Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 110 SUPPLEMENT To the Analysis of Aristotle's Speculative Works; containing an Account of the Interpreters and Corrupters of his Philosophy, in connection with the History of the Times in which they respectively flourished. The quibbling logic which often disfigures Aristotle's acute reasonings is not justly chargeable on that philosopher, but on those captious or fanciful writers, whom, in many parts of his works, he was obliged to combat. This was a matter, not of choice, but necessity; since several of those writers, in treating subjects of the utmost importance, had discovered such reach of thought, and such power of expression, as had widely diffused their renown wherever the Greek language was understood and speculative science cultivated. The topics, above all others, on which Aristotle, to a modern reader, will appear most verbose and most trifling, are the doctrines of Pythagorean numbers and Platonic ideas. I ventured therefore to say in my Analysis, p. 81, that he had examined those doctrines with a degree of attention, of which they would appear altogether unworthy to the taste and reason of the present age; and from respect merely for the good sense of the public, I abstained from entering into any copious discussion of this useless and now despised subject. This proceeding of mine has excited great wrath in the author of a book, entitled "A Translation of Aristotle'sMetaphysics." The translator, Mr. Thomas Taylor, following Aristotle's commentators, maintains that the Stagirite's " first principles of the universe are no other than those incorporeal causes called by Plato ideas." The same writer accuses me of " ignorance and falsehood " for saying that Aristotle has treated of Pythagorean numbers and Platonic ideas, in the VlIth and XIth books of his ...