THE ARISTOTELIAN SENSE OF PROPORTION
I
ARISTOTLE'S OBJECTIONS TO PREVIOUS SYSTEMS
Our principles of personality thus far, though increasingly complex,
have all been comparatively simple. To get the maximum of pleasure; to
keep the universal law; to subordinate lower impulses to higher
according to some fixed scale of value, are all principles which are
easy to grasp and by no means difficult to apply. The fundamental
trouble with them all is that they are too easy. Life is not the
cut-and-dried affair which they presuppose. A man might have a lot of
pleasure, and yet be contemptible. He might keep all the commandments,
and yet be no better than a Pharisee. Even Plato's principle in actual
practice has not always escaped the awful abyss of asceticism.
In opposition to Epicurus Aristotle says, "Pleasure is not the good and
all pleasures are not desirable. No one would choose to live on
condition of having no more intellect than a child all his life, even
though he were to enjoy to the full the pleasures of a child. With
regard to the pleasures which all admit to be base, we must deny that
they are pleasures at all, except to those whose nature is corrupt. What
the good man thinks is pleasure will be pleasure; what he delights in
will be truly pleasant. Those pleasures which perfect the activity of
the perfect and truly happy man may be called in the truest sense the
pleasures of a man. The pleasure which is proper to a good activity is
therefore good; that attached to a bad one is bad. As, then, activities
differ, so do the pleasures which accompany them."
In our discussion of Epicureanism we saw that the principle of pleasure
consistently carried out produced bad results, and, as in the case of
Tito Melema, developed the most contemptible character. Aristotle shows
conclusively why this must be so. Pleasure is the sign and seal of
healthful exercise of function. A life which has all its powers in
effective and well-proportioned exercise will, indeed, be a life crowned
with pleasure. You cannot, however, reverse this proposition, as the
Epicurean attempts to do, and say that a life which seeks the maximum of
pleasure will inevitably have the healthy and proportionate exercise of
function as its consequent. According to Aristotle healthy exercise of
function in a well-proportioned life in devotion to wide social ends and
permanent personal interests, is the cause of which happiness is the
appropriate and inevitable effect. Seek the cause and you will get the
effect. Seek directly the effect, and you will miss both the cause you
neglect and the effect which only the cause can bring. The criticism
which we quoted from George Eliot on the career of Melema is the
quintessence of the Aristotelian doctrine. To put it in a figure: Build
a good fire and warm your room, and the mercury in the thermometer will
rise. The cause produces the effect. But it does not follow that because
you raise the mercury in the thermometer by breathing on the bulb, or
holding it in your hand, that the fire will burn, or the room will be
warmed. The Epicureans and hedonists are people who go about with the
clinical thermometer of pleasure under their tongues all the time, and
expect to see the world lighted with benevolence and warmed with love in
consequence. Aristotle bids them take their clinical thermometers out of
their mouths; stop fingering their emotional pulse; go to work about
some useful business; pursue some large and generous end; and then, not
otherwise, in case from time to time they have occasion to feel their
pulse and take their temperature, they will as a matter of fact find
that they are normal. But it isn't taking the temperature and feeling
the pulse that makes them morally sound; it is doing their proper work
and keeping in vigorous exercise that gives them the healthy pulse and
normal temperature.
There are, however, two apparently contradictory teachings about
pleasure in Aristotle, and it is a good test of our grasp of his
doctrine to see whether we can reconcile them. First he says, "In all
cases we must be especially on our guard against pleasant things, and
against pleasure; for we can scarce judge her impartially. And so, in
our behaviour toward her, we should imitate the behaviour of the old
counsellors toward Helen, and in all cases repeat their saying: If we
dismiss her, we shall be less likely to go wrong." "It is pleasure that
moves us to do what is base, and pain that moves us to refrain from what
is noble."
On the other hand he says: "The pleasure or pain that accompanies the
acts must be taken as a test of character. He who faces danger with
pleasure, or, at any rate, without pain, is courageous, but he to whom
this is painful is a coward. Indeed we all more or less make pleasure
our test in judging actions."
Can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements?
Perfectly. On the one hand if we do an act simply for the pleasure it
will give, without first asking how the proposed act will fit into our
permanent plan of life, we are pretty sure to go astray. For pleasure
registers the goodness of the isolated act; not the goodness of the act
as related to the whole plan of life. Thus if I drink strong coffee at
eleven o'clock at night, the taste is pleasant and the immediate effect
is stimulating. But if it keeps me awake half the night and unfits me
for the duties of the next day, in spite of the pleasure gained, the act
is wrong. And it is wrong, not fundamentally because of the pains of
wakefulness it brings; it is wrong because it takes out of my life as a
whole, and my contribution to the life of the world, something for which
the petty transient pleasure I gained at the moment of indulgence is no
compensation whatsoever. Is not Aristotle right? Do we not pity as a
miserable weakling, hardly fit to have been graduated from the nursery,
any man or woman who will let the mere physical sensation of a few
moments at the end of an evening count so much as the dust in the
balance against the efficiency of the coming forenoon's life and work?
If we see this half of Aristotle's truth, we see that the other is not
its contradiction but its complement. If we are sorely and grievously
tempted by the coffee, if we give it up with pain, if saying "No, I
thank you," comes fearfully hard, if we cannot forego it cheerfully
without so much as seriously considering the drinking of it as possible
for us, why then it reveals how little we care for the life and work of
the morrow; and since life and work are but a succession of to-morrows,
how little we care for our life and work anyway. If we had great aims
burning in our minds and hearts, wide interests to which body and soul
were devoted, it would not be a pain, it would be a pleasure, to give up
for the sake of them ten thousand times as big a thing as a cup of
coffee, if it stood in the way of their accomplishment. Yes; Aristotle
is right on both points. Pleasure isolated from our plan of life and
followed as an end will lead us into weakness and wickedness every time
we yield to its insidious solicitation. On the other hand, the resolute
and consistent prosecution of large ends and generous interests will
make a positive pleasure of everything we either endure or do to promote
those ends and interests. Pleasure directly pursued is the utter
demoralisation of life. Ends and interests, pursued for their own sakes,
inevitably carry with them a host of noble pleasures, and the power to
conquer and transform what to the aimless life would be intolerable
pains.
Aristotle rejects the Epicurean principle of pleasure; because, though a
proof that isolated tendencies are satisfied, it is no adequate
criterion of the satisfaction of the self as a whole. He rejects the
Stoic principle of conformity to law; because it fails to recognise the
supreme worth of individuality. He rejects the Platonic principle of
subordination of appetites and passions to a supreme good which is above
them; because he dreads above all things the blight of asceticism, and
strives for a good which is concrete and practical.
What, then, is this good, which is neither a sum of pleasures, nor
conformity to law; nor yet superiority to appetite and passion? What is
this principle which can at once enjoy pleasure to the full, and at the
same time forego it gladly; which can make laws for itself more severe
than any lawgiver ever dared to lay down; and yet is not afraid to break
any law which its own conception of good requires it to break; which
honours all our elemental appetites and passions, uses money and honour
and power as the servants of its own ends, without ever being enslaved
by them? Evidently we are now on the track of a principle infinitely
more subtle and complex than anything the pleasure-loving Epicurean, or
the formal Stoic, or the transcendental Platonist has ever dreamed of.
We are entering the presence of the world's master moralist; and if we
have ever for a moment supposed that either of these previous systems
was satisfactory or final, it behooves us now to take the shoes from off
our feet, and reverently listen to a voice as much profounder and more
reasonable than them all, as they are superior to the senseless
appetites and blind passions of the mob. For if we have a little
patience with his subtlety, and can endure the temporary shock of his
apparent laxity, he will admit us to the very holy of holies of
personality.
II
THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN
Before coming to Aristotle's positive doctrine we must consider one
fundamental axiom. Man is by nature a social being. Whatever a man seeks
has a necessary and inevitable reference to the judgment of other men,
and the interest of society as a whole. Strip a man of his relations and
you have no man left. The man who is neither son, brother, husband,
father, citizen, neighbour or workman, is inconceivable. The good which
a man seeks, therefore, will express itself consciously or unconsciously
in terms of other men's approval, and the furtherance of interests which
he inevitably shares with them. The Greek word for private, peculiar to
myself, unrelated to the thought or interest of anybody else, is our
word for idiot. The New Testament uses this word to describe the place
to which Judas went; a place which just suited such a man as he, and was
fit for nobody else. Now a man who tries to be his own scientist, or his
own lawgiver, or his own statesman, or his own business manager, or his
own poet, or his own architect, without reference to the standards and
expectations of his fellow-men, is just an idiot; or, as we say, a
"crank." A wise man may defy these standards. The reformer often must do
so. But if he is really wise, if he is a true reformer, he must reckon
with them; he must understand them; he must appeal to the actual or
possible judgment and interest of his fellows for the confirmation of
what he says and the justification of what he does. This social
reference of all our thoughts and actions, which Aristotle grasped by
intuition, psychology in our day is laboriously and analytically
seeking to confirm. Aristotle lays it down as an axiom, that a man who
does not devote himself to some section of the social and spiritual
world, if such a being were conceivable, would be no man at all. Family,
or friends, or reputation, or country, or God are there in the
background, secretly summoned to justify our every thought and word and
deed.
Because man's nature is social, his end must be social also. It will
prevent misunderstanding later, if we put the question squarely here,
Does the end justify the means? As popularly understood, most
emphatically No. The support of a school is a good end. Does it justify
the raising of money by a lottery? Certainly not. The support of one's
family is a good end. Does it justify drawing a salary for which no
adequate services are rendered? Certainly not.
Yet if we push the question farther, and ask why these particular ends
do not justify these particular means, we discover that it is because
these means employed are destructive of an end vastly higher and greater
than the particular ends they are employed to serve. They break down the
structure and undermine the foundations of the industrial and social
order; an end infinitely more important than the maintenance of any
particular school, or the support of any individual family. Hence these
means are not to be judged by their promotion of certain specific ends,
but by their failure to promote the greatest and best end of all; the
comprehensive welfare of society as a whole, of which all institutions
and families and individuals are but subordinate members.
Throughout our discussion of Aristotle we must understand that the word
"end" always has this large social reference, and includes the highest
social service of which the man is capable. If we attempt to apply to
particular private ends of our own what Aristotle applies to the
universal end at which all men ought to aim, we shall make his teaching
a pretext for the grossest crimes, and reduce it to little more than
sophisticated selfishness. With this understanding of his terms, we may
venture to plunge boldly into his system and state it in its most
paradoxical and startling form.
III
RIGHT AND WRONG DETERMINED BY THE END
We are not either good or bad at the start. Pleasure in itself is
neither good nor bad. Laws in themselves are neither good nor bad. It is
impossible to say with Plato that some faculties are so high that they
always ought to be exercised, and others are so low that as a rule they
ought to be suppressed. The right and wrong of eating and drinking, of
work and play, of sex and society, of property and politics, lie not in
the elemental acts involved. All of these things are right for one man
in one set of circumstances, wrong for another man in another set of
circumstances. We cannot say that a man who takes a vow of poverty is
either a better or a worse man than a multi-millionnaire. We cannot say
that the monk who takes a vow of celibacy is a purer man than one who
does not. For the very fact that one is compelled to take a vow of
poverty or celibacy is a sign that these elemental impulses are not
effectively and satisfactorily related to the normal ends they are
naturally intended to subserve. All attempts to put virginity above
motherhood, to put poverty above riches, to put obscurity above fame
are, from the Aristotelian point of view, essentially immoral. For they
all assume that there can be badness in external things, wrong in
isolated actions, vice in elemental appetites, and sin in natural
passions; whereas Aristotle lays down the fundamental principle that the
only place where either badness or wrong or vice or sin can reside is in
the relation in which these external things and particular actions
stand to the clearly conceived and deliberately cherished end which the
man is seeking to promote. A simpler way of saying the same thing, but a
way so simple and familiar as to be in danger of missing the whole
point, is to say that virtue and vice reside exclusively in the wills of
free agents. That, every one will admit. But will is the pursuit of
ends. A will that seeks no ends is a will that wills nothing; in other
words, no will at all. Whether an act is wrong or right, then, depends
on the whole plan of life of which it is a part; on the relation in
which it stands to one's permanent interests. For these many years I
have defied class after class of college students to bring in a single
example of any elemental appetite or passion which is intrinsically bad;
which in all circumstances and relations is evil. And never yet has any
student brought me one such case. If brandy will tide the weak heart
over the crisis that follows a surgical operation, then that glass of
brandy is just as good and precious as the dear life it saves. The
proposition that sexual love is intrinsically evil, and those who take
vows of celibacy are intrinsically superior, is true only on condition
that racial suicide is the greatest good, and all the sweet ties of
home and family and parenthood and brotherly love are evils which it is
our duty to combat. To deny that wealth is good is only possible to him
who is prepared to go farther and denounce civilisation as a calamity.
He who brands ambition as intrinsically evil must be prepared to herd
with swine, and share contentedly their fare of husks.
The foundation of personality, therefore, is the power to clearly grasp
an imaginary condition of ourselves which is preferable to any practical
alternative; and then translate that potential picture into an
accomplished fact. Whoever lives at a lower level than this constant
translation of pictured potency into energetic reality: whoever, seeing
the picture of the self he wants to be, suffers aught less noble and
less imperative than that to determine his action misses the mark of
personality. Whoever sees the picture, and holds it before his mind so
clearly that all external things which favour it are chosen for its
sake, and all proposed actions which would hinder it are remorselessly
rejected in its holy name and by its mighty power;--he rises to the
level of personality, and his personality is of that clear, strong,
joyous, compelling, conquering, triumphant sort which alone is worthy of
the name.
How much deeper this goes than anything we have had before! A man comes
up for judgment. If Epicurus chances to be seated on the throne, he asks
the candidate, "Have you had a good time?" If he has, he opens the gates
of Paradise; if he has not, he bids him be off to the place of torment
where people who don't know how to enjoy themselves ought to go.
The Stoic asks him whether he has kept all the commandments. If he has,
then he may be promoted to serve the great Commander in other
departments of the cosmic order. If he has broken the least of them, no
matter on what pretext, or under what temptation, he is irrevocably
doomed. Plato asks him how well he has managed to keep under his
appetites and passions. If the man has risen above them, Plato will
promote him to seats nearer the perfect goodness of the gods. If he has
slipped or failed, then he must return for longer probation in the
prison-house of sense.
Aristotle's judgment seat is a very different place. A man comes to him
who has had a very sorry time: who has broken many commandments; who has
yielded time and again to sensuous desires; yet who is a good husband, a
kind father, an honest workman, a loyal citizen, a disinterested
scientist or artist, a lover of his fellows, a worshipper of God's
beauty and beneficence; and in spite of the sad time he has had, in
spite of the laws he has broken, in spite of the appetites which have
proved too strong for him, Aristotle gives him his hand, and bids him go
up higher. For that man stands in genuine relations to some aspects of
the great social end to which he devotes himself. And because some
portion of the real world has been made better by the conception of it
he has cherished, and the fidelity with which he has translated his
conception into fact, therefore a share in the great glory of the
splendid whole belongs of right to him. Good honest work, after an ideal
plan, to the full measure of his powers, with wise selection of
appropriate means, gives each individual his place and rank in the vast
workshop wherein the eternal thoughts of God, revealed to men as their
several ideals, are wrought out into the actuality of the social,
economic, political, aesthetic and spiritual order of the world.
On the other hand, the man of scattered and unfruitful pleasures, the
man of merely clear conscience, pure life, unstained reputation, with
his boast of rites observed, and ceremonies performed, and laws
unbroken, "faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null," is the
man above all others whom Aristotle cannot endure.
Do you wish, then, to know precisely where you stand in the scale of
personality? Here is the test. How large a section of this world do you
care for, in such a vital, responsible way, that you are thinking about
its welfare, forming schemes for its improvement, bending your energies
toward its advancement? Do you care for your profession in that way? Do
you care for your family like that? Do you love your country with such
jealous solicitude for its honour and prosperity? Can you honestly say
that your neighbour gets represented in your mind in this imaginative,
sympathetic, helpful way? Do you think of God's great universe as
something in the goodness of which you rejoice, and for the welfare of
which you are earnestly enlisted? Begin down at the bottom, with your
stomach, your pocket-book, your calling list, and go up the scale until
you come to these wider interests, and mark the point where you cease to
think how these things might be better than they are and to work to make
them so, and that point where your imagination and your service stops,
and your indifference and irresponsibility begins, will show you
precisely how you stand on the rank-book of God. The magnitude of the
ends you see and serve is the measure of your personality. Personality
is not an entity we carry around in our spiritual pockets. It is an
energy, which is no whit larger or smaller than the ends it aims at and
the work it does. If you are not doing anything or caring for anybody,
or devoted to any end, you will not be called up at some future time and
formally punished for your negligence. Plato might flatter your
self-importance with that notion, but not Aristotle. Aristotle tells
you, not that your soul will be punished hereafter, but that it is lost
already.
Goodness does not consist in doing or refraining from doing this or that
particular thing. It depends on the whole aim and purpose of the man who
does it, or refrains from doing it. Anything which a good man does as
part of the best plan of life is made thereby a good act. And anything
that a bad man does, as part of a bad plan of life, becomes thereby an
evil act. Precisely the same external act is good for one man and bad
for another. An example or two will make this clear.
Two men seek political office. For one man it is the gate of heaven; to
the other it is the door to hell. One man has established himself in a
business or profession in which he can earn an honest living and support
his family. He has acquired sufficient standing in his business so that
he can turn it over temporarily to his partners or subordinates. He has
solved his own problem; and he has strength, time, energy, capacity,
money, which he can give to solving the problems of the public. Were he
to shirk public office, or evade it, or fail to take all legitimate
means to secure it, he would be a coward, a traitor, a parasite on the
body politic. For there is good work to be done, which he is able to do,
and can afford to do, without unreasonable sacrifice of himself or his
family. Hence public office is for this man the gateway of heaven.
The other man has not mastered any business or profession; he has not
made himself indispensable to any employer or firm; he has no permanent
means of supporting himself and his family. He sees a political office
in which he can get a little more salary for doing a good deal less work
than is possible in his present position. He seeks the office, as a
means of getting his living out of the public. From that day forth he
joins the horde of mere office-seekers, aiming to get out of the public
a living he is too lazy, or too incompetent, or too proud to earn in
private employment. Thus the very same external act, which was the
other man's strait, narrow gateway to heaven, is for this man the broad,
easy descent into hell.
Two women join the same woman's club, and take part in the same
programme. One of them has her heart in her home; has fulfilled all the
sweet charities of daughter, sister, wife, or mother; and in order to
bring back to these loved ones at home wider interests, larger
friendships, and a richer and more varied interest in life, has gone out
into the work and life of the club. No angel in heaven is better
employed than she in the preparation and delivery of her papers and her
attendance on committee meetings and afternoon teas.
The other woman finds home life dull and monotonous. She likes to get
away from her children. She craves excitement, flattery, fame, social
importance. She is restless, irritable, out of sorts, censorious,
complaining at home; animated, gracious, affable, complaisant abroad.
For drudgery and duty she has no strength, taste, or talent; and the
thought of these things are enough to give her dyspepsia, insomnia, and
nervous prostration. But for all sorts of public functions, for the
preparation of reports, and the organisation of new charitable and
philanthropic and social schemes, she has all the energy of a
steam-engine, the power of a dynamo. When this woman joins a new club,
or writes a new paper, or gets a new office, though she does not a
single thing more than her angel sister who sits by her side, she is
playing the part of a devil.
It is not what one does; it is the whole purpose of life consciously or
unconsciously expressed in the doing that measures the worth of the man
or woman who does it. At the family table, at the bench in the shop, at
the desk in the office, in the seats at the theatre, in the ranks of the
army, in the pews of the church, saint and sinner sit side by side; and
often the keenest outward observer cannot detect the slightest
difference in the particular things that they do. The good man is he
who, in each act he does or refrains from doing, is seeking the good of
all the persons who are affected by his action. The bad man is the man
who, whatever he does or refrains from doing, leaves out of account the
interests of some of the people whom his action is sure to affect. Is
there any sphere of human welfare to which you are indifferent? Are
there any people in the world whose interests you deliberately
disregard? Then, no matter how many acts of charity and philanthropy,
and industry and public spirit you perform--acts which would be good if
a good man did them--in spite of them all, you are to that extent an
evil man.
We have, then, clearly in mind Aristotle's first great concept. The end
of life, which he calls happiness, he defines as the identification of
one's self with some large social or intellectual object, and the
devotion of all one's powers to its disinterested service. So far forth
it is Carlyle's gospel of the blessedness of work in a worthy cause.
"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
He has a work, a life purpose; he has found it, and will follow it. The
only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about
was happiness enough to get his work done. Whatsoever of morality and of
intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness of method,
insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of strength the man
had in him will lie written in the work he does. To work: why, it is to
try himself against Nature and her everlasting unerring laws; these will
tell a true verdict as to the man."
When we read Carlyle, we are apt to think such words merely exaggerated
rhetoric. Now Aristotle says the same thing in the cold, calculated
terms of precise philosophy. A man is what he does. He can do nothing
except what he first sees as an unaccomplished idea, and then bends all
his energies to accomplish. In working out his ideas and making them
real, he at the same time works out his own powers, and becomes a living
force, a working will in the world. And since the soul is just this
working will, the man has so much soul, no more, no less, than he
registers in manual or mental work performed. To be able to point to
some sphere of external reality, a bushel of corn, a web of cloth, a
printed page, a healthful tenement, an educated youth, a moral
community, and say that these things would not have been there in the
outward world, if they had not first been in your mind as an idea
controlling your thought and action;--this is to point to the external
and visible counterpart and measure of the invisible and internal energy
which is your life, your soul, your self, your personality.
IV
THE NEED OF INSTRUMENTS
Aristotle's first doctrine, then, is that we must work for worthy ends.
The second follows directly from it. We must have tools to work with;
means by which to gain our ends. General Gordon, who was something of a
Platonist, remarked to Cecil Rhodes, who was a good deal of an
Aristotelian, that he once had a whole room full of gold offered him,
and declined to take it. "I should have taken it," replied Mr. Rhodes.
"What is the use of having great schemes if you haven't the means to
carry them out?" As Aristotle says: "Happiness plainly requires external
goods; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to act nobly without
some furniture of fortune. There are many things that can be done only
through instruments, so to speak, such as friends and wealth and
political influence; and there are some things whose absence takes the
bloom off our happiness, as good birth, the blessing of children,
personal beauty. Happiness, then, seems to stand in need of this kind of
prosperity."
How different this from all our previous teachings! The Epicurean wants
little wealth, no family, no official station; because all these things
involve so much care and bother. The Stoic barely tolerates them as
indifferent. Plato took especial pains to deprive his guardians of most
of these very things. Aristotle on this point is perfectly sane. He says
you want them; because, to the fullest life and the largest work, they
are well-nigh indispensable. The editor of a metropolitan newspaper, the
president of a railroad, the corporation attorney cannot live their
lives and do their work effectively without comfortable homes, enjoyable
vacations, social connections, educational opportunities, which cost a
great deal of money. For them to despise money would be to despise the
conditions of their own effective living, to pour contempt on their own
souls.
Is Aristotle, then, a gross materialist, a mere money-getter,
pleasure-lover, office-seeker? Far from it. These things are not the end
of a noble life, but means by which to serve ends far worthier than
themselves. To make these things the ends of life, he explicitly says is
shameful and unnatural. The good, the true end, is "something which is a
man's own, and cannot be taken away from him."
Now we have two fundamental Aristotelian doctrines. We must have an end,
some section of the world which we undertake to mould according to a
pattern clearly seen and firmly grasped in our own minds.
Second, we must have instruments, tools, furniture of fortune in the
shape of health, wealth, influence, power, friends, business and social
and political connections with which to carry out our ends. And the
larger and nobler our ends, the more of these instruments shall we
require. If, like Cecil Rhodes, we undertake for instance to paint the
map of Africa British red, we shall want a monopoly of the product of
the Kimberley and adjacent diamond mines.
V
THE HAPPY MEAN
The third great Aristotelian principle follows directly from these two.
If we are to use instruments for some great end, then the amount of the
instruments we want, and the extent to which we shall use them, will
obviously be determined by the end at which we aim. We must take just so
much of them as will best promote that end. This is Aristotle's much
misunderstood but most characteristic doctrine of the mean. Approached
from the point of view which we have already gained, this doctrine of
the mean is perfectly intelligible, and altogether reasonable. For
instance, if you are an athlete, and the winning of a foot-ball game is
your end, and you have an invitation to a ball the evening before the
game, what is the right and reasonable thing to do? Dancing in itself is
good. You enjoy it. You would like to go. You need recreation after the
long period of training. But if you are wise, you will decline. Why?
Because the excitement of the ball, the late hours, the physical effort,
the nervous expenditure will use up more energy than can be recovered
before the game comes off upon the morrow. You decline, not because the
ball is an intrinsic evil, or dancing is intrinsically bad, or
recreation is inherently injurious, but because too much of these
things, in the precise circumstances in which you are placed, with the
specific end you have in view, would be disastrous. On the other hand,
will you have no recreation the evening before the game; but simply sit
in your room and mope? That would be even worse than going to the ball.
For nature abhors a vacuum in the mind no less than in the world of
matter. If you sit alone in your room, you will begin to worry about the
game, and very likely lose your night's sleep, and be utterly unfitted
when the time arrives. Too little recreation in these circumstances is
as fatal as too much. What you want is just enough to keep your mind
pleasantly diverted, without effort or exertion on your part. If the
glee club can be brought around to sing some jolly songs, if a funny man
can be found to tell amusing stories, you have the happy mean; that is,
just enough recreation to put you in condition for a night's sound
sleep, and bring you to the contest on the morrow in prime physical and
mental condition.
Aristotle, in his doctrine of the mean, is simply telling us that this
problem of the athlete on the night before the contest is the personal
problem of us all every day of our lives.
How late shall the student study at night? Shall he keep on until past
midnight year after year? If he does, he will undermine his health, lose
contact with society, and defeat those ends of social usefulness which
ought to be part of every worthy scholar's cherished end. On the other
hand, shall he fritter away all his evenings with convivial fellows, and
the society butterflies? Too much of that sort of thing would soon put
an end to scholarship altogether. His problem is to find that amount of
study which will keep him sensitively alive to the latest problems of
his chosen subject; and yet not make all his acquisitions comparatively
worthless either through broken health, or social estrangement from his
fellow-men. How rare and precious that mean is, those of us who have to
find college professors are well aware. It is easy to find scores of men
who know their subject so well that they know nothing and nobody else
aright. It is easy to find jolly, easy-going fellows who would not
object to positions as college professors. But the man who has enough
good fellowship and physical vigour to make his scholarship attractive
and effective, and enough scholarship to make his vigour and good
fellowship intellectually powerful and personally stimulating,--he is
the man who has hit the Aristotelian mean; he is the man we are all
after; he is the man whom we would any of us give a year's salary to
find.
The mean is not midway between zero and the maximum attainable. As
Aristotle says, "By the mean relatively to us I understand that which is
neither too much nor too little for us; and that is not one and the same
for all. For instance, if ten be too large and two be too small, if we
take six, we take the mean relatively to the thing itself, or the
arithmetical mean. But the mean relatively to us cannot be found in this
way. If ten pounds of food is too much for a given man to eat, and two
pounds too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order him
six pounds; for that also may perhaps be too much for the man in
question, or too little; too little for Milo, too much for the beginner.
And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too
much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it--not
the absolute but the relative mean. So that people are wont to say of a
good work, that nothing could be taken from it or added to it, implying
that excellence is destroyed by excess or deficiency, but secured by
observing the mean."
The Aristotelian principle, of judging a situation on its merits, and
subordinating means to the supreme end, was never more clearly stated
than in Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley: "I would save the Union. If
there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the
same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who
would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy
slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle
is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and
if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I
could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that.
What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it
helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not
believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I
believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when I
shall believe doing more will help the cause."
VI
THE ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUES AND THEIR ACQUISITION
The special forms that the one great virtue of seeking the relative mean
takes in actual life bear a close correspondence to the cardinal virtues
of Plato; yet with a difference which marks a positive advance in
insight. Aristotle, to begin with, distinguishes wisdom from prudence.
Wisdom is the theoretic knowledge of things as they are, irrespective of
their serviceableness to our practical interests. In modern terms it is
devotion to pure science. This corresponds to Plato's contemplation of
the Good. According to Aristotle this devotion to knowledge for its own
sake underlies all virtue; for only he who knows how things stand
related to each other in the actual world, will be able to grasp aright
that relation of means to ends on which the success of the practical
life depends. Just as the engineer cannot build a bridge across the
Mississippi unless he knows those laws of pure mathematics and physics
which underlie the stability of all structures, so the man who is
ignorant of economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and ethics is
sure to make a botch of any attempts he may make to build bridges
across the gulf which separates one man from another man; one group of
citizens from another group. Pure science is at the basis of all art,
consciously or unconsciously; and therefore wisdom is the fundamental
form of virtue.
Prudence comes next; the power to see, not the theoretical relations of
men and things to each other, but the practical relationships of men and
things to our self-chosen ends. Wisdom knows the laws which govern the
strength of materials. Prudence knows how strong a structure is
necessary to support the particular strain we wish to place upon it.
Wisdom knows sociology. Prudence tells us whether in a given case it is
better to give a beggar a quarter of a dollar, an order on a central
bureau, a scolding, or a kick. The most essential, and yet the rarest
kind of prudence is that considerateness which sensitively appreciates
the point of view of the people with whom we deal, and takes proper
account of those subtle and complex sentiments, prejudices, traditions,
and ways of thinking, which taken together constitute the social
situation.
Temperance, again, is not the repression of lower impulses in the
interest of those abstractly higher, as it came to be in the popular
interpretations of Platonism, and as it was in Stoicism. With Aristotle
it is the stern and remorseless exclusion of whatever cannot be brought
into subjection to my chosen ends, whatever they may be. As Stevenson
says in true Aristotelian spirit, "We are not damned for doing wrong: we
are damned for not doing right." For temperance lies not in the external
thing done or left undone; but in that relation of means to worthy ends
which either the doing or the not doing of certain things may most
effectively express. We shall never get any common basis of
understanding on what we call the temperance question of to-day until we
learn to recognise this internal and moral, as distinct from the
external and physical, definition of what true temperance is. Temperance
isn't abstinence. Temperance isn't indulgence. Neither is it moderation
in the ordinary sense of that term. True temperance is the using of just
so much of a thing,--no more, no less, but just so much,--as best
promotes the ends one has at heart. To discover whether a man is
temperate or not in anything, you must first know the ends at which he
aims; and then the strictness with which he uses the means that best
further those ends, and foregoes the things that would hinder them.
Temperance of this kind looks at first sight like license. So it is if
one's aims be not broad and high. In the matter of sexual morality,
Aristotle's doctrine as applied in his day was notoriously loose.
Whatever did not interfere with one's duties as citizen and soldier was
held to be permissible. Yet as Green and Muirhead, and all the
commentators on Aristotle have pointed out, it is a deeper grasp of this
very principle of Aristotle, a widening of the conception of the true
social end, which is destined to put chastity on its eternal rock
foundation, and make of sexual immorality the transparently weak and
wanton, cruel and unpardonable vice it is. To do this, to be sure, there
must be grafted on to it the Christian principle of democracy,--a regard
for the rights and interests of persons as persons. The beauty of the
Aristotelian principle is that it furnishes so stout and sturdy a stock
to graft this principle on to. When Christianity is unsupported by some
such solid trunk of rationality, it easily drops into a sentimental
asceticism. Take, for example, this very matter of sexual morality.
Divorced from some such great social end as Aristotelianism requires,
the only defence you have against the floods of sensuality is the vague,
sentimental, ascetic notion that in some way or other these things are
naughty, and good people ought not to do them. How utterly ineffective
such a barrier is, everybody who has had much dealing with young men
knows perfectly well. And yet that is pretty much all the opposition
current and conventional morality is offering at the present time. The
Aristotelian doctrine, with the Christian principle grafted on, puts two
plain questions to every man. Do you include the sanctity of the home,
the peace and purity of family life, the dignity and welfare of every
man and woman, the honest birthright of every child, as part of the
social end at which you aim? If you do, you are a noble and honourable
man. If you do not, then you are a disgrace to the mother who bore you,
and the home where you were reared. So much for the question of the end.
The second question is concerned with the means. Do you honestly believe
that loose and promiscuous sexual relations conduce to that sanctity of
the home, that peace and purity of family life, that dignity and welfare
of every man and woman, that honest birthright of every child, which as
an honourable man you must admit to be the proper end at which to aim?
If you think these means are conducive to these ends, then you are
certainly an egregious fool. Temperance in these matters, then, or to
use its specific name, chastity, is simply the refusal to ignore the
great social end which every decent man must recognise as reasonable and
right; and the resolute determination not to admit into his own life, or
inflict on the lives of others, anything that is destructive of that
social end. Chastity is neither celibacy nor licentiousness. It is far
deeper than either, and far nobler than them both. It is devotion to the
great ends of family integrity, personal dignity, and social stability.
It is including the welfare of society, and of every man, woman, and
child involved, in the comprehensive end for which we live; and holding
all appetites and passions in strict relation to that reasonable and
righteous end.
Aristotelian courage is simply the other side of temperance. Temperance
remorselessly cuts off whatever hinders the ends at which we aim.
Courage, on the other hand, resolutely takes on whatever dangers and
losses, whatever pains and penalties are incidental to the effective
prosecution of these ends. To hold consistently an end, is to endure
cheerfully whatever means the service of that end demands. Aristotelian
courage, rightly conceived, leads us to the very threshold of Christian
sacrifice. He who comes to Christian sacrifice by this approach of
Aristotelian courage, will be perfectly clear about the reasonableness
of it, and will escape that abyss of sentimentalism into which too
largely our Christian doctrine of sacrifice has been allowed to drop.
Courage does not depend on whether you save your life, or risk your
life, or lose your life. A brave man may save his life in situations
where a coward would lose it and a fool would risk it. The brave man is
he who is so clear and firm in his grasp of some worthy end that he will
live if he can best serve it by living; that he will die if he can best
serve it by dying; and he will take his chances of life or death if
taking those chances is the best way to serve this end.
The brave man does not like criticism, unpopularity, defeat, hostility,
any better than anybody else. He does not pretend to like them. He does
not court them. He does not pose as a martyr every chance that he can
get. He simply takes these pains and ills as under the circumstances the
best means of furthering the ends he has at heart. For their sake he
swallows criticism and calls it good; invites opposition and glories in
overcoming it, or being overcome by it, as the fates may decree; accepts
persecution and rejoices to be counted worthy to suffer in so good a
cause.
It is all a question here as everywhere in Aristotle of the ends at
which one aims, and the sense of proportion with which he chooses his
means. In his own words: "The man, then, who governs his fear and
likewise his confidence aright, facing dangers it is right to face, and
for the right cause, in the right manner, and at the right time, is
courageous. For the courageous man regulates both his feelings and his
actions with due regard to the circumstances and as reason and
proportion suggest. The courageous man, therefore, faces danger and does
the courageous thing because it is a fine thing to do." As Muirhead sums
up Aristotle's teaching on this point: "True courage must be for a noble
object. Here, as in all excellence, action and object, consequence and
motive, are inseparable. Unless the action is inspired by a noble
motive, and permeated throughout its whole structure by a noble
character, it has no claim to the name of courage."
The virtues cannot be learned out of a book, or picked up ready-made.
They must be acquired, by practice, as is the case with the arts; and
they are not really ours until they have become so habitual as to be
practically automatic. The sign and seal of the complete acquisition of
any virtue is the pleasure we take in it. Such pleasure once gained
becomes one's lasting and inalienable possession.
In Aristotle's words: "We acquire the virtues by doing the acts, as is
the case with the arts too. We learn an art by doing that which we wish
to do when we have learned it; we become builders by building, and
harpers by playing on the harp. And so by doing just acts we become
just, and by doing acts of temperance and courage we become temperate
and courageous. It is by our conduct in our intercourse with other men
that we become just or unjust, and by acting in circumstances of danger,
and training ourselves to feel fear or confidence, that we become
courageous or cowardly." "The happy man, then, as we define him, will
have the property of permanence, and all through life will preserve his
character; for he will be occupied continually, or with the least
possible interruption, in excellent deeds and excellent speculations;
and whatever his fortune may be, he will take it in the noblest fashion,
and bear himself always and in all things suitably. And if it is what
man does that determines the character of his life, then no happy man
will become miserable, for he will never do what is hateful and base.
For we hold that the man who is truly good and wise will bear with
dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his
circumstances, as a good general will turn the forces at his command to
the best account."
This doctrine that virtue, like skill in any game or craft, is gained by
practice, deserves a word of comment. It seems to say, "You must do the
thing before you know how, in order to know how after you have done it."
Paradox or no paradox, that is precisely the fact. The swimmer learns to
swim by floundering and splashing around in the water; and if he is
unwilling to do the floundering and splashing before he can swim, he
will never become a swimmer. The ball-player must do a lot of muffing
and wild throwing before he can become a sure catcher and a straight
thrower. If he is ashamed to go out on the diamond and make these
errors, he may as well give up at once all idea of ever becoming a
ball-player. For it is by the progressive elimination of errors that the
perfect player is developed. The only place where no errors are made,
whether in base-ball or in life, is on the grand stand. The courage to
try to do a thing before you know how, and the patience to keep on
trying after you have found out that you don't know how, and the
perseverance to renew the trial as many times as necessary until you do
know how, are the three conditions of the acquisition of physical skill,
mental power, moral virtue, or personal excellence.
VII
ARISTOTELIAN FRIENDSHIP
We are now prepared to see why Aristotle regards friendship as the crown
and consummation of a virtuous life. No one has praised friendship more
highly, or written of it more profoundly than he.
Friendship he defines as "unanimity on questions of the public advantage
and on all that touches life." This unanimity, however, is very
different from agreement in opinion. It is seeing things from the same
point of view; or, more accurately, it is the appreciation of each
other's interests and aims. The whole tendency of Aristotle thus far has
been to develop individuality; to make each man different from every
other man. Conventional people are all alike. But the people who have
cherished ends of their own, and who make all their choices with
reference to these inwardly cherished ends, become highly
differentiated. The more individual your life becomes, the fewer people
there are who can understand you. The man who has ends of his own is
bound to be unintelligible to the man who has no such ends, and is
merely drifting with the crowd. Now friendship is the bringing together
of these intensely individual, highly differentiated persons on a basis
of mutual sympathy and common understanding. Friendship is the
recognition and respect of individuality in others by persons who are
highly individualised themselves. That is why Aristotle says true
friendship is possible only between the good; between people, that is,
who are in earnest about ends that are large and generous and
public-spirited enough to permit of being shared. "The bad," he says,
"desire the company of others, but avoid their own. And because they
avoid their own company, there is no real basis for union of aims and
interests with their fellows." "Having nothing lovable about them, they
have no friendly feelings toward themselves. If such a condition is
consummately miserable, the moral is to shun vice, and strive after
virtue with all one's might. For in this way we shall at once have
friendly feelings toward ourselves and become the friends of others. A
good man stands in the same relation to his friend as to himself, seeing
that his friend is a second self." "The conclusion, therefore, is that
if a man is to be happy, he will require good friends."
Friendship has as many planes as human life and human association. The
men with whom we play golf and tennis, billiards and whist, are friends
on the lowest plane--that of common pleasures. Our professional and
business associates are friends upon a little higher plane--that of the
interests we share. The men who have the same social customs and
intellectual tastes; the men with whom we read our favourite authors,
and talk over our favourite topics, are friends upon a still higher
plane--that of identity of aesthetic and intellectual pursuits. The
highest plane, the best friends, are those with whom we consciously
share the spiritual purpose of our lives. This highest friendship is as
precious as it is rare. With such friends we drop at once into a
matter-of-course intimacy and communion. Nothing is held back, nothing
is concealed; our aims are expressed with the assurance of sympathy;
even our shortcomings are confessed with the certainty that they will be
forgiven. Such friendship lasts as long as the virtue which is its
common bond. Jealousy cannot come in to break it up. Absolute sincerity,
absolute loyalty,--these are the high terms on which such friendship
must be held. A person may have many such friends on one condition: that
he shall not talk to any one friend about what his friendship permits
him to know of another friend. Each such relation must be complete
within itself; and hermetically sealed, so far as permitting any one
else to come inside the sacred circle of its mutual confidence. In such
friendship, differences, as of age, sex, station in life, divide not,
but rather enhance, the sweetness and tenderness of the relationship. In
Aristotle's words: "The friendship of the good, and of those who have
the same virtues, is perfect friendship. Such friendship, therefore,
endures so long as each retains his character, and virtue is a lasting
thing."
VIII
CRITICISM AND SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S TEACHING
If finally we ask what are the limitations of Aristotle, we find none
save the limitations of the age and city in which he lived. He lived in
a city-state where thirty thousand full male citizens, with some seventy
thousand women and children dependent upon them, were supported by the
labour of some hundred thousand slaves. The rights of man as such,
whether native or alien, male or female, free or slave, had not yet been
affirmed. That crowning proclamation of universal emancipation was
reserved for Christianity three centuries and a half later. Without
this Christian element no principle of personality is complete. Not
until the city-state of Plato and Aristotle is widened to include the
humblest man, the lowliest woman, the most defenceless little child,
does their doctrine become final and universal. Yet with this single
limitation of its range, the form of Aristotle's teaching is complete
and ultimate. Deeper, saner, stronger, wiser statement of the principles
of personality the world has never heard.
His teaching may be summed up in the following:--
TEN ARISTOTELIAN COMMANDMENTS
Thou shalt devote thy utmost powers to some section of our common social
welfare.
Thou shalt hold this end above all lesser goods, such as pleasure,
money, honour.
Thou shalt hold the instruments essential to the service of this end
second only to the end itself.
Thou shalt ponder and revere the universal laws that bind ends and means
together in the ordered universe.
Thou shalt master and obey the specific laws that govern the relation of
means to thy chosen end.
Thou shalt use just so much of the materials and tools of life as the
service of thy end requires.
Thou shalt exclude from thy life all that exceeds or falls below this
mean, reckless of pleasure lost.
Thou shalt endure whatever hardship and privation the maintenance of
this mean in the service of thy end requires, heedless of pain involved.
Thou shalt remain steadfast in this service until habit shall have made
it a second nature, and custom shall have transformed it into joy.
Thou shalt find and hold a few like-minded friends, to share with thee
this lifelong devotion to that common social welfare which is the task
and goal of man.