A History of Greek Philosophy / ARISTOTLE

Page 12

This conception Aristotle extended to Thought, to the various forms of life, to education, to morals, to politics. Thought is an entelechy, an organic whole, in which every process conditions and is conditioned by every other. If we begin with sensation, the sensation, blank as regards predication, has relations to that which is infinitely real,—the object, the real thing before us,—which relations science will never exhaust. If we start from the other end, with the datum of thought, consciousness, existence, mind, this is equally blank as regards predication, yet it has relations to another existence infinitely real,—the subject that thinks,—which relations religion and morality and sentiment and love will never exhaust. Or, as Aristotle and as common sense prefers to do, if we, with our developed habits of thought and our store of accumulated information, choose to deal with things from a basis midway between the two extremes, in the ordinary way of ordinary people, we shall find both processes working simultaneously and in organic correlation. That is to say, we shall be increasing the individuality of the objects known, by the operation of true thought and observation in the discovery of new characters or qualities in them; we shall be increasing by the same act the generality of the objects known, by the discovery of new relations, new genera under which to bring them. Individualisation and generalisation are only opposed, as mutually conditioning factors of the same organic function.

This analysis of thought must be regarded rather as a paraphrase of Aristotle than as a literal transcript. He is hesitating and obscure, and at times apparently self-contradictory. He has not, any more than Plato, quite cleared himself of the confusion between the mutually contrary individual and universal in propositions, and the organically correlative individual and universal in things as known. But on the whole the tendency of his analysis is towards an apprehension of the true realism, which neither denies matter in favour of mind nor mind in favour of matter, but recognises that both mind and matter are organically correlated, and ultimately identical.

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A History of Greek Philosophy : Table of Contents
Cf. D'Arcy W. Thompson, Aristotle's Natural Science

Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/history-of-philosophy/aristotle.asp?pg=12