But the high-water mark of mental achievement
had not been reached by the great generation in which Hippocrates had
labored. Socrates had been dead sixteen years, and Plato was a man of
forty-five, when far away in the north in the little town of Stagira, on
the peninsula of Mount Athos in Macedoniawas, in 384 B.C., born a "man
of men," the one above all others to whom the phrase of Milton may be
applied. The child of an Asklepiad, Nicomachus, physician to the father
of Philip, there must have been a rare conjunction of the planets at
the birth of the great Stagirite. In the first circle of the "Inferno,"
Virgil leads Dante into a wonderful company, "star-seated" on the
verdure (he says)--the philosophic family looking with reverence on "the
Master of those who know"--il maestro di color che sanno.(28) And with
justice has Aristotle been so regarded for these twenty-three
centuries. No man has ever swayed such an intellectual empire--in logic,
metaphysics, rhetoric, psychology, ethics, poetry, politics and natural
history, in all a creator, and in all still a master. The history of
the human mind--offers no parallel to his career. As the creator of
the sciences of comparative anatomy, systematic zoology, embryology,
teratology, botany and physiology, his writings have an eternal
interest.
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