The Physics, Vol. I (Books I-IV)

FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE AND BRERRBTON LAURENCE READREI IN ANOILNT PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSIiY OF CAMBRIDGE IN TWO VOLUMES LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD NEW YORK: σα. P. PUTNAM’S SONS MCMXXIX A cuaractenistic of the work of Philip Henry Wicksteed was his deep interest in the sources of any literature he sought to understand, and his long study of the Middle Ages, represented by such minds as those of Aquinas and Dante, constantly led him back to the classics and eventually to a serious study of Aristotle as the great master of Mediaeval Philosophy. But though he considered Aristotle was for various reasons more intelligible to the mediaeval scholar than to us, he did not believe that his importance to the world had decreased. His own thought ranged from man’s urgent material needs, represented by Economies, to his deepest spiritual necds, represented by Religion. He would not have considered it an exaggerated claim that Aristotle’s practical genius working upon the Greek love of thought for its own sake, made his mind and method of vital importance in almost all our modern problems: a touchstone clear of the structure and débris of ages we stand on, and of the utilitarian element so difficult, if not impossible, to escape to-day, and yet so practical a danger to the value we call truth. When he left London to live in the country some thirty years ago, he conceived the project of translating the Physics, and after a severe illness in 1918 Vv which compelled him to give up his lecturing, it became more and more his principal literary occupation.…