A Dissertation on the Philosophy of Aristotle

PREFACE.

As the first and second books of this dissertation are almost entirely a collection from the volumes of my translation of Aristotle’s works, it is necessary to observe that my reason for doing so was to benefit as much as possible those who were not purchasers of that translation. For as it consists of nine volumes in quarto quarto: a book size where each sheet is folded twice into four leaves, or eight pages, and only fifty copies were printed, it must unavoidably be confined to a few purchasers. Of the present volume, therefore, a greater number than fifty were printed, so that those English readers who were prevented from obtaining the translation of his entire works by the high price and the small number of copies might possess his principal physical and metaphysical metaphysical: pertaining to the fundamental nature of reality dogmas dogmas: authoritative principles or doctrines.

Conceiving also that it would be more acceptable to the reader to present him with these dogmas in their most genuine form, I have provided them in the very words of Aristotle himself, and have added the commentaries on them by his best Greek disciples. For I have neither the arrogance to suppose that any explanations of mine could be sufficient to supersede the elucidations of these excellent men, nor the audacity to destroy Aristotle’s scientific method of philosophizing by attempting, like the ephemeral ephemeral: short-lived, transient writers of this age, to exhibit his doctrines in a form calculated to satisfy the superficial and captivate the vulgar. As an apology for the freedom with which I have censured modern writers and modern opinions, I deem it sufficient to observe that I write...