had great reputations, as in Pisa, Bologna, Salerno, Padua, and finally in Rome at the Collegio di Sapientia. Niphus tells us that the cities of Bologna and Venice had offered him a thousand gold scudi per year to profess philosophy in their cities. The house of Medici provided him much protection, and in particular Leo X, who showered him with goods and honors. He ordered him to refute the book of Pomponatius on the immortality of the soul, [56] and to prove to him that the immortality of the soul was not contrary to the sentiments of Aristotle, as Pomponatius argued. So does the barbarity of the century make the best causes bad. By this ridiculous way of refuting Pomponatius, this philosopher was found to be right: for it is certain that Aristotle did not believe in the immortality of the soul. If Niphus had been determined to prove that the soul was immortal, he would have shown that Pomponatius was wrong, along with Aristotle, his master and guide. Niphus had many adversaries, because Pomponatius had many disciples. All these writings against him did not keep him from being quite acceptable to Charles V and even to the women of his court, for the philosopher, although rather ugly, was nonetheless so good at doffing the roughness of philosopher and assuming the airs of the court that he was regarded as one of the most amiable of men. He was good at telling stories, and had an imagination that served him well in conversation. His voice was sonorous; he loved women, and much more than a philosopher should; he sometimes pushed his adventures so far that he was scorned for it and risked something more. Bayle, as one might expect, goes on a good bit about this matter; he follows him in all his adventures where we think we should leave him. We cannot rise up too much against his morals, and against his mad habit of mocking everyone on any subject whatsoever. There are many obscene traits in his works. The public usually takes its vengeance; there are very few persons about whom such amusing tales are told as about Niphus. In some sources it is said that he went mad, but we should make no more of these little stories than of his own. We can only assert that he was a very clever man; we see it easily in his works. He wrote commentaries on almost all of Aristotle’s books that have to do with philosophy; that is indeed what he did best; for what he wrote about ethical philosophy is not anywhere near as good. His great flaw was prolixity: when he has an idea, he does not leave it until he has presented it to you in every way.

Among the last philosophers who followed pure Peripatetics, Giacomo Zaborella was one of the most famous.  [57] He was born into an illustrious family in Padua in 1533. The mind of those who are going to be noticed develops early. In the midst of the mistakes and bad things a young man does one discovers traits of genius if he is destined to enlighten the world one day. Such was Zaborella: he combined an insatiable desire for knowledge with great facility. He would have liked to possess all the sciences and exhaust them all. He dueled early on in Peripatetics, for it was then the nec plus ultra of philosophers. He applied himself especially to mathematics and astrology, in which he made great progress. The senate of Venice thought so highly of him that it had him succeed Bernard Tomitanus. [58] His reputation was not concentrated in Italy alone. Sigismund, then king of Poland, offered him such considerable advantages to go teach in Poland that he decided to leave his own country and satisfy Sigismund’s desires. [59] He wrote several works that would give him a great reputation if we still lived in the barbarity of those times; but the new day that shines on the literary world obscures the brightness that these sorts of books then cast.

The Piccolominis must not be forgotten here. This house is as illustrious for the scholars it has produced as for its antiquity. The parents of Alessandro Piccolomini, having inherited the love of the sciences from their ancestors, wanted to transmit it to their son: for that they gave him all sorts of masters, and the most capable. [60] They were not thinking the way people do today: preceptors and governors are given to children out of vanity; the point is just to have one, no one worries about whether he can offer a proper education; no one asks whether he knows what he must teach his pupil; they only wish that he not be expensive. I am persuaded that this way of thinking has been the downfall of several great houses. A young man poorly raised gets into all sorts of trouble and ruin; if he avoids trouble he does not do for his advancement in the world what he could have done with a better education. They say that the duke of Burgundy’s inclinations were not oriented naturally to the good: what then did the education not do which the great Fénelon gave him, since he made of him a prince whom France will forever mourn? [61] To return to Alessandro Piccolomini, he made extraordinary progress with such masters. I believe what is said about him may be exaggerated, and that flattery had some part in it, yet it is true that he was one of the most capable men of his time. His gentle behavior and his urbanity worthy of the times of Augustus made him as many friends as his knowledge had attracted admirers. Not only did he have philosophical merit, he was judged to have episcopal merit: he was raised to that dignity, and was later coadjutor of the archbishop of Sienna. In his old age he was esteemed and respected by all. He died in 1578, mourned by all the scholars and all the diocesans whose father he had been. His love for the works of Aristotle was beyond comprehension; he read them night and day and always took new pleasure in it. They are right to say that passion and prejudice play a role, for it is certain that in some of Aristotle’s works the pleasures which a clever man can enjoy are soon exhausted. Alessandro Piccolomini was the first to write philosophy in the vernacular: it drew him the reproaches of many scholars for whom Aristotle’s philosophy was being profaned. These superstitious men hardly dared to write it in Latin: to hear them, Greek alone was worthy of containing such great beauties. What would they say today if they returned? Our philosophy would surely surprise them; they would see the smallest schoolboys mocking opinions they so respected. How can it be that men who naturally love independence bent the knee for so long before Aristotle? That is a problem that deserved the pen of a man of wit to resolve it; it surprises me all the more that they were already writing against religion. Revelation was constraining; they didn’t want to cage their minds under the prophets, under the evangelists, under Saint Paul. Yet his epistles contain a better philosophy than that of Aristotle. I am not surprised to see unbelievers today: Descartes taught us to accept nothing that is not very clearly proven. He who knew the price of submission refused it to all the ancient philosophers. He was not guided by self-interest, for by his principles they thought they should follow him only when his reasons were good. I conceive how they extended this examination to all things, even to religion; but that in a time when everything in philosophy was judged by authority, they should have examined religion, that is what is extraordinary.

Francesco Piccolomini was another one of those who did honor to Peripatetic philosophy.  [62] It seems his mind needed to get out of the shackles it was in. Aristotle’s authority was no longer enough for him: he dared also to think like Plato, which drew the fiery Zaborella upon him. Their dispute was singular: it was not over ethical principles they disputed, but over the manner of treating them. Piccolomini wanted ethics treated synthetically, in other words starting from principles to arrive at conclusions. Zaborella said that in truth that was the way to proceed in the order of nature, but that it was not the same with our knowledge: that one had to start from effects to arrive at the causes; and he expended all his effort to show that Aristotle had the same thought, believing the dispute was over if he succeeded in demonstrating that; but he was wrong. When Piccolomini was beaten by Aristotle, he took refuge with Plato. There Zaborella did not deign even to attack him; he would have thought he failed in the respect due his master by giving him a rival. Piccolomini wanted to reconcile the two philosophers, thinking that, their principles being the same, they must consequently agree in their conclusions. The zealots of Aristotle did not approve of this conduct; they wanted their master to be the only one in antiquity who had thought correctly. He died at the age of eighty-four. The tears that were shed at his sepulcher are the most eloquent funeral oration that can be offered him, for men do not love someone precisely for his talents; if he lacks heart, they limit themselves to esteeming his mind. Francesco Piccolomini merited the esteem and friendship of all his fellow-citizens. He left us a commentary on the books of Aristotle that deal with heaven, and especially that deal with the origin and death of the soul, a system of natural and moral philosophy that was published under the title: the perfect and philosophical Science of all Nature, distributed in five parts . [63]

Highborn men studied philosophy then, though it was nowhere near as pleasurable as today. Among them was Ciriaco Strozzi. He was from the illustrious house of that name in Florence. After an education worthy of his high birth, he thought it necessary to round it out with travel in the different parts of Europe. He did not do so as a man who travels just to entertain himself. All of Europe became a library for him, where he worked as much as, and with more fruit than, certain scholars who would think they are wasting their time if they sometimes glimpsed daylight. Back in his own country, he was named professor: for the highborn then did not think they were dishonored by proving they knew more than others. He then became a professor in Bologna, and from there was transferred to Pisa; everywhere he sustained his reputation, which was very great. He undertook to provide the public with the ninth and tenth books of Aristotle’s politics, which are lost. They perhaps do not quite have the force of those that came from Aristotle’s pen, but we can say that there is finesse in his reflections, depth in his views, and wit [ esprit ] sown throughout his book.  [64] Now in those times wit was much rarer than knowledge, and I am persuaded that some of those who shone then could not write two lines today: science must be combined with wit.

Andrea Cesalpino and Cesare Cremonini became very famous in their time. [65] It is easy to fix all eyes on oneself by writing against religion, and especially when one writes with wit: you see everyone rushing to buy these books; you would say that men want vengeance for the constraint in which religion keeps them, and are quite content to see precepts that are the enemies of all of man’s passions attacked. Cesalpino passed for ungodly, and not without cause; never did anyone make less of revealed truths. After the usual studies, he resolved to become skilled in medicine and in the philosophy of Aristotle. With his penetrating and facile genius he made rapid progress in those two sciences. His vast erudition covered somewhat the stain of impiety of which he was accused, for Pope Clement VIII made him his first physician and gave him a chair in medicine at the Collegio di Sapientia. It was there he manifested all his sagacity. He made a great name for himself with the different books he wrote, and especially for the discovery of the circulation of the blood: for he appears in that to have anticipated Harvey. [66] Justice requires that we report on what basis we can contest Harvey for the glory of that discovery. Here is the way Cesalpino puts it: Idcirco pulmo per venam arteriis similem ex dextro cordis ventriculo fervidum hauriens sanguinem, eumque per anastomosim arteriae venali reddens quae in sinistrum cordis ventriculum tendit, transmisso interim aere frigido per asperae arteriae canales, qui juxta arteriam venalem protenduntur, non tamen osculis communicantes, ut putavit Galenus, solo tactu temperat. Huic sanguinis circulationi ex dextro cordis ventriculo per pulmones in sinistrum ejusdem ventriculum, optime respondent ea quae in dissectione apparent: nam duo sunt vasa in dextrum ventriculum desinentia, duo etiam in sinistrum; duorum autem unum intromittit tantum, alterum educit, membranis eo ingenio constitutis.  [67] I leave it to the physicians to judge whether these words do not prove that Cesalpino was aware of the circulation of the blood. What interests us the most in the person of Cesalpino is philosophy, since here our subject is philosophy alone. He had in mind to follow Aristotle strictly; no commentator was a sufficient authority for him. Happy he would be to have been able to shake off even the authority of Aristotle. But it was given to France to produce that genius who was to lead all the world’s minds out of slavery. [68] When he found something in Aristotle that appeared to him contrary to the dogmas of the Christian religion, that did not stop him: he kept on his path, and left it to theologians to get out of that quandary. It even appears he anticipated Spinoza in several of his ungodly principles; this is what we can see in his Peripatetic questions on the first principles of natural philosophy. [69] Not only did he follow Aristotle’s impieties, but one can say further that he much improved on that philosopher. That is why several persons distinguished in their century by their merit accused him of atheism. We shall say in few words what should be corrected in Cesalpino. We must first recall what we have said about the system of Aristotle’s physiology, without which it would be difficult to follow us. The better to make the poison go down, he would take a passage of Aristotle and interpret it in his manner, making it say what he wanted, so he was often lending him something he had never thought. One cannot without horror read what he says about God and the human soul, for in that he surpassed the impieties and follies of Averroes. According to Cesalpino there is but one soul in the world, which animates all bodies and even God; it even appears that he acknowledged only one substance; that soul, according to him, is the God we worship, and if you ask him what men are, he will tell you that they enter into the composition of that soul. As God is one and singular (for all that is combined in his doctrine), he includes only himself; he has no relationship with exterior things, and consequently no Providence. There you have the fruits of Aristotle’s philosophy, in part, it is true, misunderstood, and in part not corrected. For Aristotle having taught that all things begin with matter, Cesalpino concluded that there was only one spiritual substance. And as he saw that there was more than one animated body, he claimed that it was a part of that soul that animated each body in particular. He used this axiom of Aristotle: Quod in se optimum, id seipsum intelligere [What is best in oneself is to understand oneself] to deny providence. In physics also he is full of errors. According to him, there is no difference between modification and substance; and what is singular is that he wants us to define matter and different bodies by the different accidents and qualities that affect them. In all that, he is no doubt full of contradictions, but we cannot deny him having defended some of his propositions with great subtlety and great ingenuity. One cannot too greatly deplore that such a genius should have spent his entire life on useless things. If he had glimpsed the true, what progress would he not have made? Almost all scholars, as I have already noted, reproach Cesalpino his Spinozism. Yet we must concede that there is some essential difference between him and that famously ungodly man. The single substance in Cesalpino’s principles had to do only with the soul, and in Spinoza’s principles it also includes matter: but so what? Cesalpino’s opinion does not destroy the nature of God any less than Spinoza’s. According to Cesalpino, God is the substance of the world; it is he who constitutes it, and he is not in the world. What an absurdity! He considered God with respect to the world like a hen on her eggs. There is no more action on God’s part to make the world go than there is on the part of that hen to make her eggs hatch. As it is impossible, he says elsewhere, for a power to be without a subject, it is impossible to find a spirit without a body. He is full of such absurdities that it would be superfluous to relate.

Cremonini was ungodly in the style of Cesalpino; their impiety was formed on the same model, in other words on Aristotle. These sorts of philosophers could not imagine that it was possible for Aristotle to be wrong about anything; everything their master philosopher had uttered seemed to them incontestable: that is why all those who professed to follow him strictly denied the immortality of the soul and Providence. They did not think they ought to take advantage of the light which the Christian religion had shed on these two points. Aristotle did not think so; after him could one think better? If they had reflected a little on their conduct, they would have noticed that Aristotle was not their master but their god; for it is not in a man to discover everything that can be known and never to be wrong. With such veneration for Aristotle, one must imagine the frenzy with which they devoured his works. Cremonini was one of those who understood them the best. He made a great reputation that won him the friendship and the esteem of princes, and that is what I do not understand, for there was nothing attractive about this kind of philosophy. I would not be surprised if the philosophers of that time had all been dismissed from their school, for I sense that they must have been very annoying; but that today what is called a great philosopher should not be welcomed by kings, that they do not make them their friends, that is what surprises me. For whoever says great philosopher today means a man full of infinitely useful and agreeable knowledge, a man who is full of grand views. They will tell us that these philosophers understand nothing about politics: do we not know that the conduct of business is a sort of routine, and that the only way to understand it is to have been a party to it? But do we believe that a man who by his works is recognized as possessing a vast and extensive genius, as possessing surprising insight; do we believe, I say, that such a man would not be a great minister if he were made use of? A great mind is always active and is always attracted by some object, so he would do something; we would see certain systems redressed, certain customs abolished, because they are bad; we would see new ideas blossom and make the situation of the citizens better; society in a word would be improved, as philosophy is improved every day. In certain states we are today, with regard to the system of general welfare of society, as these philosophers were of whom I speak with regard to the ideas of Aristotle; we must hope that nature will give to society what it has already given to philosophy; society will have its Descartes who will overturn huge numbers of prejudices, and make our distant progeny laugh at all the silly things we have adopted. To return to Cremonini, the heart of his system is the same as for Cesalpino’s. All these philosophers could sense their impiety, because it only takes eyes to see that what they argued is contrary to the teaching of Christianity; but they thought they were rendering sufficient homage to religion by giving it faith and reserving reason for Aristotle, a very disadvantageous division. How did they not sense that what is contrary to reason, what reason proves false, could not possibly be true in religion? Truth is the same in God as in men; it is the same source. I am no longer surprised that they did not encounter the truth: they did not know what it was. Failing in the first principles, it was most unlikely they would escape from the error that was subjugating them.

The philosophers I have discussed so far came from the bosom of the Roman church; there were many others, no doubt; but we have believed we should pause only for those who distinguished themselves the most. The Protestants had theirs just like the Catholics. It seemed that Luther had delivered the last blow in that party to Peripatetic philosophy by enveloping it in the curses he uttered against scholastic theology. But Luther himself felt he had gone too far. The Anabaptist sect showed him that he had opened the door to the exalted and illuminated. The Lutherans lacked the arms to refute them with, and had to borrow those they were cursing in the hands of the Catholics. Melanchthon was one of those who contributed the most to the re-establishment of philosophy among the Protestants. [70] All they knew how to be in those days was Peripatetic. Melanchthon was too enlightened to fall into the crude errors of that sect, so he believed he should reform philosophy in some of its parts, and preserve the foundation he deemed necessary to defend against the darts being launched by the Catholics, and at the same time halt the progress of certain sects that went much farther than the Protestants. This famous man was born in Schwarzerd to an upstanding family; [71] he received a very good education. From early on, an insatiable desire for learning was discovered in him; ordinary pleasures did not amuse him. His constant application left him grave and serious, but that never altered the gentleness of his character. At the age of twelve he went to continue his studies in Heidelberg; he soon attracted the esteem and friendship of everyone. Count Louis de Lowenstein chose him to be his children’s preceptor. Baillet was right to include him among the children who had distinguished themselves at an early age when one rarely possesses what is necessary to be a scholar. [72] Melanchthon was naturally eloquent, as can be seen in his writings; he cultivated with great care the natural talents he had of this kind. He studied philosophy like the others, for a person was nothing without knowing Aristotle. He distinguished himself greatly in the solutions he gave to the difficulties on the modal propositions. [73] He was like an eagle on the universals. The reader will doubtless be surprised to see me praising Melanchthon by these mentions; he is mocked today, and rightly so, but we must praise a man for going farther than his whole century. These were then the stylish questions, so one could not dispense with studying them; and when one excelled beyond everyone else, one could not fail to have considerable wit, for the first men in all eras are always great men, whatever absurdities they may have said. You have to see, said M. de Fontenelle, where they started from: a man who climbs a steep mountain can well be as light as a man on the plain who will cover six times as much distance. [74] Yet Melanchthon had too much wit not to sense that the philosophy of Aristotle extended its rights too far; he disapproved of the thorny, difficult, and useless questions that tormented everyone’s mind; he perceived that endless follies were hidden under big words, and that only their philosophical raiment could make them respected. It is quite evident that by dint of putting words in the head, all the ideas are forced out; one turns out very scholarly without knowing anything; the head seems full, and nothing is there. It was a monk who finally convinced him of the bad taste that tyrannized all men: that monk, one day, not knowing a sermon he was to preach, or not having written it, had the idea, in its place, of explaining some questions in Aristotle’s ethics; he used all the terms of the art: one readily feels how useful that exhortation was, and what unction he put into it. Melanchthon was indignant to see that barbarity went so far; fortunate he, if only he had not subsequently made of the folly of one individual, which the Church has always disavowed, as it disavows every day the extravagancies of zealots, a crime against the entire Church! He finished his studies at seventeen and began to explain Terence and Vergil, especially to children. Some time later he was commissioned for an oration, which led him to read Cicero and Livy attentively; he acquitted himself like a man of great intelligence and who had been raised on the best authors. But what most surprised Melanchthont, who was, as I have already said, of very gentle character, was when he witnessed for the first time the disputes of the different sects. At that time those of the Nominals and the Reals were seething; [75] after several bad reasons on both sides, and this because good ones could not be had on that subject, the best fighters were victorious. Everyone by common accord stripped away philosophical gravity and fought indecently, only too content if in the tumult some well-landed blow could have make a change in their heads: for if, as one clever man remarks, a blow from a nurse’s finger could have made Pascal a fool, why could a trepanned fool not become a clever man? The midwives of those times were no doubt less skillful than at present, and I think the long triumph of Aristotle is due to them. Melanchthon was called by the Elector of Saxony to be a professor of Greek. Luther’s error was making rapid progress then; Melanchthon met this dangerous heresiarch, and as he was looking for something new, because he was quite aware that what he had been taught was not what he needed to know, he swallowed the poison that Luther handed him; he went astray. He was right to look for something new, but it should have been only in philosophy; it was not the religion that called for change: you do not make a new religion as you make a new system. There cannot even be a reform on religion: it represents such extraordinary things to believe that if Luther had been entitled to reform it, I would reform it further, because I would easily persuade myself that he overlooked numerous things. It is only because I know it cannot be touched that I make do with what is proposed to me. Melanchthon, now that he knew Luther, became a sectarian and an ardent sectarian, and consequently his mind became enveloped in the veil of error: he preached, he catechized, he intrigued, and finally, if he abandoned Aristotle in something it was only to follow Luther, who was all the more preferable to him that he more formally attacked religion. Luther spread some clouds over Melanchthon’s mind concerning Aristotle, for he was not ashamed, after Luther’s lessons, to call Aristotle a vain sophist . But he soon was reconciled, and despite the apologies he wrote of Luther’s sentiment, he contributed much to the re-establishment of philosophy among the Protestants. He perceived that Luther condemned scholastics rather than philosophy; this heresiarch’s quarrel was indeed not with the philosophers, but with the theologians, and we must admit that he had gone about it well by first making their weapons odious and vile. Melanchthon detested all the other sects of philosophers; Peripatetics alone seemed to him defensible; he rejected Stoicism, skepticism, and Epicureanism alike. He recommended to everyone the reading of Plato, because of its abundance, and because of what he says about the nature of God, and his fine diction; but he preferred Aristotle for his order and method. He wrote the life of Plato and of Aristotle; his sentiment can easily be seen by reading them. I think no one will object if I transcribe here a few phrases drawn from his orations, which are very rare, and besides you will see how this famous man, whose speeches made such an impression, expressed himself: Cum eam, quam toties Plato praedicat methodum, non saepe adhibeat, et evagetur aliquando liberius in disputando, quaedam etiam figuris involvat, ac volens occultet, denique cum raro pronuntiet quid sit sentiendum; assentior adolescentibus potius proponendum esse Aristotelem, qui artes, quas tradit, explicat integras, et methodum simpliciorem, seu filum ad regendum lectorem adhibet, et quid sit sentiendum plerumque pronuntiat: haec in docentibus ut requirantur multae causae graves sunt; ut enim satis dentibus draconis a Cadmo seges exorta est armatorum, qui inter se ipsi dimicarunt; ita, si quis serat ambiguas opiniones, exoriuntur inde variae ac perniciosae dissensiones.  [76] And soon after, he says that by using Aristotle’s method it is easy to reduce what in Plato would be extremely long. Aristotle, he tells us elsewhere, has other advantages over Plato; he gives us a complete course: what he begins, he completes. He begins things from as high as one can go, and leads you very far. And he concludes: let us love Plato and Aristotle, the first because of what he says on politics, and because of his elegance; the second because of his method. Yet one must read both with caution, and distinguishing carefully what is contrary to the doctrine we read in the Gospel. We could not do without Aristotle in the Church, says Melanchthon further, because he is the only one who teaches us to define, divide, and judge; he alone teaches us to reason; now are all of these not necessary in the Church? For the things of life do we not need many things that physics alone teaches us? Plato talks about them, in truth; but he is like a prophet proclaiming the future, and not a master seeking to instruct, whereas in Aristotle you find the principles, and he himself draws out the consequences. I ask only, says Melanchthon, that one hold onto the things Aristotle says, and not to the words; that one abandon the vain subtleties and make use of distinctions only when they are necessary to give the sense that the difficulty is not about what you are defending, whereas commonly one distinguishes to make you lose sight of what one is arguing: is that the way to clarify the subjects?  [77] I think we have said enough to demonstrate that it is not for nothing that we have included Melanchthon among those who re-established the philosophy of Aristotle. We have not attempted to present his life; it contains many more interesting circumstances than those we have related: he is a great man, and one who played a very great role in the world; but his life is well known, and this was not the place to write it.

Nicolaus Taurellus was one of the most celebrated among the Protestants. [78] He was born to parents whose fortune did not give Taurellus hope for the kind of education his mind required; but the facility and penetration that was observed in him led the duke of Würtemberg to be persuaded to furnish the expenses. He made extraordinary progress, and never did anyone less disappoint his benefactors than he. The disputes between Catholics and Protestants prevented him from embracing the priesthood. He became a physician, and that is what put an end to his fortune at the court of Würtemberg. The duke of Würtemberg wanted him there to have him defend the reformation party which he had embraced, and that is part of the reason he had provided the cost of his education; but he was suspected of leaning toward the Augsburg confession. [79] Perhaps he was not for any party; whatever his religion, it is irrelevant to Philosophy. That is why we are not discussing that matter exactly. After long professing medicine in Basel, he went to Strasbourg, and from there returned to Basel to be a professor of ethics. From there he went to Germany, where he acquired a great reputation; his school was filled with barons and counts who came to hear him. He was so disinterested that with all that reputation and the crowd coming to hear him, he did not get rich. He died of the plague at the age of fifty-nine. He was one of the first men of his time, for he dared to think on his own, and never let himself be governed by authority. One discovers everywhere in his writings a certain boldness in his thoughts and opinions. Never did anyone better grasp a difficulty or better use it against his opponents, who commonly could not stand against him. He was a great enemy of the philosophy of Cesalpino. In all his writings one discovers that he was quite content with what he was doing; his pride shows a little too openly, and one sometimes perceives an unbearable presumption. He looked down with his lofty mind on all the philosophers who had preceded him, with exception of Aristotle and a few Ancients. He examined the philosophy of Aristotle, and perceived in it some errors; he had the courage to reject them, and wit enough to do so successfully. It is impressive to hear him say in the preface to the method of predictive Medicine (for such is the book’s title), “I strive to avenge the doctrine of Jesus Christ, and grant nothing to Aristotle that Jesus Christ would seem to refuse him; nor do I examine what is contrary to the Gospel, because before even examining it, I am satisfied that it is false.” [80] All philosophers should have in mind that their philosophy must not be opposed to religion; all their reason must splinter there, because it is an edifice supported by immutable truth. We must admit that his philosophical system is difficult to grasp. I know only that he greatly scorned all of Aristotle’s commentators, and that he admits he was very fond of Peripatetic philosophy, but corrected and made to conform to the Gospel: that is why I do not believe we should erase him from the catalog of Peripatetics, although he has reformed it in several places. A mind as bold as his could not fail to unleash a few paradoxes; his adversaries have used them to prove he was an atheist. But in truth, the respect he manifests everywhere for religion, which certainly was not feigned, ought to make him immune to such an accusation. He did not foresee that such consequences could be derived from the principles he advanced, for I am persuaded that he would have retracted them, or would have explained them satisfactorily to everyone. I think one should be very reserved about the accusation of atheism, and never conclude from a few tentative propositions that a man is an atheist; one must consult all his works, and one can assure that if he really is one, his impiety will be perceptible throughout.

Michael Piccart [81] was illustrious around the time of Nicolaus Taurellus; he professed logic early, and distinguished himself in it; he followed the torrent, and was a Peripatetic. After his first exercises he was appointed to the chair of metaphysics and poetry: that appears rather disparate, and I foresee hardly any good of a time when a chair in poetry is given to a Peripatetic; but after all he might have been the best in those times, and one cannot object when someone is better than anyone else in his time. I do not understand why, in a century when scholars were so well paid, Piccart was so poor, for he struggled his whole life against poverty, and he made it plain from his behavior that the philosophy of his heart and mind was better than the philosophy he dictated in the schools. He wrote a great many works, and all were highly esteemed while he was alive. We have fifty-one dissertations of his in which he makes it clear that he had a superior grasp of Aristotle. He also wrote the manual of Aristotle’s philosophy, which was widely adopted. Piccart’s reputation subsists still, and, what can hardly be said for the works of those times, there is profit to be had in his.

Cornelius Martini was born in Antwerp; he did his studies there, and with such distinction that he was attracted immediately after to Amsterdam to teach philosophy there.  [82] He was subtle, capable of embarrassing a man of wit, and easily performed well as a good Peripatetic. The duke of Brunswick had the idea of sending him to the colloquium of Ratisbonne. [83] Gretzer, who was deputized to that colloquium for the Protestant party, was displeased to have a professor of philosophy associated with him in a dispute where questions of theology alone were to be debated. Which is what made him say, when he saw Martini in the assembly: Quid Saül inter prophetas quaerit? To which Martini replied, Asinam patris sui . [84] Subsequently Martini made it clear that Gretzer had been wrong to complain of a second like him. He was most zealous for the philosophy of Aristotle; he worked all his life defending it against the assaults that were already beginning to be made on it. That is what made him take up arms against the partisans of Ramus, [85] and we can say that it was only by means of redoubled efforts that Peripatetics survived. He was ready to dispute anyone; never in his life did he refuse a philosophic challenge [ cartel ]. [86] He died at age fifty-four, a kind of martyr of Peripatetics: for he had damaged his health, either by the determined work to defend his dear master, or by the oral disputes which infallibly wore out his lungs. We have by him the logical analysis, the logical commentary against the Ramists, a system of moral philosophy and metaphysics. I make no mention here of his different writings on theology, because I am speaking only of what concerns philosophy.

Hermann Conring was one of the most learned men Germany has produced.  [87] He could be lauded for a number of things, but I shall limit myself to what concerns philosophy: he distinguished himself so greatly that we cannot fail to mention him with praise in this history. Duke Ulrich of Brunswick made him a professor in his university. He came at a bad time: wars were devastating all of Europe; this scourge afflicted all the different nations. It is difficult with such troubles to give to study the time required to become a scholar. Yet he found the means of becoming one of the most learned men who ever existed. The greatest praise I can offer him is to say that he was written by M. Colbert into the catalog of scholars whom Louis le Grand [Louis XIV] rewarded. This great king testified his esteem for him by his generosity in the heart of Germany. He was a Peripatetic, and himself complains that the respect he had for what his masters had taught him went a little too far. Not that he did not dare examine Aristotle’s opinions, but prejudice always becoming involved, these sorts of examinations were not leading him to new discoveries. He thought about Aristotle and the proper way to study him, like Melanchthon. Here is his way of evoking Aristotle’s works: “There are many things wanting in Aristotle’s moral philosophy which I would desire: for example, everything concerning natural law, and which I think should be treated in the Ethics, since it is on natural law that all ethics depends. His method seems bad to me, and his arguments weak.” It would indeed have been difficult for him to offer a good moral philosophy, since he denied Providence, the immortality of the soul, and consequently a state to come where vice is punished and virtue rewarded. What virtues would one admit who denies the first truths? Why then would I not seek to be happy in this world, since there is nothing for me to hope for in the next one? In Aristotle’s principles, a man who sacrifices for country is a fool. Love of self is before love of country; and if we ordinarily put love of country before love of self, it is only because we are persuaded that the preference which we give to the country’s interest is rewarded. If I die for country, and everything dies with me, is that not the greatest of all follies? Whoever thinks otherwise is paying more heed to the great words of country than to the reality of things.  [88] Yet Conring opposed Descartes a bit too much; he saw nothing reasonable in his Physics, and Aristotle’s satisfied him. What can prejudice not do to the mind? He approved of Descartes only in his rejection of substantial forms. The Germans could not yet accustom themselves to Descartes’s new ideas; they were like men who have their eyes covered for a long time, from whom the wrap is lifted: the first steps are timid; they refuse to rest their weight on the floor they discover; and the blind man who crosses all of Paris in an hour might take more than a day to take the same path if he were suddenly made to see. Conring died, and Peripatetics almost expired with him. It has only languished since, because those who came after and defended it could not be great men: there was too much light then for a man of wit to lose his way. There you have more or less the beginning, the evolution, and the end of Peripatetics. I do not think anyone imagines that my intention was to name all those who have distinguished themselves in that school; that would take huge volumes. For in the past to be a distinguished man in one’s own time, one had to achieve renown in some philosophical school, and everyone knows that Peripatetics was long dominant. If a man was reputed to have some merit, they first proposed some argument to him, very often in barocho, [89] to judge whether his reputation was well founded. If Racine and Corneille had come in those times, inasmuch as not one single ergo would have been found in their tragedies, they would have passed for ignorant, and consequently for men of little wit. Happy is our century that it thinks otherwise!

[Addendum] [90]

The author thought he should sow here some passages of Mr. Deslandes’s work, which make up about one-tenth of this long article; [91] the rest is a substantial and critical extract of Brucker’s Latin history of philosophy, [92] a modern work esteemed abroad, little known in France, which has been wisely put to use for the philosophical part of the Encyclopédie , as in the article Arabs [93] and in a large number of other articles.

1. Philip II, king of Macedon from 359 to 336 BCE.

2. ‘A grateful Aristotle has erected this altar to Plato / Whom the wicked nor the unjust could never celebrate.’

3. Aristotle was reputed to be giving to an ambulatory style of teaching, hence the name of the Peripatetic school from ancient Greek word περιπατητικός ( peripatētikós ) referring to walking about.

4. I.e. , Aristotle’s as opposed to Plato’s.

5. That Antipater was responsible for Alexander’s death is disputed.

6. One “exoteric” for the general public; one “esoteric” for the initiates.

7. The pun here is lost in English: comprendre means both contain and comprehend or understand.

8. Jean Hardouin (1646–1729), a Jesuit scholar who rejected most of the classical authors.

9. The passage can be found (in Latin) as cited in Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibniz (1646-1716), Viri illustratis Godefridi Guil, Leibnitii epistolae ad diversos, theologici, iuridici, medici, philosophici, mathematici, historici et philologici argumenti ... (Leipzig, 1734-1742).

10. Juan Luis Vivès (1492—1540): his Introductio ad sapientiam (1524) and the many volumes of De disciplinis (1531) attacked the standing of Aristotle in his time.

11. “Le statuaire et la statue de Jupiter” ( Fables , book IX, fable 6).

12. René Rapin (1620–1687), Jesuit, in Réflexions sur la poëtique d’Aristote et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes (Paris, 1676).

13. In Le Monde de Descartes ou traité de la lumière et des autres principaux objects des sens , published posthumously in 1664.

14. Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon and Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (Paris, 1749), vol. I, pp. 43–48.

15. Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558), translator and commentator, Aristotle, Historia de animalibus (Toulouse, 1619).

16. This reference appears to come directly from Pierre Bayle’s article on Aristotle in Dictionnaire historique et critique (1740 ed., vol. I, p. 326, rem. H) citing Agrippa von Nettesheim, “who tells us that the theologians of Cologne maintained that Aristotle had been the precursor of the Messiah in the mysteries of nature, as Saint John was in the mysteries of grace.”

17. Lambertus de Monte, Quaestio de salvatione Aristotelis (1498).

18. Giovanni Battista Crispo (ca. 1550–ca. 1598), De ethnicis philosophis caute legendis disputationum (Rome, 1594).

19. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), besides being a great philosopher, was Lord Chancellor of England. This reference is not to his major work Novum Organum (1620) but to Masculus partus temporum (The Masculine Birth of Time), 1603.

20. On Rapin, see note 12.

21. 140–137 BCE.

22. “ Philosophical distinctions are very often nothing but quibbles and escapes. The theologians have multiplied disputes by dint of distinctions .” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux .)

23. Pope Paul V (1550–1621) assumed the throne of Saint Peter in 1605.

24. Theodorus Gaza (c. 1398–c. 1475).

25. Mourad II (1404–1451) became Ottoman sultan in 1421; he attacked Thessalonica in 1430.

26. George of Trebizond (1395–1486).

27. Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472), In calumniatorem Platonis . On this text, see Eva Del Soldato, "Basil [Cardinal] Bessarion", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta.

28. Johann Jakob Brücker (1696–1770), author of Historia critica philosophiae a mundi incunabulis ad nostram usque aetatem deducta, 5 vols., (Leipzig, 1742–1744), which Yvon cites at the end of the article. The definition referred to here is that by Pope Leo X at the Lateran Council discussed above.

29. “A professor dictates his philosophy lesson before explaining it” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ).

30. Pierre Varignon (1654–17221), Jesuit.

31. Ecumenical council held in Trent in three sessions between 1545 and 1563, to respond to the challenge posed by Luther and the Protestant Reformation more generally.

32. Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), Spanish Dominican priest and theologian.

33. Thomas Gallus (ca. 1200-1246), French theologian sometimes called Thomas of St. Victor.

34. De justitia et jure (1556).

35. De jure belli ac pacis (1625).

36. Domingo Báñes (1528–1604), Spanish Dominican, polemicist and author of, among other works, Scholastica Commentaria in secundam secundae angelici doctoris D. Thomae (Salamanca, 1584).

37. “Physical premotion [...] is a complement to active virtue by which it passes from the first act to the second act, in other words from complete and immediate power to action” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ).

38. Duns Scotus (1265/66–1308).

39. Allusion most specifically to the Jesuit order, officially the Society of Jesus.

40. Ángel Manrique (1577–1649), author of Cisterciensium seu verius ecclesiasticorum annalium a condito Cistercio , 1642–1649).

41. Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz (1606–1682).

42. Theologia rationalis , Frankfurt (1654–1655).

43. Gabriel Vásquez (ca. 1549–1604).

44. Francisco Suárez (1548–1617).

45. Rodrigo de Arriaga (1592–1667).

46. Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a very prominent Protestant scholar and polemicist, author of the very influential Dictionnaire historique and critique , 1697.

47. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525); his two works mentioned in this article are De fato (On destiny) and De incantantibus (On enchantments).

48. Alessandro Achillini (ca. 1463–1512).

49. “ Disposer is said in medicine, not only of the outer situation of the parts of the body, but also of the inner parts, and of the temperament and humors.” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux .)

50. To understand Yvon’s reference here see the article Power of the imagination of pregnant women over the fetus, most of which is taken from Buffon’s Histoire naturelle .

51. In other words, because the Roman Inquisition was to be feared there.

52. I.e. , the pre-Christian order.

53. Ercole Gonzaga (1505–1583).

54. On Scaliger, see note 15.

55. Agostino Nifo (ca. 1473–ca. 1538), De intellectu (1503) and De auguriis (1531).

56. De immortalitate animae (1516).

57. Giacomo or Jacopo Zabarella (1533–1589).

58. Bernardino Tomitano (1517-1576).

59. Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania (r. 1530-1572).

60. Alessandro Piccolomini (1508–1579).

61. The reference is to the grandson and heir of Louis XIV, Louis, Duke of Burgundy (1682–1712), who died before he was able to assume the throne. 62 François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715) was made preceptor of the young prince in 1689.

62. Francesco Piccolomini (1523–1607).

63. Naturae totius universi scientia perfecta atque philosophilica, quinque partibus ordine exactissimo absoluta , 1597.

64. Esprit : One could also say “cleverness”: esprit here combines intellectual qualities with liveliness of mind.

65. Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603); Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631).

66. William Harvey (1578-1657), English physician still credited with the first complete description of the circulation of blood.

67. “[But the transference is not effected exclusively in the old Galenical fashion, by percolating the septum. It takes place mainly by way of the lungs, the blood passing from the pulmonary artery to the pulmonary vein, between which vessels free asastomotic communication is presumed; cold air being, at the same time, imparted to the blood by the divisions of the trachæa which run side by side with the pulmonary veins, but have no communication with them by open mouths as Galen believed.] With this circulation of the blood from the right to the left ventricle by way of the lungs, everything discovered by dissection is in complete accordance; for as there are two vessels ending in the right ventricle, so there are two ending in the left. Of the two, however, one only in each intromits, the other emits, the valves being so arranged as to secure this result.” Quaestionum peripateticarum (Venice, 1571), book V, p. 125; trans. Robert Willis, William Harvey (London, 1878), pp. 122–23; the section in brackets is paraphrase.

68. That is, Descartes.

69. See note 67, above.

70. The reform theologian Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560).

71. Yvon is slightly confused here: Melanchthon was born in Bretten, in the Palatinate; his surname at birth was Schwarzerdt, which he later changed to Melanchthon, following a custom among humanists of latinizing their names.

72. Adrien Baillet (1649–1706); the reference is to Des Enfants devenus célèbres par leurs études et par leurs écrits [Children who became famous by their studies and their writings] (Paris, 1688).

73. Propositions modales : “Term of logic, said of propositions that contain some conditions, manners or restrictions” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ).

74. Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle (1657–1757).

75. Followers of the Nominalist and Realist or Essentialist schools.

76. “Since he does not often employ the method which he proclaims so many times, and sometimes digresses freely in his discussion, and wraps some things in images and conceals them deliberately, and, furthermore, since he rarely announces what one should notice, I agree that it is rather Aristotle who should be presented to the young. He explains completely the arts he teaches, and employs an easier method, like a thread for guiding the reader, and most of the time announces what one should note. There are many weighty reasons why this is necessary for those who teach. For just as from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus a crop of armed men sprang forth, who fought among themselves, so, if one sows ambiguous opinions, various destructive disputes will spring forth.” Oratio de Platone [Oration on Plato] (1538), trans. Christine F. Salazar in Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 201.

77. On distinctions, see note 22, above.

78. Nicolaus Taurellus (1547–1606).

79. I.e. , Lutheranism.

80. Medicae praedictionis methodus (Frankfurt, 1581).

81. Michael Piccartus or Piccart (1574-1620), University of Altdorf.

82. Cornelius Martini (1567/8–1621).

83. Diet of Regensberg, 1541.

84. “What is Saul seeking among prophets?” “His father’s she-ass.” Allusion to I Samuel 10:11–12: “Is Saul also among the prophets?”

85. Petrus Ramus or Pierre de La Ramée (ca. 1515–1572); the book in question is Commentariorum logicortium adversus Ramistas (1623).

86. Analogy to a duel; a cartel is a “missive sent to someone to challenge him to singular combat” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ).

87. Hermann Conring (1606–1681).

88. Aux grands mots de “patrie” : the meaning is somewhat unclear because of disparity between the singular patrie and the plural grands mots .

89. “BAROCO. A name given in the School to the fourth mode of syllogism of the second figure. A syllogism in baroco must have the first proposition universal and affirmative, the second and third propositions particular and negative, and its mean term is an attribute in the first two propositions, etc.” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux .)

90. This final paragraph is added to the already published article in the Errata of volume 2 of the Encyclopédie . Diderot, evidently disappointed by Yvon’s article, chose to supplement and in some ways rewrite it in another article, published in volume 12: Peripatetic philosophy, or Philosophy of Aristotle, or Aristotelianism.

91. Antoine François Boureau-Deslandes (1689–1757), Histoire critique de la philosophie , Amsterdam, 1737

92. On Brucker, see n. 28, above. In the January and March 1752 issues of Mémoires de Trévoux , the editor, Guillaume Berthier, had pointedly accused Yvon of plagiarizing these two works: see Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), p. 93 n.5. For a discussion of sources of and influences on Yvon relative to this article, see Burson, pp. 137–148.

93. There are in fact two articles on the philosophy of the Arabs, both unsigned but attributed to Diderot: Arabs, State of the Philosophy of the ancient Arabs and Sarrasins ou Arabes, Philosophie des. The second takes up where the first leaves off.