The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius (best free ebook reader txt) 📕

it was possible for a prudent and just and impartial man to be incontinent and intemperate; and he said that the wise man was not destitute of passions, but endowed with moderate passions.

He also used to define friendship as an equality of mutual benevolence. And he divided it into the friendship of kindred, and of love, and of those connected by ties of hospitality. And he said that love was divided into sensual and philosophical love. And that the wise man would feel the influence of love, and would occupy himself in affairs of state, and would marry a wife, and would live with a king. And as there were three kinds of life⁠—the speculative, the practical, and the voluptuous⁠—he preferred the speculative. He also considered the acquisition of general knowledge serviceable to the acquisition of virtue. As a natural philosopher, he was the most ingenious man that ever lived in tracing effects back to their causes, so that he could explain the principles of the most trifling circumstances; on which account he wrote a great many books of commentaries on physical questions.

He used to teach that God was incorporeal, as Plato also asserted, and that his providence extends over all the heavenly bodies; also, that he is incapable of motion. And that he governs all things upon earth with reference to their sympathy with the heavenly bodies. Another of his doctrines was that besides the four elements there is one other, making the fifth, of which all the heavenly bodies are composed; and that this one possesses a motion peculiar to itself, for it is a circular one. That the soul is incorporeal, being the first ἐντελέχεια; for it is the ἐντελέχεια of a physical and organic body, having an existence in consequence of a capacity for existence. And this is, according to him, of a twofold nature. By the word ἐντελέχεια, he means something which has an incorporeal species, either in capacity, as a figure of Mercury in wax, which has a capacity for assuming any shape; or a statue in brass; and so the perfection of the Mercury or of the statue is called ἐντελέχεια, with reference to its habit. But when he speaks of the ἐντελέχεια47 of a natural body, he does so because of bodies some are wrought by the hands, as for instance, those which are made by artists, for instance, a tower, or a ship; and some exist by nature, as the bodies of plants and animals. He has also used the term with reference to an organic body, that is to say, with reference to something that is made, as the faculty of sight for seeing, or the faculty of hearing for the purpose of hearing. The capacity of having life must exist in the thing itself. But the capacity is twofold, either in habit or in operation. In operation, as a man when awake is said to have a soul; in habit, as the same is said of a man when asleep. That, therefore, he may come under his definition, he has added the word capacity.

He has also given other definitions on a great many subjects, which it would be tedious to enumerate here. For he was in everything a man of the greatest industry and ingenuity, as is plain from all his works which I have lately given a list of; which are in number nearly four hundred, the genuineness of which is undoubted. There are also a great many other works attributed to him, and a number of apothegms which he never committed to paper.

There were eight persons of the name of Aristotle. First of all, the philosopher of whom we have been speaking; the second was an Athenian statesman, some of whose forensic orations, of great elegance, are still extant; the third was a man who wrote a treatise on the Iliad; the fourth, a Siciliot orator, who wrote a reply to the Panegyric of Isocrates; the fifth was the man who was surnamed Myth, a friend of Aeschines, the pupil of Socrates; the sixth was a Cyrenean, who wrote a treatise on Poetry; the seventh was a schoolmaster, who is mentioned by Aristoxenus in his Life of Plato; the eighth, was an obscure grammarian, to whom a treatise on Pleonasm is attributed.

And the Stagirite had many friends, the most eminent of whom was Theophrastus, whom we must proceed to speak of.

Theophrastus

Theophrastus was a native of Eresus, the son of Melantas, a fuller, as we are told by Athenodorus in the eighth book of his Philosophical Conversations.

He was originally a pupil of Leucippus, his fellow citizen, in his own country; and subsequently, after having attended the lectures of Plato, he went over to Aristotle. And when he withdrew to Chalcis, he succeeded him as president of his school, in the hundred and fourteenth olympiad.

It is also said that a slave of his, by name Pomphylus, was a philosopher, as we are told by Myronianus of Amastra, in the first book of Similar Historical Chapters.

Theophrastus was a man of great acuteness and industry, and, as Pamphila asserts in the thirty-second book of her Commentaries, he was the tutor of Menander, the comic poet. He was also a most benevolent man, and very affable.

Accordingly Cassander received him as a friend; and Ptolemy sent to invite him to his court. And he was thought so very highly of at Athens, that when Agonides ventured to impeach him on a charge of impiety, he was very nearly fined for his hardihood. And there thronged to his school a crowd of disciples to the number of two thousand. In his letter to Phanias the Peripatetic, among other subjects he speaks of the court of justice in the following terms: “It is not only out of the question to find an assembly (πανήγυρις), but it is not easy to find even