Aristotle on his predecessors Author:Aristotle 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: SUMMARY. CHAPTER I. Intellectual curiosity a fundamental natural instinct, as is shown by the fact that sense-perceptions are normally pleasant in themselv... more »es. The successive stages in the development of rational cognition: sensation, primary memory, experience, art or science [i. e., bodies of general truths which involve a theory as to the reason of facts and a systematic classification of them]. General theory, though often less serviceable for immediate practice than experience, holds a higher rank in the series of intellectual activities, because it involves insight into the cause or reason of facts; hence, we regard it as revealing a superior degree of Wisdom. Historically, human intelligence was first employed in providing for the necessities, and then for the comforts, of existence; science arose, in Egypt, from the existence of a priestly caste for whose necessities and comforts adequate provision had already been made, and who therefore were at leisure to employ their intellect upon speculative inquiry into the reasons and causes of things. CHAPTER II. What is the general character of that highest form of intellectual activity which is traditionally known as "Wisdom ? " By universal consent, Wisdom possesses the following characteristics: (i) universality of range (conversance with the universal presuppositions of all cognition); (2) profundity; (3) ultimate certainty and validity; (4) finality in its explanations; (5) scientific disinterestedness; (6) independence of immediate practical needs. All these characteristics will be found to belong in a superlative degree to the scientific investigation of the ultimate causes and principles of existence. The original incentive to such investigation is the sense of wonder and perplexity in the presence of facts whic...« less