The law concerning hunting.

vance; and let not any desire of catching men and of piracy
by sea enter into your souls and make you cruel and law-
less hunters. And as to the desire of thieving in town or
country, may it never enter into your most passing
thoughts; nor let the insidious fancy of catching birds,
which is hardly worthy of freemen, come into the head of
any youth. There remains therefore for our athletes only
the hunting and catching of land animals, of which the
one sort is called hunting by night, in which the hunters
sleep in turn and are lazy; this is not to be commended any
more than that which has intervals of rest, in which the
wild strength of beasts is subdued by nets and snares,
and not by the victory of a laborious spirit. Thus, only
the best kind of hunting is allowed at all—that of quad-
rupeds, which is carried on with horses and dogs and men's
own persons, and they get the victory over the animals by
running them down and striking them and hurling at them,
those who have a care of godlike manhood taking them
with their own hands. The praise and blame which is
assigned to all these things has now been declared; and
let the law be as follows: Let no one hinder our sacred
hunters from following the chase wherever and whitherso-
ever they will; but the nightly hunter, who trusts to his
nets and springs, shall not be allowed to hunt anywhere.
The fowler in the mountains and waste places shall be per-
mitted, but on cultivated ground and on consecrated wilds
he shall not be permitted; and any one who meets him
may stop him. As to the hunter in waters, he may hunt
anywhere except in harbours or sacred streams or marshes
or pools, provided only that he do not trouble the water
with poisonous mixtures. And now we may say that all
our enactments about education are complete.

CLE. Very good.

264

116 148

VI. THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW OF EDUCATION

The Period and the Authority. - Aristotle was the last of the great contributors to Greek educational theory, and his life (384-322 B.C.) forms a connecting link between the earlier theorists and the later cosmopolitan period which begins with the Macedonian supremacy. In philosophy Aristotle represents the culmination of the movement which passed through successive stages with the Sophists, Socrates and Plato. In his specific treatment of the subject of education he makes no great advance beyond Plato, though in later ages educational method and subject-matter are profoundly influenced through the Organon and Metaphysics. It is only with this specific treatment of education, in which he presents his own views, that the present discussion deals.

The adult life of Aristotle falls into three periods. The first is that from the seventeenth to the thirty-seventh years of his life, during which time he was under the instruction of Plato, or closely connected with the work of the Academy. Then it was that he showed opposition to the teachings of the master. Some of Aristotle's writings not now extant raise for debate the chief doctrine of the Platonic school, though the form of these writings is supposed to have been wholly in imitation of that of the master of the dialogue. This lack of orthodoxy and perhaps of intellectual sympathy led Aristotle to leave Athens at the death of Plato in 347 B.C., and for twelve

years thereafter, in Asia Minor and Macedonia, he devoted himself to study and investigation. Some portion of the latter years of this period was devoted to the education of the young Alexander. While there are absolutely no details left to modern times concerning the nature of these duties and the manner in which they were performed, it has been suggested that Aristotle's chief influence on Greek education was through instilling into the mind of the future conqueror the ideas that led to the Hellenization of the East. Certain it is that the scheme of education outlined in the Politics is for the narrow limit of the city state, and that it was a scheme which had little or no immediate practical influence on Greek life. In 335 Aristotle returned to Athens to establish in the Lyceum his own school of philosophy, since the contrast between his own thought and that of the Academicians had now become more marked, both because his own ideas and method had developed, and because the work of the Academy had now degenerated into mere exposition and comment. Here he continued to teach for eighteen years. The aim of Aristotle was broader than that of the Platonic or of the other schools; it was nothing less than to produce an encyclopædia of all the sciences, an organization of all human knowledge. During this period was produced the substance of the Aristotelian writings as we know them now. The character, order, and origin of these writings are all matters of debate. Leaving out of the question the pseudo-Aristotelian productions, it is generally admitted that not one of the works as we now have them is complete; that some of them are rather compilations or combinations of monographs than continuous treatises; that some contain

parts or whole chapters that are mere summaries by pupils ; that some are probably nothing more than very full notes taken by students at Aristotle's lectures. Even concerning the work of immediate interest to us, Jowett suggests that

we cannot be sure that any single sentence of the Politics proceeded from the pen of Aristotle." The whole question of authorship is complicated by the fact that the list of the 146 Aristotelian writings, made by the librarian of the great library at Alexander about 220 B.C., does not contain the name of a single one of his works, at least under the title by which we now know them. On the other hand, concerning the accepted works, it is quite as generally admitted that the substance, the spirit and the general form, if not the exact wording, are wholly Aristotelian. Where the efforts of the school supplemented those of the master, they were wholly under the dominance and direction of the latter, so that the same may be said of resulting collaborations. The fragmentary condition of some of the work, such as the treatment of education, is undoubtedly due to the fact that Aristotle purposely left the theme incomplete in presentation, with the expectation, and in some places with the explicit promise, of a return to the subject. This incompleteness, as well as the form in which some of the works have come down to us, is due to the manner of publication. This consisted merely in presentation through lectures in the schools, with the multiplication of texts through notes or more exact copies. It was therefore a process continuing over a considerable space of time, rather than an event of a given date. That during the period of publication the author's ideas would develop is evidenced by the Republic and the Laws, as well as by the Politics. At Aristotle's death it

appears that the work of the Peripatetic school consisted largely in collecting and editing the master's works, and in some respects in completing them by a combination of fragments. The interest of the school was largely in those works of the philosopher produced during his headship of the Lyceum. There does not seem to have been any such multiplication of copies of the works as was the case with the other philosophical schools. Some thirty-five years after the death of Aristotle, the head of the school, who fell heir to the works, removed them to Asia Minor. Shortly after this, to save them from destruction, they were hidden in a vault, and there remained lost to the world until recovered a century and a half later. They were then restored to Greece and later transferred to Rome. This indicates in part the reason why these educational writings had no immediate influence upon Greek education.

The Politics contains Aristotle's specific treatment of education in the main; though the discussions of the general purpose of education could be supplemented with selections from the Ethics, and the discussion of the place of literature in education with selections from the Poetics. It is indicative of the importance of the subject of education in Grecian thought that it should form an integral part of the science of politics, a fact to be gathered from the Republic and the Laws, as well as from the Politics. The Politics differs from the Republic and the Laws in being primarily a scientific investigation in comparative politics. In addition to being an inductive study based on his previous collection of constitutions, now lost, it contains many views that are simply a part of the ordinary aristocratic view of the Grecians, especially of those not in