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A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of God, he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more than the barbarians who preceded him.

He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point–the net bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition, expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: “Essential being as being that meditates with itself, with itself by the negativity of itself, is relative to itself only as it is relative to another; that is, immediate only as something posited and meditated.” It gives one a slight shock to hear him speak of headache being caused by wind on the brain, or powdered grasshopper-wings being a cure for gout, but when he calls the heart a pump that forces the blood to the extremities, we see that he anticipates Harvey, although more than two thousand years of night lie between them.

Some of Aristotle reads about like this Geometrical Domestic Equation:

Definitions:

All boarding-houses are the same boarding-houses.

Boarders in the same boarding-house, and on the same flat, are equal to one another.

A single room is that which hath no parts and no magnitude.

The landlady of the boarding-house is a parallelogram–that is, an oblong figure that can not be described, and is equal to anything.

A wrangle is the disinclination to each other of two boarders that meet together, but are not on the same floor.

All the other rooms being taken, a single room is a double room.

Postulates and Propositions:

A pie may be produced any number of times.

The landlady may be reduced to her lowest terms by a series of propositions.

A bee-line is the shortest distance between the Phalanstery and By Allen’s.

The clothes of a boarding-house bed stretched both ways will not meet.

Any two meals at a boarding-house are together less than one meal at the Phalanstery.

On the same bill and on the same side of it there should not be two charges for the same thing.

If there be two boarders on the same floor, and the amount of the side of the one be equal to the amount of the side of the other, and the wrangle between the one boarder and the landlady be equal to the wrangle between the landlady and the other boarder, then shall the weekly bills of the two boarders be equal. For, if not, let one bill be the greater, then the other bill is less than it might have been, which is absurd. Therefore the bills are equal.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

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The business of the old philosophers was to philosophize. To philosophize as a business is to miss the highest philosophy. To do a certain amount of useful work every day, and not trouble about either the past or the future, is the highest wisdom. The man who drags the past behind him, and dives into the future, spreads the present out thin. Therein lies the bane of most religions. A man goes out into the woods to study the birds: he walks and walks and walks and sees no birds. But just let him sit down on a log and wait, and lo! the branches are full of song.