might in his youth have learned from Aristotle, there was so much more to be learned which was not to be found in Aristotle, that Aristotelianism could only constitute a portion of his culture. In the Middle Ages it had constituted the whole of culture; but that time had gone by, and in the modern world it became possible to gain elsewhere even most of that which the study of Aristotle had to offer. The best of Aristotle’s thought had now come to be the common property of the world, and men could become good logicians without reading the ‘Organon,’ and without being conscious of the obligations which, after all, they owed to its author.
Perhaps the period of the greatest neglect which the memory of Aristotle underwent since the Christian era was the eighteenth century. This was a period of antithesis to mediævalism, and, at the same time, a period of mechanical philosophy and shallow learning. At the English universities all studies, except perhaps mathematics and verbal scholarship, were at a low ebb. Only small portions of Aristotle were taught, and these were ill taught without reference to their context and real significance. But with the nineteenth century there came a restitution of the honours of the Stagirite, who was now regarded in his proper light—that is to say, historically, and not as if he were an authority for modern times. This came about with the rise of the great German philosophies. There have been two great periods of philosophy in the world: the period of Greek philosophy in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., and that of German philosophy during
