Peripatetic philosophy, or philosophy of Aristotle, or Aristotelianism. We have treated Peripatetics, or the philosophy of Aristotle, at great length in the article Aristotelianism. [1] There remain some important things to say, however which we have reserved for this article, which will serve as complement to the one in the first volume of this work.

On the life of Aristotle . We have nothing to add to what was said about it in the article Aristotelianism. Consult that location for his birth, education, studies, the philosopher’s residence at the courts of Philip and Alexander, his attachment and his gratitude to his master Plato, his life in Athens, the opening of his school, his manner of philosophizing, his retreat to Chalcis, his death, his works, and the different parts of his philosophy in general. But to conform to the method we have followed in all our articles on philosophy, we shall list here the principal axioms of each of the parts of his doctrine more attentively considered.

On Aristotle’s logic . 1. The object of logic is the plausible or the true; or, to put the same thing another way, the probable truth or the established, certain truth. The plausible or the probable truth belongs to dialectics; the established, certain truth to analysis. The demonstrations of analysis are certain; those of dialectics are only plausible.

2. The truth can be demonstrated, and for this effect we make use of the syllogism, and the syllogism is either demonstrative and analytical, or topical and dialectical. The syllogism is composed of propositions; the propositions are composed of simple terms.

3. A term is a homonym, a synonym, or a paronym: a homonym when it includes several different things under a common name; a synonym when there is no difference between the name of the thing and its definition; a paronym when the things it expresses are the same in themselves but differ by the ending and case.

4. We can reduce univocal terms to six classes; they are called predicaments or categories .  [2]

5. And these ten classes of beings can relate to substance which is by itself, or to accident, which requires a subject in order to be.

6. Substance is either first properly so called, which can be neither the predicate of another, nor adhere to it; or second, subsisting in the first like genera and species.

7. There are nine classes of accidents: quantity, relation, quality, action, passion, time, place, situation, and habit.

8. Quantity is either contained or discrete; it has no opposite; it admits neither the most nor the least, and it denominates things, making them equal or unequal.

9. Relation is the connection in all nature of one thing to another; it admits of more and less; it is what entails one thing by another, which makes the first follow from a preceding, and the preceding from a second, and joins them.

10. Quality is said of what the thing is, and we distinguish four kinds: natural disposition and habit, natural power and impotence, passivity and passion, form and figure; it admits of intensity and remission, and it is what causes things to be called similar or dissimilar.

11. Action and passion: passion of the one who suffers; action of the one who acts, marks motion, admits of opposites, intensity, and remission. [3]

12. Time and place, situation and habit indicate the circumstances of the thing designated by these words.

13. After these predicaments, one must consider the terms that are not reducible to this system of classes, like opposites; and opposition is either relative, or contrary, or privative, or contradictory; priority, simultaneity, motion, possession.

14. The enunciation or proposition is composed of terms or words; it must be related to the doctrine of interpretation.

15. The word is the sign of a concept of the mind; it is simple or non-complex, or complex: simple if the concept or the perception is simple, and the simple perception is neither true nor false; or the perception is complex, and partakes of falseness and truth, and the term is complex.

16. The noun is a word by convention [ institution ], without relation to time, and no part of it taken separately and in itself has any meaning.

17. The verb is a word that marks time, no part of which has meaning by itself, and which is always the sign of things said of another.

18. Discourse is a series of words by convention, each separate part of which and the whole have meaning.

19. Among discourses, the only one which is meaningful and belongs to hermeneutics is the one which utters the true or the false; the others are either rhetoric or poetry. It has its subject, its predicate, and its copula.

20. There are five sorts of propositions: simple and complex, affirmative and negative, universal, particular, indefinite and singular, impure and modal. The modal ones are either necessary or possible, or contingent, or impossible.

21. There are three things to consider in the proposition: opposition, equivalence, and the conversion

22. Opposition is either contradictory, or contrary, or sub-contrary.

23. Equivalence makes two propositions designate the same thing, and can together both be true or both be false.

24. Conversion is a transposition of terms, such that the affirmative and negative proposition is always true.

25. The syllogism is a discourse in which from given premises something must necessarily follow.

26. Three terms make up the entire material of the syllogism. The disposition of these terms, according to the figures and modes, is its form.

27. The figure is a disposition of the middle term and the extremes, such that the consequence is well taken. The mode is the disposition of the propositions with respect to quantity and quality.

28. There are three figures of syllogism. In the first, the middle term is subject of the major premise, and predicate of the minor; and there are four modes where the consequence is well taken. In the second, the middle term is the predicate of the two extremes, and there are four modes which conclude well. In the third, the middle is the subject of the two extremes, and there are six modes in which the conclusion is good.

29. Every syllogism is in some one of these figures, becomes perfect in the first, and can be reduced to its universal mode.

30. There are six other forms of argument: conversion of terms, induction, example, abduction, instance, and enthymeme. But all having the force of syllogism, can and must be reduced to it.

31. The invention of syllogisms requires (1) Terms of the given problem, and the supposition of the thing in question, definitions, properties, antecedents, consequences, antipathies. (2) Discernment of the essentials, the intrinsic, the accidental, the certain and the probable. (3) The choice of universal consequences. (4) The choice of antecedents of which the thing is a universal consequence. (5) Attention to joining the sign of universality not to the consequent but to the antecedent. (6) The use of immediate and not distant consequences. (7) The same use of antecedents. (8) Preference of consequences of a universal thing, and of the universal consequences of a thing.

The acuity and reach of mind present in all these observations is unbelievable. Had Aristotle discovered only these things, he would have to be considered a man of the first order. He would have perfected logic in a single blow if he had distinguished ideas and their signs, and devoted himself more to notions than to words. Ask the grammarians about the utility of his distinctions.

32. Every scientific discourse is based on some thought prior to the thing under discussion.

33. To know is to understand what a thing is, that it is, what its cause is, and that it cannot be otherwise.

34. Demonstration is a series of syllogisms from which science is born.

35. Apodictic science is science of true, first, immediate causes, the most certain, and the least subject to a preliminary demonstration.

36. There is no demonstrative science except of a necessary thing; demonstration is therefore composed of necessary things.

37. What one states about the whole is what fits the whole, in itself and forever.

38. The first universal is what is in itself, in each thing, because the thing is a thing.

39. Demonstration is done with conclusions of eternal truth. Whence it follows that there is neither demonstration, nor science, nor even definitions, of transient things.

40. To know that a thing is, is one thing; and to know why it is, is another. Whence two kinds of demonstrations, the one a priori , the other a posteriori . The a priori demonstration is the true, perfect one.

41. Ignorance is the opposite of knowledge [ science ]; either it is a pure negation or a depravity. The latter is the worst: it arises from a syllogism which is false, where the means is flawed. Such is the ignorance caused by a dysfunction of the senses.

42. No knowledge arises immediately from the senses. Their object is individual or singular, and knowledge is of universals. They lead to it, because one passes via the sense from the known particular to the universal.

43. One proceeds by induction, going from particulars known by sense to universals.

44. The syllogism is dialectic when the conclusion follows from a probable thing; now the probable is what appears to all or to many, to educated and intelligent men.

45. Dialectic is but the art of conjecture. It is for this reason that it does not always attain its end.

46. In every proposition, in every problem, one states either the kind, or the difference, or the definition, or the specific, or the accidental.

47. The definition is a discourse that explains the nature of the thing, its specificity; not what it is, but what is in it. The kind is what can be said of several different species. The accidental is what can or cannot be in the thing.

48. The arguments of dialectic proceed either by induction or by syllogism. This art has its places. One uses induction against the ignorant, the syllogism with educated men.

49. The elenchus is a syllogism that contradicts the antagonist’s conclusion; if the elenchus is false, the syllogism came from a sophist.

50. The elenchus is sophistic either in the words or outside the words.

51. There are six sorts of sophisms of words: homonymy, ambiguity, composition, division, accent, the figure of the word.

52. There are seven sorts of sophisms outside words: the accidental sophism, the sophism of universality, or of conclusion of a thing admitted with restriction to a thing without restriction; the sophism based on ignorance of the elenchus; the sophism of the consequent; begging the question; the sophism of cause supposed as such, and not as such; the sophism of successive interrogations.

53. The sophist deceives either by things that are false, or by paradoxes, or by solecism, or by tautology. These are the limits of his art.

On Aristotle’s natural philosophy . He said: 1. The principle of natural things is not one, as the Eleatics thought;  [4] it is not the homeomerias of Anaxagoras, nor the atoms of Leucippus and Democritus, nor the sensible elements of Thales and his school, nor the numbers of Pythagoras, nor the ideas of Plato.

2. The natural principles must be opposed to each other, by qualities and by privations.

3. I call principles things that are not reciprocally of each other, nor of other things, but which are of themselves, and from which all is. Such are the primary opposites. Since they are primary, they are not of others; since they are opposite, they are not of each other.

4. They are not infinite. Without this condition, there is no access to the understanding of nature. There are more than two of them. Two would ultimately compose an equilibrium, or would obliterate each other, and nothing would be produced.

5. There are three principles of natural things: two opposites, form and privation; a third equally subject to the two others: matter. Form and matter constitute the thing. Privation is only accidental; it does not enter into matter; nothing about it is compatible with matter.

6. That which gives origin to things must be a potential [ puissance ]. That potential is primary matter. Things are not of what actually is, nor of what actually is not, for this is nothing.

7. Matter neither engenders nor destroys itself, for it is primary, the infinite subject of everything. Things are formed in the first place, not by themselves, but by accident. They will resolve themselves or do so now in matter.

8. Of the things that are, some are by their nature, others by causes. The first have in themselves the principle of motion; the second do not. Nature is the principle and cause of motion or repose in what is first by itself and not by accident; or else they rest and move by their nature: such are material substances. Properties are analogous to the nature that consists of matter and form. Yet the form which is an act is more of nature than matter.

This principle is very obscure. We do not know what the philosopher understands by nature . He seems to have taken this word in two different ways: one as essential property, the other as general cause.

9. There are four kinds of causes: material, of which everything is; formal, by which everything is, and which is the cause of the essence of each thing; efficient, which produces everything; and final, by which everything is. These causes are proximate or distant, principal or accessory, in act or in potential, particular or universal.

10. Chance is the cause of many effects. It is an accident that happens to things that are projected. The fortuitous is understood in a more extensive sense. It is an accident that happens to things projected by nature, at least for a designated end.

11. Nature does not act fortuitously, at random, or without design; what nature premeditates takes place, in whole or in part, as in monsters.

12. There are two necessities: one absolute, the other conditional. The former is of matter, the latter of form or end.

13. Motion is an actuality of potential in action.

14. What occurs without end is infinite. There is no infinite act in nature. There are, however, beings that are infinite in potential.

15. Place is an immediate and immobile surface of a body which has more than one. Every body which another contains is in the place. What is not contained in another is not in the place. Bodies either rest in their natural place, or tend toward it like portions separated from a whole.

16. The void is a place with no bodies. There are none such in nature. The void is posited; there would be no motion. For there would be neither up nor down, nor any part to which motion could tend.

17. Time is the calculation of motion relative to priority and posteriority. The parts of time touch the present instant like the parts of the line touch a point.

18. All motion and all change take place in time; and there is in every moved being speed or slowness that can be determined by time. Thus heaven, the earth, and the sea are in time, because they can be moved.

19. Time being a numbered number, there must be a numerous being that is its support.

20. Rest is the privation of motion in a body considered as mobile.

21. There is no motion that takes place in an instant. Il always takes place in time.

22. [5] What moves in a complete time also moves in all the parts of that time.

23. All motion is finite, for it takes place in time.

24. All that moves is moved by another acting either outside or inside the mobile being.

25. But as this progression to infinity is impossible, there must then occur a primum mobile [ premier moteur ], which takes its motion from nothing and is at the origin of all motion.

26. This primum mobile is immobile, for if it moved it would be by another; for nothing can move of itself. It is eternal, for everything moves from all eternity, and if motion had begun, the primum mobile could not have caused motion, and duration would not be eternal. It is indivisible and without quantity. It is infinite, for the mover must be the first, since it has moved from all eternity. Its potential is unlimited; but an infinite potential cannot be supposed in a finite quantity such as the body.

27. Heaven, composed of perfect bodies, including everything, and nothing including it, is perfect.

28. There are as many simple bodies as differences in simple motion. Now there are two simple motions, rectilinear and circular. The former tends to move away from the center or to approach it, without or with modification. As there are four simple rectilinear motions, there are four elements or simple bodies. Circular motion being of opposite nature to rectilinear motion, there must be a fifth essence, different from the others, more perfect, divine: it is heaven.

29. Heaven is neither heavy [ pesant ] [6] nor light. It tends neither to approach nor to move away from the center as what is heavy or light does. Its motion is circular.

30. Heaven having no opposite, it is without generation, without conception, without growth, without diminution, without change.

31. The world is not infinite, and outside it there is no infinite body, for the infinite body is impossible.

32. There is but one world. If there were several, impelled against each other, they would displace each other.

33. The world is eternal; it can neither grow nor shrink.

34. The world or heaven moves circularly by its nature; this motion, however, is not uniform and the same throughout its extent. There are orbits which cross other orbits; the first mobile body has opposites, hence the causes of the vicissitudes of generations and corruptions in sublunary things.

35. Heaven is spherical.

36. The first mobile body moves uniformly; it has neither beginning, nor middle, nor end. The first mobile body and the primum mobile are eternal, and suffer no alteration.

37. Celestial bodies of the same nature as the ambient body that supports them are simply more dense. They are the causes of light and heat. They rub the air and set it afire. That is above all what takes place in the sphere of the sun.

38. The fixed stars do not move by themselves; they follow the law of their orbits.

39. The motion of the first mobile body is the most rapid. Between the planets that are subject to it, the ones that move the fastest are the least distant, and conversely.

40. The stars are round. The moon as well.

41. The earth is in the center of the heavens. It is round, and immobile in the medium that supports it. It forms an orb or globe with water.

42. The element is a simple body into which composite bodies are divisible, and it exists in them in act or in potential.

43. Gravity and lightness are the motor causes of the elements. The heavy [ grave ] is what is pressed toward the center; the light what tends toward heaven.

44. There are two opposite elements: the earth, which is absolutely heavy [ grave ]; fire, which is naturally light. Air and water are of a median nature between earth and fire, and partake of the nature of these opposite extremes.

45. Generation and corruption alternate without end. It is simple or accidental.  [7] It has for cause the primum mobile and prime matter of everything.

46. To be engendered is one thing, to be altered another. In alteration, the subject remains whole, but the qualities change; everything passes into generation. Augmentation or diminution is a change in quantity; local motion, a change of space.

47. Growth supposes nutrition. There is nutrition when the substance of one body passes into the substance of another body. An animate body increases if its quantity grows.

48. Action and passion are mutual in physical contact. It takes place between things partly dissimilar in form, partly similar in nature; the ones and the others tend to incorporate the subject [ patient ]. [8]

49. Tactile qualities, objects of the senses, arise from the principles and from the difference of the elements that differentiate bodies. These qualities are by pairs and are seven in number: cold and hot, humid and dry, heavy and light, hard and soft, viscous and arid, rough and smooth, crude and fine.

50. Among these primary qualities there are two active ones: hot and cold; two passive: humid and dry. Heat gathers together the homogenous; cold dissipates the heterogeneous. The humid is retained with difficulty, the dry easily.

51. Fire is born of the hot and arid; air of the hot and humid; water of the cold and humid; earth of the cold and dry.

52. The elements are all convertible into each other, not by generation, but by alteration.

53. Mixed bodies are composed or mixed from all the elements.

54. There are three causes of mixed bodies: matter which can or cannot be a certain thing; form, cause of essence; and the motion of heaven, universal efficient cause.

55. Among mixed beings, some are perfect and some are imperfect; among the former we must count meteors, like comets, the Milky Way, rain, snow, hail, the winds, etc.

56. Putrefaction is opposed to the generation of perfect mixed bodies. Everything is subject to putrefaction with the exception of fire.

57. Animals are born of putrefaction assisted by natural heat.

Principles of Aristotle’s psychology. 1. The soul [ âme ] [9] does not move by itself, for whatever moves is moved by another.

2. The soul is the first entelechy of the natural organic body;  [10] it has life in potential. The first entelechy is the principal of operation; the second is the act or operation itself. See on this obscure word entelechy the article Leibnizianism.

3. The soul has three faculties: nutritive, sensitive, and rational. The first contains the others in potential.

4. The nutritive faculty is the one by which there is life in all things; its actualities are generation and development.

5. The sensitive faculty is the one that makes all things sense. Sensation is in general a change occasioned in the organ by the presence of a perceived object. Sense does not move by itself.

6. The exterior senses are sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch.

7. They are all affected by sensory kinds abstracted from matter, as wax receives the impression of the seal.

8. Each sense perceives the differences of its own objects, blind to the objects of another sense. There is therefore some other common and internal sense that grasps the whole and judges on the report of the exterior ones.

9. The sense differs from the intellect. All animals have senses. Few have any intellect.

10. Fancy or imagination differs from sense and intellect, although without preliminary exercise of the senses there is no imagination, just as without imagination there is no thought.

11. Thought is an act of the intellect that manifests knowledge [ science ], opinion, and prudence.

12. Imagination is an animal movement directed by the senses in action, in consequence of which the animal is agitated, conceiving things sometimes true, sometimes false.

13. Memory is born from the imagination. It is the reserve storehouse of things past; it belongs in part to the imagination, and in part to the understanding: to the understanding by accident; in itself to the imagination. They have their principle in the same faculty of the soul.

14. The memory that arises from the impression on the senses occasioned by some object ceases if too much humidity or dryness effaces the image. It therefore supposes a sort of climate in the brain.

15. Reminiscence operates not by the torment of memory, but by discourse, and the exact search for the sequence of things.

16. Sleep follows stupor or the sequence of the senses; it affects above all the internal common sense.

17. Insomnia comes from the simulacra of the imagination offered in sleep, some movements still activating, or subsisting in the intensely affected organs of sensation.

18. The intellect is the third faculty of the soul; it is proper to man, that portion of him that knows and judges.

19. The intellect is an agent or a patient. [11]

20. Patient, because it takes the forms of all things; agent, because it judges and knows.

21. The intellect as agent can be separated from the body. It is immortal, eternal, and devoid of passion. The passive or patient intellect is perishable.

22. There are two actualities of the understanding: either it operates on indivisibles, and its perceptions are simple, and there is neither truth nor falsehood; or it works with complexes, and it affirms or denies, and then there is truth or falsehood.

23. The active intellect is theoretical or practical: the theoretical puts the intelligible thing into actuality; the practical judges the thing good or bad, and moves the will to love or hate, to desire or flee.

24. The practical intellect and the appetite are the causes of the animal’s local movement; the one knows the thing and judges it; the other desires or avoids it.

25. There are in man two appetites, one reasonable and the other sensitive; the latter is either irascible or concupiscent; it has no rule but sense and imagination.

26. Only man has deliberative imagination, in consequence of which he chooses the best. This reasonable appetite that arises as a result must command in him the sensitive appetite which he has in common with beasts.

27. Life is a permanence of the soul restrained by natural heat.

28. The principle of heat is in the heart; when the heat ceases, death follows.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics . 1. Metaphysics is concerned with being as being, and its principles. This term being is used properly for the substance whose essence is singular, and improperly for the accident which is but an attribute of substance. Substance is therefore the primary object of Metaphysics.

2. A universal and primary axiom is that it is impossible for a thing to be and not be, in the same subject, at the same time, in the same manner, and from the same point of view. This truth is not demonstrable, and is the ultimate limit of any argumentation.

3. Being is of itself, or by accident, either in actuality or in potential; either in reality or in intention.

4. There is no science of being by accident: it is a sort of non-being, and has no cause.

5. Being by itself follows in its division the ten predicaments.

6. Substance is the support of accidents; it is in substance that we consider matter, form, relations, reasons, composition. We use the word substance in preference to matter although matter is substance, and the primary subject.

7. Primary matter is the subject of everything. All properties separated from the body by abstraction, it remains. Thus it is neither a complete substance, nor a quantity, nor of the class of any other predicament. Matter cannot be separated from form; it is neither singular nor determined.

8. Form constitutes what the thing is said to be; it is its whole nature, its essence, what the definition includes. Sensible substances have their own definitions; such is not the case for the being by accident.

9. Potential is active or passive. Active potential is the principle of motion, or of the change of something into another thing, or what so seems to us.

10. Passive potential is in the patient, and one cannot separate its motion from the motion of active potential, though these potentials be in different subjects.

11. Among potentials some are reasonable and others have no reason.

12. Potential separated from exercise nonetheless exists in things.

13. There is no potential whose actualities are impossible. The possible is what follows or will follow from some potential.

14. Potentials are either natural or acquired, acquired either by habit or by discipline.

15. There is actuality when potential becomes other than it was.

16. Every actuality is anterior to potential, and to all that is included, prior concept, essence, and time.

17. The intentional being is true or false: true if the judgment of the intellect conforms to the thing; false if it does not.

18. There is truth and falsehood even in the simple apprehension of things, not only considered in the enumeration, but in itself as perception.

19. The understanding cannot be fooled in the knowledge of immutable things; error is only of things contingent and passing.

20. Unity is a property of being. It is not a substance, but a categoreme, a predicate of the thing as thing or being. Multitude is the opposite of unity. Equality and similitude relate to unity; the same goes for identity.

21. There is diversity of genus and species: of genus between things that do not have the same matter; of species between those of the same genus.

22. There are three sorts of substances: two natural, one of which is corruptible, like the animals, the other sempiternal, like heaven; the third immobile.

23. There must be some immobile and perpetual substance, because there is a local eternal motion, a circular motion proper to heaven which could not have begun. If there is eternal motion and eternal time, there must be a substance which is the subject of this motion, and moved, and a substance which is the source of this motion and not moved; a substance that exerts the motion and contains it; a substance on which it is exerted and which moves it.

24. The generative substances of eternal motion cannot be material, for they move by an eternal act without the help of other potentials.

25. Heaven is one of those substances. It is moved circularly. One must not seek there the cause of generations and conceptions, because its motion is a form. It is in the inferior spheres, and especially in the sphere of the sun.

26. The first heaven is therefore eternal; it is moved by an eternal motion; there is therefore something else eternal that moves it, which is act and substance, and which does not move.

27. But how does this prime motor act? By desiring and conceiving. All its action consists in an influence by which it joins with the inferior intelligences to move the spheres.

28. All the effective force of the primum mobile is only an application of the forces of subaltern motors to the work which is their own, and in which it cooperates, so that it is entirely independent for the rest; thus intelligences move heaven not by the generation of inferior beings, but for the general good to which they tend to conform.

29. This primum mobile is God, a living being, eternal, very perfect, an immobile substance, different from sensible things, without material parts, without quantity, without divisibility.

30. He enjoys a complete and inalterable felicity, which consists in conceiving and contemplating himself.

31. After this being of beings, the primary substance, it is the primum mobile of heaven, below which there are other immaterial, eternal intelligences that preside over the motion of the inferior spheres according to their number and levels.

32. It is an ancient tradition that these motor substances of the spheres are gods, and this doctrine is truly heavenly. But are they in the form of man or other animals? That is a prejudice that has been accredited among peoples for the surety of life and the preservation of the laws.

On Aristotle’s atheism. See the article Aristotelianism.

Aristotle’s principles of ethics or practical philosophy . 1. Moral felicity does not consist in the pleasures of the senses, wealth, civil glory, power, nobility, or the contemplation of intelligible things or ideas.

2. It consists in the function of the soul occupied in the practice of one virtue; or if there are several virtues, in the choice of the most useful and most perfect.

3. That is the true happiness of life, the highest good in this world.

4. There are others that must be regarded as instruments that must be steered towards this goal: among them are friends, great possessions, dignities, etc.

5. It is the exercise of virtue that makes us as happy as we can be.

6. The virtues are either theoretical or practical.

7. They are acquired by practice. I am speaking of the practical ones, not the contemplative ones.

8. There is a mean that constitutes moral virtue in everything.

9. That mean keeps man equally far from two opposite and extreme points, at one of which he sins by excess, and at the other by default.

10. It is not impossible to grasp, even in the most agitated circumstances, in the most violent moments of passion, in the most difficult acts.

11. Virtue is a deliberate act, chosen and willing. It follows from spontaneity, the principle of which is in us.

12. Three things perfect it: nature, habit, and reason.

13. Courage is the first of the virtues; it is the mean between fear and temerity.

14. Temperance is the mean between privation and excess of sensual pleasures.

15. Liberty is the mean between avarice and prodigality.

16. Magnificence is the mean between sordid thrift and insolent flaunting.

17. Magnanimity that does itself justice and knows itself holds the mean between humility and arrogance.

18. Modesty which is relative to the pursuit of honors is equally far from disdain and from ambition.

19. Gentleness compared to anger is neither ferocious nor sluggish.

20. Popularity or the art of capturing men’s benevolence avoids rusticity and baseness.

21. Integrity, or candor, is situated between impudence and dissimulation.

22. Urbanity manifests neither crudeness nor baseness.

23. Shame that is more like a passion than a habit also has its point between two opposite excesses: it is neither pusillanimous nor intrepid.

24. Justice relative to the judgment of actions is either universal or particular.

25. Universal justice is the observation of laws established for the preservation of human society.

26. Particular justice that gives each man his due is either distributive or commutative.

27. Distributive when it grants honors and recompenses in proportion to merit. It is based on a geometric progression.

28. Commutative when, in exchanges, it maintains the just value of things; and it is based on an arithmetic proportion.

29. Equity differs from justice. Equity corrects the defect in the law. The equitable man does not interpret the law in his favor in too rigid a manner.

30. We have dealt with virtues proper to that portion of the soul that does not reason. Let us turn now to those of the intellect.

31. There are five kinds of intellectual or theoretical qualities: science, art, prudence, intelligence, and wisdom.

32. There are three things to flee in behavior: a vicious disposition, incontinence, and ferocity. Goodness is the opposite of a vicious disposition; continence is the opposite of incontinence. Heroism is the opposite of ferocity. Heroism is the character of divine men.

33. Friendship is the companion of virtue; it is a perfect benevolence between men which is reciprocal. It is formed either for pleasure or for utility; its basis is either the enjoyment of life, or the practice of the good, and is divided into imperfect and perfect.

34. It is that which is granted in friendship, which must be the measure of what one demands.

35. Benevolence is not friendship, but its beginning; concord brings it.

36. The gentleness of society is the abuse of friendship.

37. There are various sorts of sensual delights [ voluptés ].

38. I would not choose to give the name of sensual delight to dishonest pleasures. True delight is that which arises from virtuous acts and the accomplishment of desires.

39. The felicity that arises from virtuous actions is either active or contemplative.

40. The contemplative felicity that occupies the soul and earns for a man the title of sage is the most important.

41. The felicity that results from possession and the enjoyment of exterior goods is not to be compared with that which derives from virtue and its exercises.

On Aristotle’s successors: Theophrastus, Strato, Lyco, Aristo, Critolaus, Diodorus, Dicaearchus, Eudemus, Heraclides, Phanias, Demetrius, Hieronymus.

Theophrastus was born in Eresos, a maritime city on the island of Lesbos. His father consecrated him to the muses, and sent him to Alcippus. He came to Athens, and saw Plato; he heard Aristotle, who said of Callisthenes and him that Callisthenes needed spurs and Theophrastus a bit. See in the article Aristotelianism, the principal traits of his character and life. He complained in dying about how nature had granted such long days to crows and such short ones to men. The whole city of Athens followed his funeral procession on foot. Several of his works have come down to us. He made few changes in his master’s doctrine.

With Aristotle, he allowed as many motions as predicaments; he also attributed alteration, generation, growth, corruption, and their opposites, to motion. He said that place was immobile; that it was not a substance, but a relation to order and positions; that place was in animals, plants, others unlike them, animate or inanimate, because there was in all beings a relation of the parts to the whole that determined the place of each part; that among motions must be counted the appetites, passions, judgments, and speculations of the soul; that all were not born of opposites, but that some things had their opposites as cause, others their similars, still others what actually is. That motion was never separated from action; that opposites could not be contained in the same genus; that opposites could be the cause of opposites; that the saltiness of the sea did not come from the heat of the sun but from the earth that provided its bottom; that the oblique direction of the winds was caused by the nature of the winds itself, which, partly heavy [ graves ] and partly light, were impelled at the same time up and down; that chance and not prudence conducts life; that mules reproduce in Cappadocia; that the soul was not terribly subject to the body, but did much on its own; that there was no false sensual pleasure; that they were all true; and finally, that there was a principle of all things by which they were and subsisted, and that this principle was one and divine.

He died at the age of 85. He had many friends, and was of a character to make friends and keep them; he also had some enemies; and who does not? Epicurus and the famous Leontion are named among them.

Strato was born in Lampsacus. Ptolemy Philadelphus was his disciple. He neglected none of the parts of philosophy, but he turned his eyes particularly toward natural phenomena. He argued:

That there was a divine force in nature, cause of generations, growth, and diminution; and that nevertheless this cause was without intelligence.

That the world was not the work of the gods but of nature, not as Democritus had dreamed it in consequence of the crude and refined, atoms straight or crooked, and other visions.

That everything happened by weights and measures.

That the world was not an animal, but that motion and chance had produced everything and preserved everything.

That the being or permanence of what is, is the same thing.

That the soul was at the base of the eyebrows.

That the senses were kinds of windows through which the soul looked out, and that it was so joined with the senses that insofar as its operations were concerned it seemed not to differ from them.

That time was the measure of movement and rest.

That times are resolved into an individual, but place and bodies are infinitely divisible.

That what moves, moves in an individual time.

That every body had weight [ étoit grave ] and tended toward the middle.

That what is beyond heaven was an immense space, empty by its nature but endlessly filling with bodies; so it is only through thought that one can consider it as subsisting by itself.

That this space was the general envelope of the world.

That all acts of the soul were motions, both the irrational appetite and the sensible appetite.

That water is the principle of the primary cold.

That comets are only the light of the stars contained in a cloud, like our artificial lights in a lantern.

That our sensations were not, properly speaking, in the part affected, but in another principle place.

That the potential of germs was spiritual and corporeal.

That there were only two beings, the word and the thing; and that there was truth and falsehood in the word.

Strato died toward the end of the 127 ^th olympiad [272–268 BCE]. See in the article Aristotelianism the judgment that must be made on his philosophy.

Lyco, Strato’s successor, had a particular talent for teaching young people. No one knew better how to provoke their shame and awaken their emulation. His prudence was not entirely limited to his school: he showed some several times in the counsel he gave the Athenians. He had the favor of Attalus and Eumenes. Antiochus tried to employ him, but without success. He was magnificent in his regalia. Born robust, he enjoyed athletic exercises. He was head of the Peripatetic school for 44 years. He died of gout at 74.

Lyco left Aristotle’s chair to Aristo. Of him we know only one thing, which is that he devoted himself to speaking and writing with elegance and ease, and that a weight and gravitas more suitable to the philosopher and to philosophy were often desired in his lectures.

Critolaus of Phaselis was Aristo’s disciple and successor. For his eloquence he merited being associated with Carneades and Diogenes in the delegation the Athenians sent to the Romans. Oratorical art seemed to him a dangerous evil and not an art. He lived for more than 80 years. God to him was but a very subtle portion of aether . He said that all those cosmogonies which the priests delivered to people in no way conformed to nature and were nothing but ridiculous fables; that humankind was from all eternity; that the world was of itself; that there had been no beginning, that there was no cause capable of destroying it, and that it would have no end. That the moral perfection of life consisted in subjecting oneself to the laws of nature. That placing the pleasures of the soul and those of the body in a balance was weighing an atom against the earth and seas.

We know that Diodorus, taught by Critolaus, succeeded him at the Lyceum, but we do not know who he was, what his manner of teaching was, how long he held the chair, nor who succeeded him. The Peripatetic chain broke with Diodorus. From Aristotle to him there were eleven masters, among whom we are missing three. We can therefore end with Diodorus the first period of the Peripatetic school, after saying a word about some famous figures who did it honor.

Dicaearchus was among them; he was a Messinian. Cicero thought highly of him. This philosopher said:

1. The soul is nothing: it is a word devoid of meaning. The force by which we act, feel, and think is diffuse in all matter, from which it is as inseparable as extension, and where it performs differently as the one and simple being is variously configured.

2. The human species is from all eternity.

3. All divinations are false, if we except those that come to the soul when, free from distraction, it is sufficiently attentive to what takes place within.

4. It is better not to know the future than to know it.

He was profoundly versed in politics. Once every year, in the assembly of the ephors, the book he had written on the republic of Lacedaemon [Sparta] was read.

Princes employed him to measure the height and distance of the mountains and to improve Geography.

Eudemus, born in Rhodes, studied under Aristotle. He added something to his master’s logic, on hypothetical argumentation and on modes. He had written the history of Geometry and Astronomy.

Heraclides Ponticus heard Plato, embraced Pythagorism, continued under Speusippus, and ended up an Aristotelian. He combined the merit of an orator with that of a philosopher.

Phanias of Lesbos studied nature and was also interested in the history of Philosophy.

Demetrius of Phalerum was one of the most famous disciples of Theophrastus. In the 115 ^th olympiad [320–316 BCE], he obtained from Cassander, king of Macedon, the administration of the affairs of Athens, a function in which he showed much wisdom. He re-established popular government, embellished the city, and increased its revenues; and the Athenians, moved by a gratitude that was daily more visible, raised as many as 350 statues to him, which had happened for no one before him. But it was not possible to be illustrious and live tranquilly amidst an inconstant people; hatred and envy persecuted him. They revolted against the oligarchy. He was condemned to death. He was absent at the time. Given the impossibility of arresting his person, they attacked his statues, which were all overturned in less time than it had taken for one to be erected. The philosopher took refuge with Ptolemy Soter, who welcomed him and employed him to reform legislation. It is said that he lost his eyesight during his stay in Alexandria, but that having turned to Siparis, that god gave him back his sight, and that Demetrius recognized this blessing in the anthems which the Athenians sang subsequently. He advised Ptolemy to name the children of Eurydice as his successors and to exclude the son of Berenice. The prince did not listen to the philosopher, and brought in Ptolemy, known by the name of Philadelphus . After his father’s death, he relegated Demetrius to a distant province where he lived in poverty and died from a serpent’s bite. We see from the list of the works he composed that he was a poet, orator, philosopher, and historian, and that there was almost no branch of human knowledge that was foreign to him. He loved virtue and deserved a better fate.

We know almost nothing about Hieronymus of Rhodes.

On Peripatetic philosophy in Rome during the time of the republic and under the emperors . See the article Aristotelianism and the article Philosophy of the Romans.

On the philosophy of Aristotle among the Arabs . See the articles Arabs and Aristotelianism.

On the philosophy of Aristotle among the Saracens , see the article Saracens and Aristotelianism.

On the philosophy of Aristotle in the Church , see the articles Jesus Christ and Church Fathers, and Aristotelianism.

On the philosophy of Aristotle among the Scholastics, see the articles Scholastic philosophy and Aristotelianism.

On the restorers of Aristotle’s philosophy , see the article Aristotelianism and the article Philosophy.

On recent Aristotelico-scholastics , see the article Aristotelianism, where this subject is treated at great length. We will here merely restore a few less important names that were omitted, and which perhaps are scarcely worth rescuing from oblivion .

After Bannés, [12] we find in the history of philosophy Franciscus Sylvestrius. [13] Sylvestrius was born in Ferrara; he was elected head of his order; he taught in Bologna; he wrote three books of commentaries on the soul of Aristotle. Matthaeus Aquarius published them with additions and philosophical questions. Sylvestrius died in 1528.

Michele Zanardi of Bergamo, a man who knew how to lift and resolve doubts. He wrote De triplici universo, De physica et metaphysica , and Commentaria cum dubiis et questionibus in octo libros Aristotelis. [14]

John of St. Thomas,  [15] also of the Dominican order; he had a good understanding of dialectic, metaphysics, and physics, taking these words with the meanings they had in his time, which reduces his works to very little though not denying any of his talent. Almost all these men, who would have taken human knowledge as far as it could go, occupied with futile argumentations, were victims of the dominant spirit of their century.

Chrysostomus Javellus. [16] He was born in Italy in 1488. He regarded the opinions and the philosophy of Plato as more analogous to religion, and Aristotle’s as preferable for the search for natural truths. He therefore wrote moral philosophy, following Aristotle at first, then Plato, and ultimately Jesus. He said in one of his prefaces: Aristotelis disciplina nos quidem doctos ac subtilissime de moralibus, sicut de naturalibus differentes efficere potest; at moralis Platonica ex vi dicendi atque paterna adhortatione, veluti prophetia quaedam, et quasi superum vox inter homines tonans, nos procul dubio sapientiores, probatiores, vitaeque feliciores reddet. There is finesse in his first treatise, sublimity in the second, and simplicity in the third. [17]

Among the disciples Aristotle had among the Franciscans we must not forget Jean Ponzius, Mastrius, Bonaventure Mellet, Jean Lallemandet, Martin Meurisse, Claude Frassenius, etc.

In the catalogue of Aristotelians of the Cistercian order we must insert, [18] after Ange Manriquez, Bartholomée Gomez, Marcile Vasquez, Pierre de Oviedo, etc.

We must place at the head of the scholastics of the Society of Jesus, Pierre Hurtado de Mendoza before Vasquez, and after him Paul Vallius and Balthazar Tellez; and after Suarès, François Tollet and Antoine Rubius.

To these men we can add François Alphonse, François Gonsalez, Thomas Compton, François Rassler, Antonius Polus, Honoré Fabri: the latter, suspected in the Society of favoring Cartesianism, suffered persecution from them.

On philosophers who followed the true philosophy of Aristotle, see the article Aristotelianism.

Among these, the first to come to mind is Nicolas Leonic Thomée. He was born in 1457. He studied Greek language and letters under the famous Demetrius Chalcondylas, and devoted himself seriously to explicating Aristotle’s doctrine as it is presented to us in his writings. He opened the way to more famous men, Pomponatius and his disciples. [19] See in the article Aristotelianism a summary of the doctrine of Pomponatius.

Among his disciples were Hercules Gonzaga, who was later cardinal; Théophile Folengius, of the order of Saint Benedict, and author of an amusing work we have under the title Merlin Cocay ; [20] Paul Jove, Helidée, Gaspard Contarin, another cardinal, Simon Porta, Jean Genesius de Sepulveda, Jules Caesar Scaliger, Lazare Bonami, Jules-Caesar Vanini, and Ruphus, his master’s more redoubtable adversary. See the article Aristotelianism. [21]

Add, after Ruphus, among the true Aristotelians, Marc-Antoine Majoragius, Daniel Barbarus, Jean Genesius de Sepulveda, Petrus Victorius; and after the Strozzi, Jacques Mazonius, Hubert Gifanius, Jules Pacius; and following Caesar Cremonin, François Vicomescat, Louis Septale, better known among the anatomists than among the philosophers; Antoine Montecatinus, François Burana, Jean Paul Pernumia, Jean Cottusius, Jason de Nores, Fortunius Licet, Antoine Scaynus, Antoine Roccus, Felix Ascorombonus, François Robertel, Marc-Antoine Muret, Jean-Baptiste Monslor, François Valois, Nunnesius Balfurcus, etc.

Among the Protestant Aristotelians we must not forget Simon Simonius, who appeared on the scene after Joachin Camerarius and Melanchthon; Jacob Schegius, Philippe Scherbius, etc.

Ernest Sonerus preceded Michel Picart, and Conrad Horneius succeeded him and Corneille Martius.

Christianus Dreierus, Melchior Zeidlerus, and Jacques Thomasius, end this second period of Aristotelianism.

We shall present the philosophy of Thomasius in a separate article.  [22] See Thomasius, philosophy of.

It would remain for us to end this article with a few considerations on the origin, progress, and reform of Peripatetics, on the causes of its duration, on the retarding effect it had on the progress of true science, on the intractability of its followers, the arguments it supplied to atheists, the moral corruption that followed from it; on the means that could be employed against the sect, and were neglected; on the misunderstood attachment which the Protestants affected for this manner of philosophizing, on the futile attempts made to improve it, and on a few other no less important points: but we are sending all this material to some treatise on philosophy in general and in particular, where it will find its proper place. See the article Philosophy in general ( history of ).

1. The existence of this article, for which Diderot clearly had to contrive an alphabetical slot long after Yvon’s departure from the Encyclopédie team, can only reflect his intense displeasure with the article on Aristotelianism that Yvon had contributed to volume 1 – obviously because he devoted so much space to the extensions of Aristotelianism in the Christian world. See also notes 18 and 21, below.

2. Predicament : “It is one of the categories, a division made in the nature of substances or the qualities of beings.” Dictionnaire de Trévoux .

3. Passion , from the past participle ( passus ) of the Latin verb pati (‘to suffer’) retains that passive sense throughout this discussion.

4. Eleatics: From the town name of Elea: “Eleatic school, [...] founded by Xenophanes of Colophon; its principal representatives were Parmenides and Zeno, [...] and Melissus of Samos. It recognized two sorts of knowledge: that which comes to us through the senses and are but illusion; the other which we owe to reason alone, and is the only true knowledge.” Littré .

5. Point 23 in the original, because 22 was accidentally skipped, and to compensate there were two 26’s.

6. Sometimes the word grave occurs, with the same meaning, closely related to gravitation and the very word “gravity.”

7. Generation and corruption are here treated as two aspects of a single phenomenon.

8. “Patient , in terms of physics, means the object on which some agent exerts its power” ( Dictionnaire de Trévoux ).

9. Diderot consistently uses âme and not esprit throughout this article; it nevertheless includes reason and understanding, and for most purposes could equally well have been translated “mind” were it not for the semantic overlap which might then have been created with esprit .

10. Entelechy: “Didactic term used by Aristotle [...]. It means the essential form that an individual constitutes in its species, and which moves it continually toward the ends suitable to its organization. Such is the vegetative soul in plants [...] and the sensitive soul in animals.” Dictionnaire de l’Académie française , 1762.

11. See notes 3 and 8. It is helpful to keep in mind the passive sense of patient , often opposed to any active element, which agent represents here. The distinction between agent and patient can thus be understood as that between subject and object.

12. Domingo Báñes (1528-1604), Spanish Dominican discussed by Yvon in Aristotelianism.

13. Francesco Silvestri, (ca. 1474–1528), Dominican.

14. Michele Zanardi (1570–1642), Dominican. Disputationes de triplici universo, coelesti, elementari, et mixto, parvo homine , Commentaria cum quaestionibus in duodecim libros metaphysicae Aristotelis , Commentaria cum quaestionibus et dubiis in octo libros de physico auditu Aristotelis.

15. John of St. Thomas (1589–1644), was a Portuguese Dominican, born João Poinsot.

16. Chrysostomus Javellus (ca. 1470–ca. 1540), Dominican.

17. Preclarissimum epitoma sup[er] totam naturalem philosophiam [et] methaphisicam Aristotelis (1531).

18. I.e. , with respect to Yvon’s implicitly incomplete list in the article Aristotelianism.

19. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), taught at the Universities of Padua and Ferrara.

20. Merlin Coccaïe is a pseudonym of Teofilo Folengo (1491–1544) under which was published in Paris in 1606 the Histoire macaronique , a French translation of the Latin text, first published in 1517. Here is a 1521 edition, which a French owner (or dealer) called “the most beautiful and the rarest,” as well as the most complete.

21. The constant repetition of “Aristotelianism” among these cross-references is surely Diderot’s mocking way of faulting Yvon not only for having written an inadequate article on the fundamental subject of Aristotle, but on putting much far too much emphasis on the fate of Aristotelianism among Christian theologians. He even goes on to add many more, who, as he says, were probably in fact not worth rescuing from oblivion.

22. Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), German jurist and philosopher.