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

LOGIC 263
skilled in the art of analysing the phenomena methodically
into their real
factors, of following out each fact
to its causes and the laws of its action, and of unravelling
the conditions of the causal nexus. He has not
mastered—even in the degree which with the
scanty
technical skill of Greece was possible to him—the best
methods of establishing and analysing facts, of
checking
observations and theories, or of applying experiment
to science. He does not, in a word, come up to
the standard to which in our day a student of nature is
expected to attain. There is nothing strange in this';
rather would it be strange if it were otherwise.
If Aristotle were without the faults we note in his
theory and practice, he would not only be far
more in
advance of his own time than in fact he was—he would
have belonged to another and much later period of
human thought. Before science could attain to that certitude,
correlation and exactness of procedure by which
we excel the ancients, it was necessary in all ranges of
scientific and historical inquiry that the facts should be
collected and all manner of experiments made, that the
laws of particular classes of phenomena should be
sought out and gradually universalised, that hypotheses *
should be proposed for the
elucidation of various series
of facts, and these again continually checked and
revised by the facts themselves. To this end no general
disquisitions on methodology, but only scientific work
itself could assist.
Until the experimental sciences had
passed far beyond the position at which they stood in
Aristotle's time, it was not possible that either the
methodology or the methods of experimental knowledge
264 ARISTOTLE
should really advance beyond the form in which he
stated them. In the then state of science it was
already a great thing that observed facts should be
collected in such vast masses and with such care. It
was not to be expected that they should also be with
the like care tested, or that his .personal observations
should be exactly discriminated from information otherwise
received, and the value of the latter critically
appraised. Many of the assertions which we find
absurd, were probably taken by Aristotle
from others
in all good faith, and were not doubted by him, merely
because the knowledge of nature which he possessed
gave him no reason to think them impossible. When
we are surprised by the rashness with which the Greeks
often built hypotheses or theories upon facts whose
falsity is obvious to us at first sight, we do not stop to
think how utterly they were ignorant of all our aids to
accurate observation, and how greatly this poverty of
tools
must have hindered every sort of helpful experiment.
of heat
To fix time without a watch, to compare degrees
without a thermometer, to observe the heavens
without a telescope and the weather without a barometer—these
and the like were the tasks which the
natural philosophers of Greece had to set themselves.
Where there is no basis for accuracy as to facts, the
difficulties that attend the classification
of phenomena,
the discovery of natural laws, and the correction of
hypothesis by experience are so vastly increased, that we
cannot wonder if scientific inquiry rises but slowly and
insecurely above the levels of prescientific fancy. The
service which Aristotle nevertheless did for the world in