Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 01.djvu/308

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ARISTOLOCHIACEÆ
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ARISTOTELIANISM

stinate psora. A. odoratissima, of the West Indies, is alexipharmic. The A. fragrantissima, of Peru, is given in dys- enteries, fevers, rheumatism, etc.; A. serpentaria (the Virginian snake root), besides being given in the worst forms of typhus fever, is deemed of use against snake-bite; as is also A. trilobata.

ARISTOLOCHIACEÆ (ar-is-tō-lō-kē-a′sē-ī), an order of plants placed by Lindley under his last or asaral alliance of perigynous exogens. It has hermaphrodite flowers, six to ten epigynous stamina, a three or six celled inferior ovary and wood without concentric zones. There are about 130 species. Many are climbing plants. In their qualities they are tonic and stimulating.

ARISTOPHANES (ar-is-tof′ē-nēs), the greatest of the Greek writers of comedy (B. C. 448–385), born at Athens. His comedy, "The Knights," is said to have been put on the stage when the author was but 20 years old. Of his 44 plays only 11 have come down to us. These are "The Knights," "The Clouds," "The Wasps," "The Acharnians," "The Peace," and "The Lyristrate," arguments for concord among Grecian states; "The Birds," a satire against the "Greater Athens" idea; "The Thesmophoriazusæ"; "The Frogs," directed against Euripides, as the cause of the degeneration of dramatic art; in "The Ecclesiazusæ," or "Ladies of Parliament," he reduces to absurdity the overweening expectation of the righting of all wrongs through political reforms. Aristophanes first appeared as a poet in the fourth year of the Peloponnesian War (B. C. 427), and his sarcasms twice brought him to trial on charges of having unlawfully assumed the title of an Athenian citizen.

ARISTOTLE (ar'is-totl), the most re- nowned of Greek philosophers, born at Stagira, Macedonia, 384 B. c; was for 20 years a student of philosophy in the school of Plato at Athens, but at the same time a teacher. After Plato's death, he opened a school of philosophy at the court of Hermias, King of Atarneus, in Mysia, whose adopted daughter he after- ward married. At the invitation of Philip of Macedon, he undertook the edu- cation of his son, Alexander. When Al- exander succeeded to the throne, the philosopher returned to Athens and opened a school in the Lyceum. From being held in the covered walk (peri- patos) of the Lyceum, the school ob- tained the name of the Peripatetic. The number of his .separate treati.ses is given by Diogenes Laertius as 146; only 46 separate works bearing the name of the philosopher have come down to our time. He died at Chalcis, Eubcea, in the year 322 B. C.

ARISTOTELIANISM, or PERIPA- TETICISM, the doctrine of philosophy of Aristotle. Aristotle attempted to steer a medium course between the ultraideal- ism of his master Plato, and the low sen- sationalism of the physical school of Elea. His genius was as wide as nature. He keenly combated the ideal theory of Plato, or that which expounded the deity as holding in himself the archetypal ideas after which the world was fashioned, and which it was the business of reason and science to discover. But while denying these ideas of his master, he nevertheless agreed with him in the view that knowl- edge contains an element radically dis- tinct from sensation. He also differed from the Eleatics and the Epicureans, inasmuch as he denied that sensation could account for the whole of knowledge; but maintained, with them, that without this sensation, knowledge would be im- possible. The celebrated maxim that "there is nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the sense," if not Aristotle's, at least well expresses a side of his doctrine; but, when he insists upon the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the absolute and the rela- tive, he rises altogether above the sphere of sensation, and takes emphatically his place with reason. Philosophy, according to Aristotle, is properly science arising from the love of knowledge. There are