ABSTRACT
§ 1. The attempt to exhibit Aristotle’s doctrine as a continuous process of development from the lowest to the highest functions of the intellect, necessarily fails, at least in respect to the highest form of reason. As a rule, expositions of this doctrine are guided by the desire to make the course of development continuous and simple. Aristotle, on the contrary, seems to explain the human mind far more as composite throughout than as developing along one line. The inconsistencies which we find in the statement of the doctrine are to some extent at least modified, if we remember that from the first there is not one starting point, but two. The tradition of his ancestors leads naturally to a prejudice on the part of Aristotle, by which he is inclined to assume tacitly that the nature of man is dual. In the ethical sphere we have this expressly stated and made the reason for the limitation of man’s ascent to the highest levels; in the sphere of knowledge we have a similar limitation implied in the fact that human thought requires images, that it is limited by the nature of the passive reason and is but a part of that eternal process which, we must suppose, is the life of thought taken by itself. In Plato the emphasis fell mainly on the higher forms of soul-activity, on its purposes and prospects rather than its actual life and limitations: in Aristotle, on the contrary, we find speculation on the life after death and even on the life of reason itself much more limited; he concentrates his effort upon the broad basis on which the highest achievements of the human intellect must be built, and gives no more than a hint at the fulfilment or goal of life’s activities. Consequently, the Platonic division between percept and concept, between lower and higher, seems to be shifted in Aristotle, so that the whole realm of rational activity can be placed on the one side and on the other nothing be left but the creative reason, of which little is said. Looking more closely, we find that actually the dividing line is far nearer the mean between the extremes of form and matter, i.e. pure reason and mere sensation. Aristotle has, in fact, constructed the scale of mental activities so that the two factors seem to merge, to a large extent, somewhere in the mean between these extremes. Starting from the lowest point of sense life, or from the lowest form of animal life, we can ascend as high as memory and imagination (taken as sensuous imagination), but here we find that our terms are reduplicated: memory is one thing, recollection is another: memory preserves the motor character of the sense life, but recollection is a rational activity, and may be called syllogistic: the difference between the two is, in fact, the difference between the highest form of the lower life and the lowest form of the higher life; in this way the extremes find a meeting point: the case is the same with imagination, for this also may be either sensuous or rational. It is clear that the work of the senses is the condition for the activities of reason: its products, consequently, form the material upon which reason must act, but this material is not something entirely foreign to its own nature: sensation itself is from the first a degree of rationality; it is potentially intelligible, and in its character as receiving form without matter it has furnished the first step for the actual work of reason. If we take desire, imagination, and memory and consider the ways in which Aristotle refers to these, we shall see that they form, as it were, the central point at which the rational and the irrational are equally proportioned: from this centre if we think outward toward the senses, we shall find a continual decrease of rationality; if, on the other hand, our thought moves inward, we shall find a continuous decrease of the external, the material, or the purely sensible. The reason for this will be apparent at once if we recall the extent to which Aristotle’s work is almost always purely analytic. In the case of sensation we attain its meaning by taking the constituent factors, namely, the object of sense and the faculty of sense; and considering these as expressing their actual nature in the act of sensation. In the case of intellectual activities we have a similar partition, and the fact of intelligence is only to be understood by considering the objects of intellect and the agent of intellect. Again, the terms potential and actual, or the terms matter and form, are simply analytic formulæ; any object of investigation can be treated in this way; if that object is the life of men it will be capable of analysis into matter and form (in this case into sense and reason); if, again, we limit ourselves to the narrower sphere of reason it, too, has matter and form, a lower and a higher reason. The process clearly would continue to infinity, and, in fact, must do so except for the postulate of pure form: the concept of pure form, like that of first cause, is therefore really a limiting concept: in the case of motion we arrive in the end at that which moves without being moved; in the case of desire we arrive at that which is desired for its own sake; in the case of thought we reach the thought that does not go beyond itself, that is at rest rather than active, and is form without being at the same time matter for some still higher form. In the explanation of what we must ultimately regard as an insoluble problem, namely, Aristotle’s view of creative thought, the most that can be done is to keep clearly in mind that it is the natural outcome of his method: very possibly Aristotle was aware that there is a certain degree of contradiction in treating as divisible, or as capable of analysis, that which is itself the presupposition of analysis. The consistent way in which the analogy between sensation and thought is maintained by Aristotle should be a cue to his general attitude; both these are, in their simplest forms, immediate and unitary: they are not capable of division or analysis. In the case of sensation the object belongs to the world of things, and consequently has an existence which enables us to speak of it as distinct from the sensitive organism; in the case of reason, the conditions are analogous but not identical; if, for example, the sense of hearing is destroyed, there still remains the external conditions for that which we call audible sound; but in the case of intellect, the intellectual act and its object are identical; there is no essence of the intelligible which is more than its intelligibility; in a very real sense the world of things intelligible depends upon intellect for being anything at all. In opposition to Plato, Aristotle divides the world of the intelligible into two distinct parts, of which one, the concept, is presented as the result of the process which began in sensation; while the other, the sphere of axiomatic truth, is simply the activity of the intellect in its own proper motion.
