IF a vote of the learned of the last five centuries could be taken to decide what essay has had the greatest effect on literature, it is probable that at least nine voices in every ten would be for the “Poetics” of Aristotle, a treatise, which, though written more than two thousand years ago, is still accepted as the best expression of the principles of literary art ever put into words. “The ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle,” writes Professor Morley in his preface to the translation here given complete, “is a book which has been honored by all critics, idolized by some, and has throughout Europe influenced the higher literary criticism since the Revival of Learning. It is intellectually one of the great books of the world; substantially it is so small a book that it can be contained in one-half of this volume, and still leave room enough for the whole of another book of highest mark, Longinus’s ‘On the Sublime.’”

  If it were safe to make comparisons or generalizations, it would be allowable in the case of Aristotle to pronounce his intellect the greatest of the Greek world, and among moderns, surpassed, if surpassed at all, only by that of Lord Bacon. When we remember that this puts him above Homer and Plato among the Greeks and above the great thinkers and scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we may prefer not to generalize, but it is impossible to go far in the study of history without being forced to recognize the extent and strength of the influence he exerted over the development of rational intellect. His influence over classical and post-classical thought was great; but as the mind of civilization began to quicken the Dark Ages, it became evident that the progress of the world towards modern times was destined to express his thought, to follow his guidance, to borrow his methods. Even when the possibilities of modern times and the science of universal empiricism were condensed into the “Novum Organum” of Bacon, it was the thought of Aristotle which, by its contraries, inspired him.

  Born at Stagira in Macedonia 384 B.C., Aristotle was for twenty years a pupil in Plato’s school at Athens where, during much of the period of his own studies, it is said that he carried on a school of his own. Plato called him “the intellect of the school.” After Plato’s death (347 B.C.), Aristotle, then in his thirty-seventh year, opened a school at the Court of Hermias, king of a province in Mysia, who had been his fellow-student under Plato. In the year 342 B.C., on the invitation of King Philip, Aristotle went to Macedonia and became the tutor of Alexander the Great. From Macedonia he returned to Athens and opened there his celebrated school in the Lyceum, near the temple of the Lycian Apollo. He taught in the Lyceum for thirteen years; and from his habit of discussing philosophy with his pupils in its covered walk (peripatos), his disciples came to be called Peripatetics. Of his one hundred and forty-six separate treatises, forty-six still remain. Among these the “Poetics” is the masterpiece of its class, but the “Politics,” the “Rhetoric,” the treatises on logic and on natural science, belong to the literature without which the human mind could not have utilized its powers as we see them manifested in the achievements of our own civilization.

  “Aristotle’s mind was logical,” writes Professor Morley; “he was a master of analysis; and his keen search into the nature of man, of society, and of the world outside us, made him the first founder of more sciences than one. He made, by experimental research, advances in natural science that were taken as all-sufficient till the sixteenth century. He stood between the Sophists and all later time as founder of the study of rhetoric. He founded the scientific study of politics, as well as of ethics; and although he was himself a man of science rather than a poet, his analytical power made his treatise chiefly upon the character of tragic and epic poetry a masterpiece in its own way.”

  Aristotle died 322 B.C. at Chalcis, whither he had gone a fugitive from the anger of the Athenians, who, after the death of Alexander the Great, attacked Aristotle as his former teacher. After leaving Athens the great philosopher was condemned for “impiety,” but his death from a disease of the stomach deprived him of the actual martyrdom to which as the master intellect of the age of Demosthenes and the heir of the mind of Socrates, he was certainly not less entitled than they.