ARISTOTLE AND THE EARLIER PERIPATETICS vol.I by Eduard Zeller, B.F.C.Costelloe 1897

infra
LOGIC m 201
For this would take us back again to the theory of
innate ideas which Aristotle so decidedly rejects. 1
It would be equally wrong, however, to make him a
pure Empiricist, and attribute to him the view that
the Universal, ' without any limitation, comes to the
soul from the external world.' 2
If this were his view, he
could not possibly haVe derived the highest concepts
of all—the prinavpia of all knowledge—from that
faculty of immediate cognition by which the Nous is,
according to him, distinguished from all
thinking activity. 3
other forms of
For it is plain that concepts which
we can only come at by an ascent from individuals to
universals, cannot be the data of any immediate kind of
knowledge, but must be data of that kind ofknowledge
which is the most entirely mediate of all. Our cognitive
faculties, he asserts, do, in fact, take this way to arrive
at these principia; but he cannot have regarded the
thoughts in which these principia come for us into
consciousness as the mere precipitate of a progressively
refined experience, or the act by which we present them
to ourselves as only the last of these successive geneactual
perception by the relation ' As Kampb (Erltenntnissof
iviffriiiiii to the Beape7i> (p. 417, theorie d. Arist. p. 192) objects,
b, 5 : Oeupovv yh.p ylyverat rb %xov no* without reason, though his
v\v tiri.arljii.iiv}. Finally, in Anal, citation of MetapA. i. 9, 993, a,
Post. ii. 19 (cited at p. 197,n. 4, su- 7 sqq. is not in point.
pro) Aristotle says it is impos- 2
So Kampe, ibid. ; but it is
sible to believe that we should hard to reconcile with this excome
to the knowledge of the position his attempt in the next
highest principles.without posses- following pages to reduce that
sing previous knowledge ; but he true perception which is, for Arilooks
for that previous knowledge stotle, the basis of all knowledge
not in any ideas innate in the to some kind of Intuitive Thought,
soul prior to all experience, but essentially differing both from
simply in the inductive process. Knowledge and Opinion.
Of. infra, ch. v. ad fin.
3
Onthisseep. 197, n.i,supra.
202 ARISTOTLE
ralisations upon a matter given in experience. Each
of these generalisations consists in an induction, 1 the
result of which can only be expressed as a judgment
and a conclusion, and which therefore is, like all
judgments, either false or true. But, on the other
hand, the activity of the Nous in knowledge is by him
distinguished from all mediate cognition, and what we
attain by it is not judgments but ideas—not that which
may be either false or true, but that which is always
true— that which we may either have or not have, but
as to which, if we have it, we cannot be deceived. 2 So,
again, as all induction starts from perception, which
has relation to
that which is compounded of Form and
Matter and is sensible, and as the quality of contingency,
the possibility of being and not-being, is
inseparable from all that is Matter, 3 therefore by induction
alone we can never attain to anything which is
unconditionally necessary. For those ideas which rest
entirely on experience can have no higher certainty
than that on which they rest. But of the knowledge
of the principia, Aristotle holds that it is of all knowledge
the most certain, 4 and he will allow nothing to
rank among the principia except what is necessarily
true. 5
It follows, then, that the immediate knowledge
referred to can only be an intuition—and that it can
only be a spiritual intuition, as contrasted with all
sensible perception. But the spirit of man has nob
these ideas innate in itself.
Therefore, the intuition by
1
About which see oh. v. infra.
* Anal. Post. i. 2, 71, b, 19,
2 Cf. p. 197, n. i. 72, a, 25 sqq. ; ii. 19, 100, b,
3
Cf . in the second part 9.
of ch. vii., and the notes there
5
Anal. Post. i. 6 init.
on these points.