Aristotle

Use in the book

The quotation becomes intelligible through Traherne's preceding account of faculties and objects. Knowledge, life, and love do not fulfil their purpose by remaining idle capacities. A perfect life extends to its objects, sees them, and loves them; virtue is their right exercise. Traherne therefore reads the inherited formula through his own universal account of enjoyment. The appeal to Aristotle supports activity rather than the withdrawal of happiness into a possession no one uses. It does not establish that Aristotle endorsed all of Traherne's Christian claims about eternity or the world as a personal inheritance.

Places to read

1. III.68Aristotle’s account of felicity is explained as the perfected exercise of knowing and loving objects.

In this edition

The wording is Traherne's English citation and interpretation. No Greek original or exact ancient locator is supplied by this article from the meditation alone.

Use in the book

Page 36 cites his authority for causal teaching, with the proem of the Metaphysics identified in the margin. Page 94 gives a more problematic attribution to the fourth book of the Meteorologica, through Avicenna and other Philosophers. Khunrath admits that the dictum cannot be found in contemporary Aristotle texts but asserts that it belongs there and alleges hostile alteration.

The distinction between those uses matters. The first provides a general epistemic standard; the second is a contested textual proof within a technical argument. Respect for Aristotle does not eliminate the gap between an attributed saying and the available book. Khunrath's own acknowledgement allows the reader to see that gap.

Places to read

1. 1599 p. 36Aristotle underwrites knowledge through causes and principles.
2. 1599 p. 36 · margin2The proem of the Metaphysics is supplied as locator.
3. 1599 p. 94The Meteorologica dictum is defended despite its acknowledged absence from the available text.

Translation in this edition

The modern apparatus disputes the Meteorologica attribution. This article records both the primary allegation and its evidential limitation without treating suppression as a verified event.

Use in the book

The collection makes this double role unusually visible. Aristotle can credit an insight into the ratio of a mixture while asking questions that threaten the account’s extension to soul and different tissues. He can discuss Love and Strife as causes while criticizing the consistency of their assigned functions. His judgment that Empedocles and Homer share metre does not simply classify a physical doctrine; it intervenes in a theory of poetry. These are different contexts, and the lexicon does not flatten them into a single verdict that Aristotle either understood or distorted everything. A useful reading asks what he quotes, what he paraphrases, and what premise his objection needs. Where the source gathers several Aristotelian passages beneath one A number, the work named above each passage remains important: a criticism in a discussion of soul need not answer exactly the same question as a passage about animal parts or generation.

Places to read

1. A 22–A 23 (polemical)Aristotle, Poetics. Separates natural inquiry from Homeric poetry despite their shared metre.
2. A 42 (polemical)Aristotle, De caelo Γ 2; De gen. et corr. B 7. Reports an omitted formation under Love and compares the present cosmos with its former condition, passages central to rival readings of the cycle.
3. A 78 (polemical)2Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals and On the Soul. Recognizes the explanatory role of ratio while testing its relation to soul and tissue differences.
4. A 91 (polemical)Aristotle, On Sense and Sense-Objects. Uses the lantern comparison in a question about why an eye made of fire would not see in darkness.

Translation in this edition

The introduction’s superlatives about the best or most treacherous witness are editorial judgments. The safer procedure is passage-specific. Works explicitly marked Pseudo-Aristotle in the supplied edition must not be cited as secure works of Aristotle.