Duncan on Plato and Aristotle

[Plato And Aristotle.]
In the Cave under Macduff’s Castle, Wemyss.

THAT’S a wonderful illustration of Plato’s about the cave, and the shadows on the wall . A better symbol of the contrast between the permanent and the transitory could not be found: the moving shadows seen, while that of which they are the adumbration is not seen. But as a writer I prefer Aristotle to Plato. Aristotle’s Greek is very amazing. It is the exactest Greek I know. He is by far the compactest and most precise writer we have, in any literature. He is the beau ideal of the precise. Two things I wonder at in Aristotle—the extent of his acquirements, and the exactitude of his writing. He had gone over the encyclopaedia of knowledge. And the “Organon” is marvellous Greek. So is the ” Nicomachean Ethics.” He is not so great I think in his ” Metaphysics,” either in the matter or its form. —I sometimes wonder if we have much of his Esoteric—those peripatetic disclosures to the initiated. It is mostly the exoteric I suppose. But if that was the exoteric, what must the esoteric have been! His aesthetic doctrines too have not yet been superseded, though they have been supplemented. And we have a curious fragment of his own poetry, a piece peri areths. It is Smollett-like; very like Smollett’s ” Ode to Independence.” But I never could love Aristotle. Admiration is the beginning, middle, and end of my feeling towards him He could see, but could not soar. He could see, I suppose, as far as a mason could see into a wall that he had built, and that is a good deal farther than other people see into it. Plato, on the other hand, I love. He is more of the mystic, and he soars sublimely. Plato goes peering up, often into cloudland; yet I like to follow him into the mist, for when I don’t see through it, I generally think he does. It is a good thing to go up now and then into the mist, if we do not, like Ixion, embrace the cloud. . . . Philip of Macedon had been a wise man in getting such a tutor as Aristotle for Alexander. The tutorship may account a little for the greatness of both men. Each benefited the other. But what a petty ambition was that of the ward ; and what a low Empire compared with the tutor’s, in worth and duration both. To conquer the world! Alexander Magnus was, after all, Alexander Parvus too.