THREE:I.In the centre of the town I was detained by three sailors, who called out an angry "Halt!" seized my bicycle, and made me a prisoner, "because I was an Englishman." Happily I could prove the contrary by my papers; and the permit of the Bruges commander to go about on a bicycle made them return it.
THREE:Before entering on the chain of reasoning which led Aristotle to postulate the existence of a personal First Cause, we must explain the difference between his scientific standpoint, and that which is now accepted by all educated minds. To him the eternity not only of Matter, but also of what he called Form,that is to say, the collection of attributes giving definiteness to natural aggregates, more especially those known as organic specieswas an axiomatic certainty. Every type, capable of self-propagation, that could exist at all, had existed, and would continue to exist for ever. For this, no explanation beyond the generative power of Nature was required. But when he had to account for the machinery by which the perpetual alternation of birth and death below, and the changeless revolutions of the celestial spheres above the moon were preserved, difficulties arose. He had reduced every other change to transport through space; and with regard to this his conceptions were entirely mistaken. He believed that moving matter tended to stop unless it was sustained by some external force; and whatever their advantages over him in other respects, we cannot say that the Atomists were in a position to correct him here: for their349 theory, that every particle of matter gravitated downward through infinite space, was quite incompatible with the latest astronomical discoveries. Aristotle triumphantly showed that the tendency of heavy bodies was not to move indefinitely downwards in parallel lines, but to move in converging lines to the centre of the earth, which he, in common with most Greek astronomers, supposed to be also the centre of the universe; and seeing light bodies move up, he credited them with an equal and opposite tendency to the circumference of the universe, which, like Parmenides and Plato, he believed to be of finite extent. Thus each kind of matter has its appropriate place, motion to which ends in rest, while motion away from it, being constrained, cannot last. Accordingly, the constant periodicity of terrestrial phenomena necessitates as constant a transformation of dry and wet, and of hot and cold bodies into one another. This is explained with perfect accuracy by the diurnal and annual revolutions of the sun. Here, however, we are introduced to a new kind of motion, which, instead of being rectilinear and finite, is circular and eternal. To account for it, Aristotle assumes a fifth element entirely different in character from the four terrestrial elements. Unlike them, it is absolutely simple, and has a correspondingly simple mode of motion, which, as our philosopher erroneously supposes, can be no other than circular rotation.Another distinguished compliment was paid to Plotinus after his death by no less an authority than the Pythian Apollo, who at this period had fully recovered the use of his voice. On being consulted respecting the fate of the philosophers soul, the god replied by a flood of bombastic twaddle, in which the glorified spirit of Plotinus is described as released from the chain of human necessity and the surging uproar of the body, swimming stoutly to the storm-beaten shore, and mounting the heaven-illumined path, not unknown to him even in life, that leads to the blissful abodes of the immortals.423
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