Aristotle's Psychology: On the Soul and Parva Naturalia

than the other writings of Aristotle. I have, however, attempted no speculative reconstruction, such as has been applied with some success to the Politics by Barthélemy-St.-Hilaire and Susemihl. The attempt has not been very fortunate in the case of Essen’s restoration of the De anima, and, so far as I know, his predecessors in the same endeavour have not been more successful. Growing distrust of the radical treatment of texts seems to me a hopeful mark of critical scholarship. My translation is based on the text of the late Wilhelm Biehl (Teubner series), whose emendations I have constantly compared with the Berlin edition, and with whose conservative judgment I have generally found myself in accord. Where I have deviated from his text, I have stated my reading in a foot-note. In 1897 I made a careful examination of Codex E (Parisiensis Regius 1853), the best of the MSS. for the texts here translated, but as Biehl collated this Codex in the same year and published his Parva naturalia the year following, my work was rendered unnecessary. In any case, I was not interested primarily in textual questions, excepting in so far as the establishment of the text was ancillary to the establishment of doctrine. I have aimed, therefore, to avoid the accumulation of notes of a purely scholastic kind, which in the present volume could only be marks of a diligent pedantry, and while I have neglected no source of information and assistance amongst ancient or modern commentators, I have rigidly excluded all such matter as had no real interest for the doctrinal exposition of the treatises in hand, or for the history of science.