ornament. There are occasional
touches of caustic humour, but nothing of emotion, still less of
rhapsody. His strength lies in the vast architectonic genius by which
he correlates every domain of the knowable in a single scheme, and in
the extraordinary faculty for illustrative detail with which he fills
the scheme in every part. He knows, and can shrewdly criticise every
thinker and writer who has preceded him; he classifies them as he
classifies the mental faculties, the parts of logical speech, the parts
of sophistry, the parts of rhetoric, the parts of animals, the parts of
the soul, the parts of the state; he defines, distinguishes, combines,
classifies, with the same sureness and minuteness of method in them
all. He can start from a general conception, expand it into its parts,
separate these again by distinguishing details till he brings the
matter down to its lowest possible terms, or _infimae species_. Or he
can start from these, find analogies among them constituting more
general species, and so in ascending scale travel surely up to a
general conception, or _summum genus_.

In his general conception of philosophy he was {178} to a large extent
in agreement with Plato; but he endeavoured to attain to a more
technical precision; he sought to systematise into greater
completeness; he pared off everything which he considered merely
metaphorical or fanciful, and therefore non-essential. The operations
of nature, the phenomena of life, were used in a much fuller and more
definite way to illustrate or even formulate the theory; but in its
main ideas Aristotle's philosophy is Plato's philosophy. The one
clothed it in poetry, the other in formulae; the one had a more
entrancing vision, the other a clearer and more exact apprehension; but
there is no essential divergence.

Aristotle's account of the origin or foundation of [300] philosophy is
as follows (_Met_. A. 2): "Wonder is and always has been the first
incentive to philosophy. At first men wondered at what puzzled them
near at hand, then by gradual advance they came to notice and wonder at
things still greater, as at the phases of the moon, the eclipses of sun
and moon, the wonders of the stars, and the origin of the universe.
Now he who is puzzled and in a maze regards himself as a know-nothing;
wherefore the philosopher is apt to be fond of wondrous tales or myths.
And inasmuch as it was a consciousness of ignorance that drove men to
philosophy, it i