Plato, and he remembered it, as the best pupils do as a rule, in order to
oppose him. For some years he was tutor to Alexander, son of Philip, the
future Alexander the Great. He taught long at Athens. After the death of
Alexander, being the target in his turn of the eternal accusation of
impiety, he was forced to retire to Chalcis, where he died. Aristotle is,
before all else, a learned man. He desired to embrace the whole of the
knowledge of his time, which was then possible by dint of prodigious
effort, and he succeeded. His works, countless in number, are the record of
his knowledge. They are the _summa_ of all the sciences of his
epoch. Here we have only to occupy ourselves with his more especially
philosophical ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more precisely, man is
composed of soul and body. The body is composed of organs, a well-made
piece of mechanism; the soul is its final purpose; the body, so to speak,
results in the soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on the body, and is in it
not its end but its means of acting upon things, and the whole forms a full
and continuous harmony. The faculties of the soul are its divers aspects,
and its divers methods of acting; for the soul is one and
indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as being able to conceive what
is most general, and in consequence it forms within us an intermediary
between ourselves and God. God is unique; He is eternal; from all eternity
He has given motion to matter. He is purely spiritual, but all is material
save Him, and He has not, as Plato would have it, _ideas_--immaterial
living personifications--residing in His bosom. Here may be perceived, in a
certain sense, progress, from Plato to Aristotle, towards monotheism; the
Olympus of ideas in Plato was still a polytheism, a spiritual polytheism
certainly, yet none the less a polytheism; there is no longer any
polytheism at all in Aristotle.

HIS THEORIES OF MORALS AND POLITICS.--The moral system of Aristotle
sometimes approaches that of Plato, as when he deems that the supreme