enders improbable Shakespeare's personal acquaintance
with his work. In any case, the bare mention of the name of Aristotle
implies nothing in this connection. It was a popular synonym for
ancient learning. It was as often on the lips of Elizabethans as
Bacon's name is on the lips of men and women of to-day, and it would
be rash to infer that those who carelessly and casually mentioned
Bacon's name to-day knew his writings or philosophic theories at first
hand.

No evidence is forthcoming that Shakespeare knew in any solid sense
aught of philosophy of the formal scientific kind. On scientific
philosophy, and on natural science, Shakespeare probably looked with
suspicion. He expressed no high opinion of astronomers, who pursue
the most imposing of all branches of scientific speculation.

Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven's light,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk, and wot not what they are.

(_Love's Labour's Lost_, I., i., 86-91.)

This is a characteristically poetic attitude; it is the antithesis of
the scientific attitude. Formal logic excited Shakespeare's disdain
even more conspicuously. In the mouths of his professional fools he
places many reductions to absurdity of what he calls the "simple
syllogism." He invests the term "chop-logic" with the significance of
foolery _in excelsis_.[26] Again, metaphysics, in any formal sense,
were clearly not of Shakespeare's world. On one occasion he wrote of
the topic round which most metaphysical speculation revolves:--

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded by a sleep.

(_Tempest_, IV., i., 156-8.)

[Footnote 26: The speeches of the clown in _Twelfth Night_ are
particularly worthy of study for the satiric adroitness with which
they expose the quibbling futility of syllogistic logic. _Cf._ Act I.,
Scene v., ll. 43-57.

_Olivia._ Go to, you're a dry fool; I'll no more of you: besides you
grow dishonest.

_Clown._ Two faults, Madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend:
for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry: bid the
dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if
he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Anything that's mended is but
patched: virtue that transgresses is but patched with s