ARISTOTLE.

{127}

THERE is a natural sequence in the processes of social culture which

is well illustrated by the history of Moral Philosophy among the

Greeks. The man of action comes before the man of literature, the man

of literature before the man of science. In Greek ethics Socrates was

the man of action, Plato the man of literature, and Aristotle the man

of science. Not, of course, that Plato was merely the literary man, in

the trivial modern sense of that word; he was eminently the

philosopher--not merely φιλόλογος but φιλόσοφος--but he put forth his

philosophy in a popular form; he addressed himself to the imagination

as well as the reason; he appealed, as we would say, to the general

public; and speaking to men in a human way, on the most interesting of

human topics, through the medium of language artistically handled, he

falls manifestly under the broad category of the literary as opposed

to the scientific man, who works on a special subject, and with a

special faculty. But Aristotle was pre-eminently, and with very marked

features, the man of knowledge; he came with the dissecting knife in

hand and addressed himself to those who were willing to make special

dissections with him for the mere purpose of knowing, and drew a broad

line of {128} demarcation between the speculative and the practical

world. Nevertheless the Stagirite was something more than a knowing

machine; he was a man, and by virtue of his Hellenic birth also a

citizen. He could not therefore avoid occupying to a certain extent

the province of the practical man; and so it has come to pass that in

three great works, the _Ethics_, the _Politics_, and the _Rhetoric_,

he has transported himself from the teacher’s chair, and entered

into competition with Socrates and Plato as a preacher of social

morals and a guide to civic conduct. This was well both for him and

for us: well for him, because mere knowing can never exhaust the

riches of a nature so essentially practical as that of man: well for

us, because otherwise we could scarcely have imagined the phenomenon

of an intellect at once so complete in all the categories of

scientific cognition, and so strongly marked with all the sagacity

that belongs to the so-called practical man, the man of society, the

man of business, the accomplished citizen. And it is to this walking

out into the realm of common life, instead of confining himself like

so many erudite Germans within the limits of a library or a

laboratory, that Aristotle owes no small part of the influence which

he has so long exercised, not only in the schools but among

intelligent men of all classes. In ancient times, when Moral

Philosophy was justly regarded as the principal part of that wisdom

which it concerns all men to possess, the Philosopher of the Lyceum

never would have been able to assert his place as a public teacher

alongside of Socrates and Plato had he bestowed only a secondary

consideration on the grand arts of living and governing. As it was,

the poet-philosopher of the Academy could not but remain {129} the

more popular and the more effective moral teacher of the two; but if

Plato was more attractive and more interesting, and by these qualities

commanded a wider audience, it was a great consolation to the lesser

circle of the Stagirite’s disciples that, though in his discourses

on moral matters he was more angular and more severe, he was at the

same time more shrewd, more sagacious, and more practical. The

reputation which Aristotle thus maintained among ancient Greeks and

Romans, both as a speculator and as a wise guide in the conduct of

life, was increased rather than diminished when brought into contact

with the new moral force of Christianity. No doubt Plato at first was

the natural vestibule through which the cultivated Greeks of

Alexandria entered the temple of Christian faith; but after that

faith, partly in league with Plato, and partly in spite of Plato, had

achieved its natural triumph, Aristotle, the clear, cold, and keen, but

by no means devout master of all knowledge, by a sort of reaction, as

it should seem, in the middle ages began to assert an exclusive

dominance in the schools, both of Christian Europe and, through the

Arabians, in the East. To all who were anxious for clear and exact

knowledge in matters visible and tangible, the Stagirite was the only

guide. As the high priest of science he acted in those days of

sacerdotal direction as the natural complement of faith, not as its

antagonist; and for this reason he is praised by Dante among the

solemn forms of the mighty dead that pace through the dim halls of the

unseen world, as

“Il gran maestro di color chi sanno.”

The dethronement which he afterwards suffered at {130} the hands of

those twin innovators Luther and Lord Bacon was again a mere matter of

reaction, and could in its nature be only temporary. Honest Martin

raged in his own way very furiously against the great dictator of the

schools, almost as if he had been the Pope:--“Aristotle, that

histrionic mountebank, who from behind a Greek mask has so long

bewitched the Church of Christ, that most cunning juggler of souls,

whom, if he had not been accredited as of human blood and bone, we

should have been justified in maintaining to be the veritable

devil.”[130.1] But this we plainly see to be the language of a man

not with the balance of truth in his hand, but with the sword of

sacred wrath in his tongue; and, indeed, the sword was at that time

very needful, and wielded with a wise hostility, not against the true.

Aristotle whom we now read and admire, but against the so-called

Aristotelian fence of the schools, used oftener for subtle and shadowy

exercitation and in defence of the grossest abuses than in the honest

search after truth. Of the real Aristotle Luther knew as little in

those days as not a few Christians at the present hour know of true

Christianity, coming as it does to them through the strangely

distorting media of scholastic subtleties, sacerdotal usurpations, and

pure human stupidities of all kinds. As for Lord Bacon, he was no

doubt equally right in stoutly protesting against the then

Aristotelian logic as a hindrance rather than a help to the true

knowledge of nature; while, at the same time, he was no less certainly

in the wrong if he imagined, or led men to imagine, either that

induction was the only method which leads to the discovery of

important truth, or that {131} Aristotle’s writings lent any

countenance to those baseless and unfruitful methods of speculation

which were presented under the authority of his name. It was

necessary, however, that the human mind should be thoroughly

emancipated from the dictatorial oppression of the false Aristotle

before the true Aristotle could be reinstated on his throne; and this

required time. Accordingly we find that some of the most original

thinkers and ingenious scholars of the last century seem to have

imagined that Aristotle and the Pope were two great usurpers, the one

in the intellectual, the other in the religious world, whom the great

Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, in the interest both of

learning and religion, had rightfully dethroned. “Mr. Harris, for

example,” says his biographer, “had imbibed a prejudice, very

common at that time even among scholars, that Aristotle was an obscure

and unprofitable author, whose philosophy had deservedly been

superseded by that of Mr. Locke.”[131.1] And in perfect harmony with

this, Mr. Burton, in his life of Hume, remarks that “the name of

Aristotle is not once mentioned in Hume’s treatise of human

nature.”[131.2] Strange revolution of thought in a country where, in

the days of John Knox, it had been customary for famous academical

teachers to say--“_Stultum est dicere Aristotelem errasse!_” And,

indeed, not only Hume, but Bentham, James Mill, and all the thinkers

of that century, manifested a strange lust of spinning knowledge out

of their own bowels, so to speak, with a careless or insolent neglect

of the great truths handed down for the use of all ages by the master

{132} thinkers of ancient times. But not even in Scotland, never

famous for Greek, could such ignorance last for ever. The French

Revolution of 1789 shook all men violently out of their old

complacencies, and blew their dainty conceits of all kinds to the

winds; things were now to be built up from the foundations, not in the

political world only, but in the intellectual and religious world no

less; torpid Churches were suddenly fevered with hot activity; in

literature the forgotten language of a natural and passionate poetry

was to be restored; and in philosophy the ancient foundations of

stable knowledge were to be laid bare. Under such a violent volcanic

action it could not be but that both Plato and Aristotle should be

made to stand out before lesser names in their true dimensions.

Aristotle especially revealed himself to many thoughtful Germans, and

a few thoughtful Englishmen, as the precursor of Bacon in the use of

the great organon of induction; and the hard and cautious genius of

the Scotch, under the guidance of a polyhistoric Hamilton, found in

the Stagirite a more dignified corner-stone than in Reid for the

erection of a philosophical edifice which rather sought safety in

narrowing than glory in extending the bounds of human speculation. In

Oxford, the stiff conservatism of the College tutors, men trained to

the exact knowledge of a few traditional books, more certainly than

any profound philosophical insight, preserved the Ethics, along with

the Logic, of Aristotle as one of the general instruments of juvenile

drill; while, outside the academic precincts, liberal statesmen like

Cornewall Lewis and democratic historians like Grote continued to

quote the Stagirite as the wisest at once and the most cautious of all

{133} ancient political speculators. Thus the natural balance of

judgment was restored; and Aristotle, redeemed at once from the

ignorant idolatry of pseudo disciples and the local conceit of men who

spurned to learn from any but themselves, took his place for ever as

an intellectual dictator of the first rank, with whom if a man did not

happen to agree, it was always more likely that the dissentient had

wandered into error than that the authority from whom he dissented had

failed to fasten his glance upon the truth.

Before attempting to set forth in its great salient points the ethical

system of Aristotle, it will be at once interesting and useful to

sketch shortly the leading events of his life, omitting altogether, as

a matter of course, those hundred and one points of uncertain report

and slippery slander which are wont to attach themselves to the fame

of any great man as to a natural nucleus. And when a man like

Aristotle is not only a great man according to the common measure of

human greatness, but an altogether extraordinary man, it is as natural

that he should be spoken against from all sides as that dogs should

bark at a stranger. The epiphany of an intellectual giant in any

assembly of men of average talent makes those appear dwarfs who had

previously, not without reason, accounted themselves of reputable

stature; and as no man likes to be dwarfed, the necessary result of

such an apparition is to set men’s wits agog to find out cunning

devices, whereby the overwhelming stature of the huge intruder may

seem to be curtailed. So Aristotle, we are told, had “a whole host

of enemies;” and we shall therefore, as just judges, be justified in

throwing out of court, as vitiated in its source, the greater part of

the merely anecdotal {134} accretions that cling to the name of the

mighty Stagirite.

The adjuncts of high social position and freedom from pecuniary

pressure, always advantageous to wise men, hurtful only to fools,

Aristotle enjoyed in a remarkable degree. Born 384 B.C. in a Greek

town, but under Macedonian influence, his father, who belonged to an

old Asclepiad family, as court physician to King Amyntas, had ample

opportunities of launching him into the world with all the training,

equipment, and supports that are the natural harbingers of a

prosperous career. He was not therefore a Greek in the strict sense of

the word; and, though he borrowed his language and culture from

Attica, and sympathized mainly with popular institutions, as his great

work on Politics shows, he had good reason to congratulate himself

that he did not lose his original citizenship when the eloquence of

Demosthenes thundered in vain against the gold and the iron of the

Macedonian. In the period of Aristotle’s youth there was nothing in

Greece proper to make any thoughtful person lament that he had been

born a subject of a sturdy and semi-barbarous but rising monarchy,

rather than a citizen of an exhausted and decaying democracy; for

though the victories of Chabrias had restored in some sort the

supremacy of the Athenians at sea, the brilliant career of Epaminondas

had elevated Thebes for a moment only to make general Greece more

divided and less able to resist the growing power of Macedonia.

Whether his father had destined him to follow his own profession is

uncertain; there are however in the _Ethics_, and elsewhere in his

works, frequent allusions to the medical art, such as might have been

expected from {135} the associations of his parentage; and the

prominent place given to physical science in his writings seems to

indicate a tendency partly favoured by the circumstances of his birth,

partly evoked by the natural progress of the Greek mind in the then

stage of its development. This only we know certainly, that at the age

of seventeen, about the time when young men in Scotland generally

leave school for the university, the future father of encyclopædic

science was sent to Athens, where he remained for twenty years as a

pupil of Plato in the Academy. But though a pupil, he was anything but

a disciple. Naturally of an inductive rather than a speculative habit

of mind, and disposed to dissect and to tabulate rather than to

collect and to construct, he displayed from year to year a more marked

divergence from the great ideal thinker who at that time was

impressing his type on the rising intellect of Greece. The reported

gossip of antiquity has much to say about some bitter rivalry that

arose, and unseemly quarrel that broke out, between the dictatorial

master and the independent pupil; but we need believe nothing of this,

except in so far as it may be an indication of a radical difference of

intellectual character in the two men, which could not but make itself

felt in various ways, more or less inconsistent with the relation of a

merely receptive and responsive discipleship. Nothing is more common

in the intercourse of cultivated men, than that one of the parties

finds himself in a condition to respect profoundly what he cannot at

all agree with, and what he feels bound, ever and anon, decidedly to

controvert. So it fared no doubt with young Aristotle in relation to

old Plato. Confluence between two souls so differently constituted

there {136} could be none. They cannot be compared as one rose may be

compared with another, or even as one flower may be contrasted with

another flower, but only as things of a totally different nature, may

be named in the same sentence to make their incommensurability more

patent. The intellect of Aristotle was a granite palace, that of Plato

a garden of paradise; Aristotle’s wit was like a sharp knife and a

weighty hammer, Plato’s like a rolling river and a shining ocean;

the one bristled with all carious knowledge, the other blossomed with

all lofty speculation; Aristotle analysed all things great and small;

Plato harmonized all things beautiful and grand. Along with this

inborn diversity of intellectual character, we have reason to suppose

that there were certain habits of life and social peculiarities about

the Stagirite, which were not without offence to the more strict and

devoted Platonists. For that there was a certain tinge of Puritanism,

and even a sort of lofty pedantry, occasionally manifested in the

great architect of ideas, can, I think, scarcely be doubted by any one

who has read his great work--the _Republic_--with an unbribed

judgment. Now if Plato was somewhat of a philosophical Puritan, in

Aristotle there was presented that combination of a philosopher and a

man of the world, of the man of principle with the man of practice,

which, because it is difficult to produce, is always rare, and because

it is rare is always admired. A physician, and above all a court

physician, must be a man who enjoys and who understands society: such

was Aristotle’s father; and the son, while betaking himself to the

quiet bowers of the Athenian Academy for the cultivation of thought,

could not forget that there was a large busy world without {137} which

imperiously asserted itself, and from which not even a philosopher

could be allowed to withdraw with impunity. It was a characteristic

tenet of the Peripatetic school that the external trappings and

decorations of life are not to be looked down on with a lofty

contempt, but rather cared for as serviceable, and in some cases

necessary, aids to a perfect life; and so those Quaker-like

affectations of plain garb, and those over-virtuous abstinences from

“cakes and ale” and other delights of the merely sensuous part of

our nature, which some Platonic and Stoic philosophers affected, could

not but meet from Aristotle with a practical protest, of which some

significant hint peeps out here and there among the scraps of ancient

anecdote-mongers and memoir-writers. Plato, we are told, “was not

pleased with Aristotle’s manner of life, nor with his dress. For

indeed he was somewhat nice and curious in his apparel, and there was

a particular tidiness about his shoes; and his hair also he had cut

after a jaunty fashion, not approved of by men of Plato’s following;

and he made a display of many rings on his finger. Moreover, there was

a peculiar sarcastic play about his mouth, and, when he spoke, he

could prattle away with a notable fluency; all which things seemed not

to be quite in keeping with the character of a philosopher, and were

the occasion that Plato preferred Speusippus and Xenocrates, who

afterwards became his successors in the Academy.” This picture is,

no doubt, in the main true; and it can only excite our admiration when

we consider that the same man of whom this is told was also noted as

the most severe and persistent reader in Athens; his house, indeed,

was called by Plato “the house of the reader;” and the {138}

learned geographer Strabo notes him as the first Greek who collected

books on a large scale, and supplied to the Ptolemies of the

succeeding age the model of those systematic stores of books with

which they made Alexandria famous. Aristotle therefore may justly be

regarded as the great prototype of those modern Germans who, like the

mailed knights of the middle ages, stand up in our libraries, cased in

the invulnerable panoply of polyhistoric and encyclopædic erudition;

and he gave birth to that curious sort of intellectual laboriosity,

which when divorced from his genius and his sagacity, produced those

accumulations of written and printed record, under which the shelves

of so many libraries groan, by which also, we may justly say, not a

few strong intellects have been lost to the living world, smothered

beneath heaps of cumbrous babblement, in extent infinite, in value

infinitesimal.

After the death of Plato in the year 347, Aristotle retired for a few

years to the court of his fellow-student and friend Hermias, then

ruler of Atarnæ, on the coast of Asia Minor. This change of scene was

necessary for him, while on the one hand his scheme of establishing a

new school of philosophy was yet immature, and, on the other hand, the

political relations between Macedonia and Athens were not such as that

it would be pleasant for him to be identified with a city which might

soon be forced into hostility with his natural sovereign. It was

fruitful also, no doubt, in those shrewd observations on men and

manners which stamp so many sagacious pages in his moral and political

treatises. From this judicious retirement after a few years he was

called to a field of more {139} honourable and influential activity.

In the year 342 he received a letter from Philip of Macedon,

requesting him to undertake the office of tutor to his young son

Alexander. The duties of this position he performed with such results

to his royal pupil as in such circumstances were to be expected; and

with the great advantage to himself of adding the resources of an

absolute monarch and a great conqueror to his own private instruments

for the prosecution of scientific research. The unexpected death of

Philip by the hands of an assassin, called Alexander prematurely to

dash into that brilliant career of Asiatic victory which has made his

name no less famous than that of his tutor, who by this event relieved

at once from personal responsibility and political apprehension, found

himself in a position to establish that independent school of wisdom

at Athens, which now for more than two thousand years has propagated

itself in the world as the natural and necessary complement to the

Platonic style of thought. In the year 334 he pitched his intellectual

camp at the Lyceum, in the eastern suburbs of Athens, under Mount

Lycabettus, and here during the space of thirteen years he remained

exercising towards his scholars the diverse functions of fatherhood

and fraternity, which in the ancient philosophical associations, as in

the early Christian Churches, were so happily combined. After the

death of Alexander, in the year 322, he left Athens and retired to

Chalcis, in Eubœa, where he had a small property; a migration to

which political considerations must have been the main inducement, for

so distinguished a dependant of the Macedonian court could scarcely

look upon himself as safe in {140} the Attic capital the moment that

the death of the great conqueror opened up to the most distinguished

people whom his arms had subjugated the prospect of political

liberation. The philosopher, accordingly, when leaving the city of his

adoption, as it turned out for the last time, with an obvious allusion

to the fate of Socrates, is reported to have said that he did so in

order that the Athenians might not again have the opportunity of

signalizing themselves by the murder of a philosopher; for, indeed, in

unlimited democracy generally, and specially in the extreme democracy

of that time, he had no faith, observing sarcastically that while the

Athenians had discovered two useful things, wheat and freedom, they

understood how to use the one, but the other they had possessed for a

short time, only to abuse. And no doubt he acted wisely in retreating

from a scene where no weight of character or reputation for grave

wisdom could have shielded him from the combined assault of personal

malignity and political rancour so ready in every democratic soil to

rise with jealous spite against individual eminence and independence.

The philosopher was threatened, we are told, with prosecution for

atheism; a charge which, however unfounded to the eye of reason, might

have been brought against the Stagirite from the orthodox Athenian

point of view with much more justice than about eighty years before it

had been brought against the great father of moral science. An atheist

certainly, in the strict sense of the term, Aristotle was not, but a

pious believer in the polytheistic theology of his country he was even

less; piety indeed of any kind is not at all a pronounced feature in

the composition of his character. Like many a {141} modern man of

science, he had cultivated acuteness at the expense of wonder; and,

while indulging in the omnivorous lust of knowledge, had starved

veneration, and stunted the growth of some of the most delicate

emotions of the soul. For devotion is of the very finest fragrance of

the emotional life; and as there are some flowers without smell, so

there are some souls without piety. In point of religious feeling,

beyond all question, both Socrates and Plato were infinitely superior

to Aristotle.

Such are the few trustworthy notices that have been preserved to us of

the outward fortunes of this great hierarch of encyclopædic

knowledge. He died shortly after his retirement to Chalcis, at the

early age of sixty-three, followed immediately by his great

contemporary Demosthenes. On his deathbed he named Theophrastus as his

successor in the chair of the great school of philosophy which he had

founded.

We now proceed to place before the reader a short statement of the

most striking characteristics of the ethical philosophy of Aristotle

as they are set forth in that compact little book, the _Nicomachean

Ethics_. And the first observation proper to make here is the extreme

practicality that appears not more in the general colour and tone than

in the individual chapters and paragraphs of this remarkable volume.

In criticising the sermons delivered in our Christian pulpits we are

accustomed to distinguish between doctrinal and practical preaching,

and to believe that while, in Scotland at least, the former is the

more popular and the more easy, the latter is always the more

difficult and the more efficient style of moral address. Now what we

have to say of Aristotle, as he appears in the _Ethics_, is that he is

not a mere {142} writer on ethics, an acute speculator or a subtle

casuist, but he presents himself with all the seriousness of a

preacher, and an eminently practical preacher. No doubt in this

capacity he must be regarded both by natural genius and in the general

tone of his ethical writings as second to his great master Plato; but

his influence on the moral culture of the world has not for that

reason been less. A large class of men, especially in this practical

country, are apt to suspect Plato of nonsense; and these are unwilling

to take advice in the affairs of common life from a man who, in his

flights of ideal constructiveness, so far transcends the narrow range

of their own hard-faced realism. But Aristotle is a man whom no man

can suspect of nonsense. He takes what lies before him, and in the

most cool practical way conceivable proceeds to analyse it, and to

spell out its significance. He is not ambitious--at least not in the

department of morals--of piling a grand system, or of tabulating an

exhaustive scheme. He is a practical man, as much as you or I am, and

sees with marked distinctness always what lies in his way. There is no

fear that under his guidance you will lose yourself in a mist or be

carried off your feet in a balloon. He is therefore peculiarly fitted

for being put forward as a lay-preacher to a British public; and the

Oxford scholars have done good service to the English youth by giving

his famous work on Ethics such a prominent place among classical books

of the first rank. He is as sensible as Dr. Paley, and a great deal

more profound; while, on the other hand, it never occurs to him that

it is necessary to prepare the way for a plain practical discourse on

the conduct of life by abstract discussions {143} on the liberty of

the will and the responsibility of free agents. This omission

Principal Grant considers a weakness; I consider it a sign of good

sense, or, at all events, a remarkable piece of good luck. He assumes

morality in the moral world, just as he assumes light and air and

water in the physical; he describes a moral man with strong lines and

a firm hand, just as he would describe a healthy man as contrasted

with a diseased man. If you have a single eye and an honest purpose,

you will not fail to know what he means; if you have not, his book is

not for you. There never was a more practical preacher. This word

_practical_, therefore, I desire the reader to emphasize doubly when

he applies himself to the thorough comprehension of the _Nicomachean

Ethics_. There are, no doubt, in this treatise, as in almost every

Greek book, some half-dozen curious questions raised, which, like the

subtle casuistry of the Jesuit doctors, have little practical value;

for Aristotle was a Greek, and as such a habitual dealer in

ἀπορήματα, or knotty points, in the solution of which a hard

practical Scot or a broad burly Englishman would think a single

sentence wasted. These however belong to the soil, grow up like weeds

among the best wheat, and, like bad puns in Shakespeare, must be taken

with the lot. In the gross and scope of his handling, as we have said,

the Stagirite systematically waives all unpractical questions; and in

the very arrangement of his book an attentive reader will not fail to

discern that there are certain scientific deficiencies which can be

explained fully only from the consideration that the writer had

vividly realized the difference between what we could call an

academical lecture and a sermon, and was {144} determined to make it

felt that a lecture on morals, through which the undertones of

seriousness that belong to a sermon are not heard, is one of the most

absurd and unmeaning of all human performances. No doubt this defect

in respect of strictly scientific method may arise partly from the

fact that the treatise seems to have been composed at different times,

and packed up, so to speak, in bundles rather than reared up

architecturally into a jointed structure; it is also plain enough to

any one who can read with a discerning eye that the work was left

incomplete by the great author, and that the fifth, sixth, and seventh

books, as we now have then, are from a different hand, and of

manifestly inferior workmanship; but I consider it not less certain

that, had it not been for the dominance of the practical point of

view, not a few chapters in this most valuable treatise would have

been compacted more aptly into the firmness of a complete organism.

Once and again in the first two books of his treatise does he repeat

the solemn warning that our object in inquiring into the nature of

virtue is, not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may be

virtuous. Once and again does he enter a protest against the

supersubtle tendencies of his countrymen, always ready to stand and

debate, even where the solution of the problem was to be found only in

motion and in action. Subtleties of any kind, indeed, are not suitable

for a moral discourse; the entertainment of them shows that the

inquirer has not yet conceived what the purport of the inquiry is;

ethical philosophy refers as distinctly to a deed as a sword refers to

a cut; and all questions about morals are idle, and even pernicious,

that do not bear directly on some practical result. {145} We must

therefore, so Aristotle argues, in our method of discussion here, not

insist on having always those exact proofs and nice definitions which

in the sciences of measurement and number may fairly be demanded. We

should rather seek for an analogy to moral science in such arts as

medicine, and say that propriety of conduct, like the health of the

body, is liable to much indeterminateness and variation; that to seek

for scientific rules which might apply with exactitude to all cases is

absurd; that no wise man will attempt to cut logs with razors, and

that in such matters of complex practice we must content ourselves

with stating some such broad general principles as suit the great

majority of cases, and which every man must be left to apply for

himself in the experience of life. Of the deep tone of practical

seriousness which underlies the whole of the _Nicomachean Ethics_, I

know no more striking proof than an utterance of Maurice, in the

preface to his exposition of the Epistles of John, which I shall here

extract. “I owe unspeakable gratitude,” says that truly

evangelical moralist, “to the University of Oxford for having put

Aristotle’s _Ethics_ into my hands, and induced me to read it, and

to think of it. I doubt if I could have received a greater boon from

any university or any teacher. I will tell you what this book did for

me. First, it assured me that the principles of morals cannot belong

to one time or another; that they must belong to all times. Here was

an old heathen Greek making me aware of things that were passing

within me, detecting my laziness and my insincerity, showing how

little I was doing the things which I professed to do, forcing me to

confess that with all the {146} advantages which I enjoyed he was

better than I was. That was one great thing. Next, I could not but

learn from him--for he took immense pains to tell me--that it is not

by reading a book or learning a set of maxims by heart that one gets

to know anything of morality, that it belongs to life, and must be

learned in the daily practice of life. English and Christian writers

no doubt might have told me the same thing. But I am not sure that

their words would have gone as much home as Aristotle’s did. I might

have thought that it was their business, part of their profession, to

utter those stern maxims, and to hold up such lofty ideals of

conduct.” And what adds immense force to Aristotle’s preaching,

especially with young men, is the feeling that they have here to do

not only with a non-professional preacher but with a thorough

gentleman, and a shrewd man of the world, the friend of princes, and

of great statesmen and mighty captains. It is seldom indeed that young

men in the heat of their blood and the glow of their fancy will listen

with much attention to sermons of any kind, even from the best

preachers; but if they will not receive the word of warning from such

a prophet as Aristotle they will at least have no excuse for sneering

either at the doctor or the doctrine. In him they will find no

sarcastic Cynic, content with the negative pleasure of snarling from

his private kennel at the faults of men, instead of rising to help

their infirmities; no sickly devotee whose principal occupation

through the dreariness of the present life is to dream and maunder

about the glories of the future; no curious registrar of morbid frames

of mind or dainty nurse of unproductive sentiment. Such caricatures of

the spiritual man, {147} justly odious to the vigorous, generous, and

sanguineous temper of youth, may be found cropping out largely in the

histories both of philosophical and religious sectaries; but not a

hint of them appears in the thoroughly masculine, thoroughly manly,

and thoroughly healthy Ethics of Aristotle.

The corner-stone of Aristotle’s moral doctrine, as in that of

Socrates, lies in the single word λόγος, which, whether in its

internal side as Reason, or with its outer face as Discourse, was so

peculiarly the watchword of the Hellenic race. “The Greeks seek

after wisdom;” and wisdom, or σοφία, is in all cases the

result, and the only possible result, of the just exercise of

λόγος or reason. We shall not therefore expect to find in the

Stagirite any fundamental principle different from that on which the

moral doctrine of Socrates rests--nay, just as some of the most

characteristic maxims of the New Testament can be pointed out in, and

no doubt were actually borrowed from, the Old Testament, even so, and

in a much greater degree, was the ethical doctrine of Aristotle

borrowed in its great leading points from Socrates and Plato. This

borrowing, however, was not in the style of patchwork; it was an

affair of natural growth. What we find in Aristotle is not a new

ethical doctrine, but the emphasizing and systematizing of certain

important aspects of an old doctrine. Now the aspect which Aristotle

strongly emphasizes as the starting-point of his ethical teaching is

the τέλος and the ἀγαθόν. All men profess to have some object after

which they strive in their life and by their deeds; no man in this

world, as Goethe says, can safely live at random: the ship that sails

at random will be wrecked {148} even in a calm, and the man who lives

at random will be ruined without the help of any positive vice. What

then is it that men must propose to themselves as the τέλος, the

end, object, or purpose of their existence? Generally, all men profess

to be seeking for the ἀγαθόν, or the Good. The question,

therefore, which ethical science has to answer is, in the words of the

Westminster Catechism, _What is the chief end of man?_ What is the

ultimate aim and highest Good, the _summum bonum_, of which the

creature called Man is capable? How are we to discover this? Plainly

in the same way that we discover the chief good of any special kind of

man,--a man exercising any special professional function. What is the

_summum bonum_ of a flute-player? Of course to play the flute, and to

play the flute well; of a soldier, to fight well; of a shoemaker, to

make good shoes; of a brewer, to brew good beer; of a fowler, to snare

birds; and of an angler, to hook fish. The chief end, therefore, of

any creature is found by discovering his natural work or business in

the world,--for all things are full of labour, and a man’s duty is

always some kind of work. As, then, there is a special work for the

flute-player or the fowler, which determines his chief good, so, if we

are to find the chief end of man, we must put our finger on some

general work or business, which belongs to all men as men, and not as

engaged in special occupations and practising particular arts. How is

this work found? Of course by fixing our attention on the

differentiating element in the human creature. The differentiating

element in birds is wings, in fish fins, in worms rings. By this

differentiation, stamped on every creature by the absolute

dictatorship of {149} Nature, the destiny and the duty, the privilege

and the glory, of each type of organized existence is inevitably

determined. The creature has nothing to do in the matter but to

recognise and to obey; unreasoning creatures unconsciously and

blindly, choice. The proper work of man, therefore, can lie only in

what in him is most distinctively human; not therefore of course in

any function of the merely vegetative life which he has in common with

the plant; nor again in any function of the merely sensuous life,

which he enjoys in common with, oxen; but in the exercise of that

faculty which he alone possesses, and which alone stamps him as

distinctively human, viz., REASON. The work of a man, accordingly,

and the chief end of all men, will be an energizing of the soul,

according to reason, or not without reason; and a life according to

reason will be good, and the chief good; and not only so, but it must

also be the pleasure, and the highest pleasure, of the reasonable

being who leads such a life; for the pleasure of every creature lies

in acting freely and without hindrance according to its distinctive

nature; and as horses are the pleasure of the rider, and views of the

landscape painter, so good actions are the pleasure of good men, and

reasonable actions the delight of all who live by the use of reason;

so much so indeed, that he cannot even claim to be numbered amongst

good men who, besides doing good deeds, does not likewise rejoice in

doing such deeds. Charity given with an unwilling hand is not charity;

it is a boon extorted.

This statement taken almost literally from the first eight chapters of

the first book of the _Ethics_, will, it is hoped, make the moral

attitude of Aristotle {150} sufficiently intelligible. He does not

say, with Bentham and the modern utilitarians, “Look round about you

for what is pleasurable; and that which affords pleasure to you, and

to the greatest possible number of creatures with whom you are

socially connected, is your duty;” but he looks about to find your

distinctive excellence, your peculiar faculty among all

creatures,--“Exercise that,” he says, “and you fulfil your

destiny, and attain your chief good. As for pleasure, that you will

have also, not as an amulet hung about your neck, but in the very

necessity of your energy exercised according to your special nature.

Cultivate what is noblest in you, and you cannot fail to find what is

most agreeable. The doing of this, however, is by no means so simple

a matter as in the mere abstract statement might appear. It is the

business of a man, no doubt, to act reasonably, that is virtuously,

just as much as it is the business of a bee to bag honey; but it is a

much easier thing for the bee to suck honey from the flowers than for

a man to force fragrant deeds from the stuff that daily life presents.

How is this? The difficulty lies in the compound nature of man: a

nature not compound only, but composed of parts of which one is found

to be often strangely at variance with the others; so much so, indeed,

that while reason is the distinctive faculty of man, and to act

reasonably is at once his safety, his happiness, and his glory, he

bears within himself likewise a principle of unreason, an

ἄλογον opposed to his λόγος,--a principle in the normal

state of man altogether dependent and servile, but which, as things

are, has a strong tendency to rebel, assert an unruly independence,

and even cast down from his throne {151} the lawful regent of the

soul. This, the reader will remark, is exactly the doctrine of St.

Paul, with regard to the contrariety of Flesh and Spirit, in the

eighth chapter of the Romans, and expressed in almost the same terms.

The exact words of Aristotle are: “_There appear manifestly in human

beings some strong natural tendencies different from reason, and not

only different, but fighting with and resisting reason_.” But this

remarkable peculiarity in the complex creature Man does not in the

least change the nature of human good; it only adds to it another

element which makes it in the end more glorious--the element of

resistance, struggle, victory, and triumph,--of course always with the

necessary alternative of possible feebleness, cowardice, and defeat.

And the same fact,--the same original sin, as our theologians term

it,--nicely considered, raises a noticeable question about the origin

of laws and moral obligation; that old question so often discussed by

the Sophists, and argued, as we have seen, by Socrates, in his

discourse with Hippias, whether right and wrong exist by nature or by

institution, φύσει as they expressed it, or νόμῳ; and the

answer given to this question by the Stagirite, characterized by his

usual good sense, is that, while the determination of right and wrong

is not a matter of arbitrary, compulsory imposition, according to the

selfish theory of Hobbes, but lies deeply rooted in the innermost

recesses of human nature, it is nevertheless true that it is the

nature of man, more perhaps than of any other animal, to require

training and discipline to bring out what is in him; and that virtue,

in fact, is not virtue till the inborn impulses towards excellence

have been fostered and strengthened by those social {152} appliances

which lie in the very primary conditions of human life. We are made

virtuous, therefore, neither by nature, nor contrary to nature, nor

independently of nature, but we _grow_ virtuous by repeated acts of

living according to reason, as we learn to see by using our eyes.

Virtue is, in fact, a habit;[152.1] and as one fit of drunkenness does

not make a man a drunkard, so one act of generosity does not make a

generous man, and the whole roll of the virtues practised only once or

twice, however completely, does not make a virtuous man. Hence the

immense importance of education, which other animals may dispense

with, but not man, and on which, accordingly, both Plato and Aristotle

insist, as the one thing needful for the well-being, whether of the

individual or of society. The existence of innate tendencies towards

the Good does not in the least imply that human nature in its early

stages may be safely left to itself. These good tendencies may be

counteracted by opposite tendencies; they may be overwhelmed by

adverse circumstance; they may be extinguished; and experience proves

that they not seldom are extinguished.

Having laid this sure foundation in the differentiating element of

man, the philosopher might naturally have proceeded to prove that,

assuming man to be naturally a social animal, and widowed with those

instincts which make social organization necessary to his normal

existence, any application of reason to social existence, that is,

every assertion of practical reason in a creature so constituted, is

what we call {153} right, and every omission to assert it, or direct

assertion of the contrary, is what we call wrong. A right action is an

action according to the real constitution of things, which reality it

is the business of reason to discern; a wrong act is an act in

contravention of the real constitution of things, and can be performed

only when reason is undeveloped or asleep, or by some violent impulse

or blind illusion led astray: it is an act insulated, contumacious,

and rebellious, issuing necessarily in confusion and chaos and ruin;

for no single unit in a complex whole can assert its mere capricious

independent self in practical denial of the totality to which it

belongs, without producing discomfort at first, and ultimately being

crushed by the firm compactness of the mighty machinery which it has

recklessly dared to disturb. How this might have been demonstrated in

detail the reader of the preceding discourse on Socrates cannot be

ignorant; but however much it lay in his way, the Stagirite in his

Nicomachean treatise did not choose to enter upon this theme. For this

procedure he may have had two sufficient reasons; for, in the first

place, he may have thought that view of the matter lay too obviously

in the whole scheme and handling both of Plato and Socrates, to be

susceptible of much novelty at his hands; and in the second place, he

may have considered such a demonstration, however cogent in a book, to

be less practically useful than some test of right and wrong, which he

might be able to formulate. And in the test which he hits upon, as we

shall presently see, it is quite evident that practical utility rather

than theoretic invulnerability was his main object; and this is

precisely what, in consistency at once with the nature of the {154}

subject, and his own introductory observations, he was directly led to

do. His test was simply this, that virtue, or right conduct, is

generally found in the mean between two extremes; for though there may

be the same difficulty in pronouncing about the quality of particular

actions, sometimes, as there is in pronouncing about the state of

bodily health in any individual, yet, upon a broad view of both cases,

nothing seems more obvious and more certain than that the unhealthy

condition, whether of body or soul, is chiefly indicated by some

deficiency or excess. In other words, virtue is a medium, a balance, a

proportion, a symmetry, a harmony, a nice adjustment of the force of

each part in reference to the calculated action of the whole. Now, it

will at once be seen that this principle is not put forth as anything

new; its truth rather consists in its antiquity, and in the

deep-rooted experience of all human individuals and all human

associations. It is a principle which forms part of the proverbial

wisdom of all peoples; and the Greeks especially from the oldest times

were strong on this point. Μηδὲν ἄγαν--μέτρον ἄριστον--παντὶ μέσω τὸ

κράτος θεὸς ὤπασεν--were maxims familiar to every Greek ear long before

Aristotle; and in the realm of speculation, the ἀριθμός, or

_number_ of Pythagoras, when applied to morals, really meant nothing

else. So in the Proverbs of Solomon we find the well-known

utterances--“_Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient

for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it_.” And again:

“_Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise; why

shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou

foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy {155} time?_” And our

Shakespeare, whose plays are a grand equestrian march of all wisdom,

says to the same effect in his own admirable style--

“These violent delights have violent ends,

And in their triumph die: like fire and powder

Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey

Is loathsome in his own deliciousness,

And in the taste confounds the appetite:

Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;

Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”

What Aristotle enunciated therefore was merely the most commonplace

wisdom; and so much the better. Commonplace wisdom is the best kind of

wisdom for common needs and every-day occasions. It is too late in the

day now, and was too late in Aristotle’s time certainly, to be

discovering altogether new rules for keeping the consciences and the

stomachs of the human millions in good order. Things absolutely

necessary to healthy existence were necessarily known from the

earliest ages, unless indeed we imagine that the primeval man was

created in a state of physical and moral disease, that he might grope

and blunder his way into health, as some theorists assert that he

groped and blundered his way from a tiger into a moral being, and from

a monkey into a man. So far unquestionably, Henry Thomas Buckle was

right: there are no discoveries to be made in morals. We do not

discover the sun; we only recognise it when the clouds are blown and

the rain has exhausted itself. So it is in morals--in the light which

lighteth every man that cometh into the world. We do not discover

moral principles by a fingering induction, or in any other way; we

merely remove obstructions; we can apply the {156} bellows also and

blow the small spark into a mighty flame. Our endeavours therefore as

preachers, and as philosophers, like Aristotle, are not in vain. We

have much to do, if not in the way of discovering absolutely new

principles, certainly in a thousand and one ways of applying those

principles. A burning-glass when first invented did not discover the

sun; it utilized the sun. And in the same way the institution of every

new church or the establishment of every new school is an invention in

morals, though not a discovery of a new moral principle.

Sabbath-schools were a discovery in morals; Voluntary Churches were a

discovery in morals; Reform Bills were a discovery in morals. And in

the world of books, we must say also that the principle of the mean

asserted and systematically set forth in the Nicomachean Ethics was a

great discovery in moral philosophy. The discovery consisted in the

sagacity which seized, among a thousand others, a floating proverb, as

alone fit, or mainly fit, for being made the corner-stone of a

comprehensive canon of human conduct. To pick up a rough stone from

the road, and polish it, and set it in a ring, and carve upon it the

signature of the king’s imperial will, is no small achievement; and

this simile precisely appraises the merit of the Stagirite, in

reference to that old maxim μηδὲν ἄγαν, which we have just

quoted. He has stamped it with the authority of his own regal

intellect, in a manner appealing not less effectively to the analytic

habits of the scientific man, than to the broad views so dear to the

so-called practical man. And that he was grandly right in seizing upon

this rule of conduct, no person who has ever seriously applied,

himself to the wisdom of life, as to the one {157} thing needful, will

hare any difficulty in admitting. For there is hardly a man of any

self-knowledge who will not be willing to confess that the greatest

blunders he has made in the difficult game of life have arisen from

the neglect of this rule, as his most signal successes have sprung

from the observance of it. The attainment of this golden mean, indeed,

in one shape or another, is the constant problem of existence; and it

will be difficult to point out any defects of moral character which do

not arise either from a certain feebleness and deficiency of some

necessary practical energy, or from the exaggeration and

misapplication of virtues--a misapplication, be it observed, which

almost always proceeds from an excess; for as a mother is apt to have

her pet child, and an old maid her green parrot, her Skye terrier, or

her tortoise-shell cat, on which she spends the overflow of her

non-utilized sympathies, so every man is apt to have his pet virtue,

his idol excellence, on which he prides himself, and of which he is

fond of making a parade on all proper and improper occasions. It is

the excessive sway of the favourite affection that makes a man blind

to discern and weak to prevent its improper application. This is a

great truth--and somewhat of a comfortable truth, too; for to sin by

excess of good is always better than to offend from pure viciousness;

and man is upon the whole (notwithstanding the floating lies of the

hour, and the Devil’s Paradise in New York) a blundering rather than

a diabolical creature. The importance of Aristotle’s rule arises

from the fact that it is a regulative principle of universal

application; and in this way it may well be taken in the left hand,

along with the golden rule in the right {158} hand, “Do unto others

as ye would that they would do unto you;” for this sacred sentence

is founded on a just, delicate, and broad sympathy, and belongs rather

to the emotional element--the moral steam, so to speak--of our nature,

which, to avoid great perils, must always be associated with the

regulative principle of the mean, or something to that effect. These

two famous maxims indeed may, for practical purposes, be regarded as

complementary of each other. For persons in whom the sympathetic

emotions predominate are often deficient in the regulative faculty;

while those whose power of regulation is great have sometimes little

to regulate, and like a great commander with few soldiers, make a very

poor appearance in the battle-field. In the struggle of life, the man

whose sympathetic unselfish impulses are strong will perhaps find more

benefit from the constant reference to Aristotle’s mean than even to

the Scriptural golden rule; while the well-tempered Aristotelian will,

on the other hand, find it for his advantage to inquire whether the

even pace at which he goes is not as much owing to the dullness of the

charger’s blood as to the skill with which the rider wields the

rein. For there is no single maxim in morals that will conduct a man

through all practical difficulties without the consideration of some

other maxim qualifying it, and perhaps, for the nonce, giving it a

flat contradiction; as I have known a gentleman who confessed to me

that by nothing had he been led into so many serious blunders as by

the indiscriminate application of this very text, “Do unto

others,” etc.; for, being a man of a peculiar idiosyncrasy, and not

having learned that the golden rule applies only to that which we

{159} hold in common with our fellow-men, and not to those points on

which we differ, he was constantly led into a course of behaviour

towards certain persons, meant by him as a great kindness, but taken

as a serious offence. While he wished not to be troublesome, he was

considered to be neglectful; while he abstained from mentioning

certain subjects for fear of rousing painful feelings he was accused

of coldness and indifference; while he meant to be frank and

confiding, he was met with a rebuff that he was rude and impertinent.

All this shows how little mere preaching and parading of general

maxims has to do with the difficult task of the formation of

character; and no writer deserves greater praise for having gravely

enunciated this truth than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. In

order fully to realize the value of the Aristotelian mean in the

conduct of life, we may follow the method of the great moralist

himself, and cull a few examples at random for its verification. We

shall take three virtues--courage, truthfulness, self-esteem--and see

how distinctly they stand out each as the middle-point of two vicious

extremes. That courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness does

not require to be told: but what a wide field of operation does this

triad open to us, while we proceed to realize it in education, and in

the conduct of public affairs, and in the events of life! What a nice

judgment is required to know at what exact point the too much and the

too little commences, where the right way swerves into an error of

which the consequences may be incalculable! For the mean point is

variable; and the hesitation which would be prudence in one person, or

on one occasion, is cowardice in another. A sailor sailing without a

{160} chart among blind reefs and strong currents--such as occur

everywhere in the Shetland seas--can scarcely be too cautions; with a

soldier, a bold dash into a difficulty with a fearlessness which can,

scarcely be distinguished from rashness is sometimes the nearest road

to a brilliant success. And as good amusements are a mimicry of life,

there is a moment at bowls, or croquet, or backgammon, or even

deliberate whist, when the fortune of a whole game may depend on a

move which at other times would be either the most stupid ignorance or

the most reckless folly. The wisdom of life, considered as a battle,

depends at every moment on the skill to know when to advance and when

to retreat, when to dash on with the spear, and when to crouch behind

the shield; to know this moment is to know the just mean between

rashness and cowardice, which the Greeks by a very significant name

called manhood (ἀνδρειότης) or courage. Take another virtue. Of all

commodities in the world, the most difficult to deal with is truth.

If, indeed, all men went about the streets, like Socrates, in search

of nothing but truth, and thanking everybody most fervidly for any

contribution to his stock of it, even in the most disagreeable shape,

truthfulness would be an easy virtue; as easy for a human being, one

might imagine, as for a quick fountain to spout water, and for an

eager fire to spit flame. But we all know it is not so--rather quite

otherwise, for truth is an article to which, except in so far as

particular truths may happen to prop up their prejudices, to flatter

their vanity, and to inflate their conceit, many persons have serious

objections. To fling it in their face is to insult them; to put it

down their throats, {161} even with a silver spoon and sugar-candy, a

difficult operation. Hence, in the conduct of life, the great

importance of not speaking too much truth, lest we frighten people,

and not speaking too little, lest we learn altogether to live upon

lies. In mixed society, on account of the extreme sensitiveness of all

sorts of vain and self-important persons, the rule is generally

adopted of speaking as little truth as possible--that is, as little

serious truth about important matters; for truth about trifles will

discompose no one. But this conventional reticence is by no means the

μεσότης which a reasonable compliance with the Aristotelian

rule in this case would require; for though a surplus of truth is sure

to make society uncomfortable, and a deluge of it makes it impossible,

a great deficiency will certainly make it tame and stupid; and this is

the extreme to which, in this country, we have lately been drifting

with a gentle, but not the less a dangerous, current. Even in our

pulpits we find a sort of cowardice sometimes formally enthroned, and

a tame coldness set up as the standard in a place where, above all

others, an indiscreet fervour might occasionally be allowed to pass

for full cousin to the greatest excellence. Take again, self-esteem,

which is partly an instinct, partly with wise men the result of that

self-knowledge which long and varied experience ought always to

produce. This is a moral mean perhaps even more difficult to strike

than truthfulness; for in speaking, or rather not speaking, the truth,

the principal difficulty a wise man has to deal with is the weakness

of a brother; whereas, in estimating himself, the wisest man is

constantly liable to be bribed by that love of self which, indeed, is

the necessary root of {162} our vitality, but never can be the

blooming crown of our glory. In reference to this quality, the general

tendency of the world is towards overestimate; most persons are apt to

measure too highly the value of their own particular strong point, and

to under-estimate, or altogether misprize, that of their neighbours;

as a gentleman in the month of August scouring the moors in triumph

with a gun will be apt to think himself a much more sublime character

than a poet lying lazily on a heather brae, and spinning out pretty

fancies to the tune of a brown burn that eddies lazily round an old

granite boulder; while the rhymer, on the other hand, thinks it a

daintier occupation to sympathize quietly with feathered life than to

take it away with powder and shot. So it is with us all, women as well

as men--

“If a fair girl has but a pretty face,

She has the wit to know it.”

And there is no reason why she should not know it. If a woman does not

know her points, according to a high authority, she cannot even dress

well; only, experience has proved that the less men and women think

about their strong points, except, of course, when they are dressing,

the better; for there is no more certain way of committing suicide on

the higher moral nature than by falling in love with ourselves. In

reference to this matter, therefore, it may be thought that the other

and less common extreme is the more safe--it is better to think too

lowly of ourselves than too highly. And it is a fact, capable of being

proved from a hundred biographies, that the greatest men have been the

least given to self-glorification; that modesty, as is commonly said,

{163} is the invariable accompaniment of genuine power, while forward

conceit, and empty inflation, and boastful exhibition of all kinds,

are the natural characteristics of the young, the superficial, and the

small. The under-estimate of self often found in connexion with the

highest genius, especially in the early period of its experiments,

arises naturally from the high ideal of perfection, by the

contemplation of which excellence grows. No young man who puts a few

well-adjusted and well-toned figures together on a piece of canvas can

know, and certainly ought never to imagine, that he carries Raphael

and Michael Angelo, and something better than both perhaps, in his

bosom. But though this be true, I do not know whether I have not seen

more sad mistakes made in life by persons who were rather depressed by

too little than elevated by too much self-esteem. I have sometimes

thought that the conceit so natural to young men is given to them by a

gracious provision as a superfluity that is sure to be pruned off. The

world is constantly employed in pulling down outrageous conceit; but

when a poor fellow starts in the hot race of life, afflicted with that

disease which the Greeks call δυσωπία, or _difficult-facedness_--that

is, so modest as not to be able to look a fellow-being in the face--I

must confess, though I have a kindly feeling towards a person so

deficient which I never can have to the smart and pert self-conscious

mannikin, I feel that the defect of the one is a much greater

misfortune, and a malady much more difficult to cure, than the excess

of the other. With some persons, and indeed whole families, the

tendency to underrate their own capacity acts like a positive taint in

the blood; it cuts the wing from hope, dulls the nerve {164} of

aspiration, and palsies the arm of action. It makes an honest man

useless where God has put him, and opens the door for a dishonest man

with a little natural confidence to do badly what the honest man for

sheer lack of confidence has not been able to do at all. The man of

defective self-esteem thus commits two great wrongs--he wrongs

himself, because he allows himself to be shunted out of his natural

sphere, and becomes a hindrance where he might have been a help; and

he wrongs the public, which lacks both the insight and the leisure to

drag modest merit from its den and to look with an unwinking eye on

the juggling glamoury of the bold pretender.

But it is not only in the phases of individual character and the

experiences of personal life that the validity of the Aristotelian

standard of well-being is strongly asserted. In every sphere of

existence through the various drama of the cosmos, we find the same

principle in operation. And we may, without qualification, broadly

pronounce that the world is a κόσμος, an ordered and garnished

whole, only in so far as it is held together by the harmonizing law of

the mean; otherwise it jerks asunder, and through violent excess bolts

into chaos. Take what we call Health, for instance; what is it but the

rhythmical medium, of normal pulse between the excess of fever and the

defect of feebleness? which two extremes, as the common saying is,

necessarily meet; for they are both equally removed from healthy life,

and sisters-uterine to death and dissolution. Then, again, what is

Beauty? A power which all feel, but few can define; neither shall I

attempt to define it now. But one thing at least in reference to it is

quite plain, that it is always a medium {165} betwixt two extremes,

or, what comes to the same thing, a marriage of extremes. For by such

a marriage, as we see in the commonest processes of chemical action, a

mean product is produced of a comparatively mild and innocuous

character. The corrosive acid or alkali is annihilated and a neutral

salt comes to view. Exactly so in works of nature or art on which the

imagination can pleasantly dwell. No extreme is beautiful. The extreme

of force overwhelms; the extreme of gentleness enfeebles and

enervates. Therefore, to make a handsome man, we must borrow a few

tricks of grace from the female; and to make a woman who shall be more

than an animated rose or primrose, we must find her infected with a

certain dose of firmness and energy from the male. A mere masculine

creature, composed altogether of the extreme of strength and force, is

disagreeable, and often unbearable; a mere feminine creature in the

extreme of delicacy, however finely tinted with the “_dolce mistura

di rosa e di ligustro_,” which Ariosto lauds, if she is capable only

of a gentle smile and a soft caress, very soon becomes tiresome. She

is the extreme of the mere woman, and, like a cooing turtle-dove, soon

satiates; and at the apparition of such an unfeathered pigeon we yawn,

as from the fully-developed unmitigated male bear we shrink. But it is

in the great movements of the social world--in the rise and fall of

stock and commercial speculations--no less than in the slow changes

and violent revolutions of Churches and States, that the operation of

the Aristotelian mean is most strikingly exemplified. Moderation,

indeed, both in Church and State, and on ’Change, is the one great

condition of safety--no proposition {166} in Euclid is more certain

than this: but though this be the wisdom of government and of trade,

it is a wisdom which political, commercial, and ecclesiastical

adventurers in all ages have been slow to learn; and in public life we

constantly meet with persons who act and speak as if they believed

that the triumph of an extreme view is ever the triumph of right, and

that the well-being of communities consists in the unlimited sway of

one party and the complete annihilation of all others. And it may be

said also, that, notwithstanding all the warnings of centuries of

bloody experience, the man or the party that takes the strong

one-sided violent view has, on critical occasions, the best chance to

succeed. Wisdom in the days of Solomon lifted up her voice in the

streets, and was not heard. It is even so now. The streets are not the

place for wisdom. Wisdom requires calm reflection; but the streets are

full of hurry and bustle. Aristotle had a serene contempt for the

multitude, and the multitude have an instinctive aversion to

Aristotle. When you bring a multitude of men together to be harangued,

violent and extreme opinions pronounced in the strongest language are

apt to be the most popular. A one-sided view taxes thought less; a

one-sided speech flatters an ignorant audience, who are capable only

of one idea--at least only of one at a time--and who delight to hug

themselves in the fancy that there is no other idea in the universe.

And the natural leader of a multitude so affected is not, of course,

your man of many thoughts, your Aristotle, your Shakespeare, your

Goethe, but your well-packed, self-contained, little man, full of

bottled fire impatient to burst forth, who marches from his cradle to

his grave capable only {167} of one aspect of things, and who, if the

notion by which he is governed happens to jump with the humour of the

time, shall become the demagogue of the hour, or, if circumstances

favour, the dictator of the age. When, indeed, we consider the

undeniable fact that great social changes are generally effected

through the agency of excited multitudes and highly stimulated

parties, we shall not be surprised at the result so often exhibited in

history. That result shows bloody civil wars instead of peaceful

arrangement; faction instead of patriotism; and an oscillation between

feverish extremes, instead of a well-calculated balance of social

forces. The revolutions and reforms which fill the most interesting

pages of history teem with examples of this kind. These revolutions

and reforms are of two kinds--remedial and constructive, or

disintegrating and destructive; and the history of both equally

illustrates the hopelessness--perhaps it were more correct to say the

impossibility--of expecting wisdom and moderation to perform a

prominent part in the management of the congregated millions of

diverse and hostile-minded men under the passionate influences that

accompany organic change. For these things are generally done in the

manner of a battle: parties get heated; the blood is up; first ink is

shed in oceans, then gall, then blood; and who expects moderation from

men with partisan pens or poignards in their hands, and carrying on a

systematic trade in all sorts of misrepresentation, slander, and lies?

We read sometimes, indeed, of a whole people having by a happy

accident found out their wisest man--as in the notable example of

SOLON--and oligarchs and democrats voluntarily submitting themselves

to {168} him as a just and legal arbiter. The result in this case, as

we read, was what might have been expected. The wise man produced a

wise constitution. The contending claims of the adverse parties were

adjusted with moderation; and a mingled polity, presenting a just

medium between oligarchy, the cold selfishness of the few, and

democracy, the overbearing insolence of the many, was the result. But

nothing human is permanent; and the next changes did not proceed so

comfortably. The democracy, inflated with their military successes at

Marathon and Salamis, would tolerate no check; their Areopagus, or

House of Lords, was shorn of all influence; the extravagant ambition

of their popular assemblies was fooled to the top of its bent by the

unprincipled brilliancy of adventurers like Alcibiades; the constant

necessity of maintaining political influence by flinging sops to a

greedy multitude produced, as we see in America at the present hour, a

corruption of public morals, and a deterioration of the character of

public men, against which all patriotic remonstrances were weak:

faction assumed the helm; venality became law; and at the moment of

danger, when the young Macedonian snake might yet have been crushed,

there was found only one honest man among the noisy haranguers of the

Pnyx. And to him they listened only when it was too late. Thus, by the

excess of democratic polity fostered by Pericles, the insolence of

democratic ambition spurred by Alcibiades, the languor that followed

the over-exertion of the Peloponnesian War, and the corruption that

belongs to every extreme form of government, Athens forfeited her

short lease of brilliant liberty, and became a slave for more than two

thousand years. A similar scene {169} was exhibited in the Roman

Forum, which, however, I must refrain from painting out in detail

here. Suffice it to say that, so long as a moderate balance between

patricians and plebeians was maintained, the Aristocratic Republic of

Rome prospered at home and conquered abroad; but no sooner had the

democracy, by the Hortensian law of B.C. 286, asserted the right of

acting alone in legislative measures, without the co-operation of the

Roman House of Lords (that is, the Senate), than the seed of

destruction was sown. The two parties were now planted face to face on

independent ground; two masters in the same house claimed equal power;

the peaceful balance became a battle-field; assassinations in the

Forum were the harbingers of butcheries in protracted dramas of civil

slaughter; violence was followed by exhaustion; and on the bloody

steps of a democratic Tribunate the armed nursling of the democracy

mounted the throne of universal despotism. So the public life of

Ancient Rome ended with faction and a native military monarchy, as

that, of Greece in faction and subjection to a foreign power. There

are some people of a happy innocence of mind who believe that we in

modern times, by the help of Christianity and schoolmasters, may haply

escape all these evils and flourish in a green immortality on the

earth, if not under present circumstances exactly, at least by and by

with the help of manhood suffrage, ballot-boxes, unbearded

politicians, and a few other democratic imaginations. I am sorry to

say that I do not in the least share in these anticipations: only

under one condition is it possible that modern States should escape

the disintegrating process which annihilated the constitutions of

Ancient Greece and {170} Rome--they must study moderation; they must

be converted to the doctrine of Aristotle; otherwise they must perish.

That in free constitutions public affairs should be managed by the

oscillations of opposing parties is necessary and natural: the

annihilation of parties is possible only with the prostration of

liberty; but the eternal truth still remains, that if parties will not

acknowledge certain wise limitations, but push their hostility to

extremes, the preservation of national liberty is impossible. If, when

organic reforms are necessary, the wise and moderate men of all

parties will unite together to make such changes as will satisfy the

just demands of new claimants, without destroying the equally just

rights of the old, then, so far as political forces of corruption are

concerned, the durability of a constitution may be looked upon as

secured; but if the parties, instead of working for a patriotic

purpose, are more concerned for the momentary success of a

parliamentary manœuvre than for the ultimate triumph of a great

principle--if, instead of wisely and courageously confronting a

violent and unreasonable clamour and quashing outrageous folly with

statesmanlike firmness, they waver, and flinch, and yield, and even

condescend to the base game (practised in ancient Rome and mediæval

Florence) of outbidding one another in cowardly concessions to an

untempered multitude--in this case, neither Christianity nor

schoolmasters can save any modern State from perdition, either on this

or on the other side of the Atlantic. For there is not one law of

morality for the individual and another for public men, but they are

both the same; and it is not so much the form of government as the

tone of political morality, {171} and the character of politicians,

that saves or ruins a State. If in any country the management of

public affairs falls into the hands of men who make a trade of

politics, and employ an organized machinery of violence, and lies, and

intrigue, for the purpose of getting into power; and if they consider

power valuable, not for the purpose of moderating popular passions and

exposing popular delusions, but for keeping their party in place by

spreading full sails to the popular breeze, then that country is

already in the hands of the destroying Siva, and no constitution can

save it. Political wisdom is not to be expected from men who enter the

game of public life with the recklessness of professional gamblers;

and that army will scarcely be looked to for noble achievements in the

field which, with Selfishness for its god, has chosen Cunning for its

captain, and planted Cowardice for a guard.

In these last remarks we have wandered beyond the strict bounds of the

present essay into the domain of Politics, and the Art of Government,

but not without design; for the _Politics_ and the _Ethics_ are with

the Stagirite only two parts of the same work; as indeed with the

Greeks generally, personal ethics were always conceived of in

connexion with the State, in the same way that with thorough and

consistent Christians the fruits of social virtue cannot be divorced

from the root of theological faith of which they are the consummation.

And whoever studies the great treatise on the Art of Government with

that care, which more than any other work of antiquity its weighty

conclusions demand, will not fail to observe that the key-note to the

whole political system lies in that μεσότης, or just mean,

{172} which is the prominent principle of the _Ethics_. But this by

the way. What remains for us now, in order that the modern thinker may

have a full view of the attitude of Aristotle as a moral philosopher,

is that we exhibit him discoursing in his own person on some one of

those types of social character, which in his third and fourth books

he has so skilfully analysed. For this purpose we shall choose the

section on μεγαλοψυχία or _great-mindedness_, a chapter eminently

characteristic both of the writer and of the people to whom he

belonged, and presenting also, one of the most striking of those

contrasts between the attitude of Hellenic and that of Christian

ethics, which it is one object of the present volume to set forth. The

Chapter is the third of Book IV.

“That great-mindedness has reference to something great is plain

from the name; let us inquire therefore, in the first place, to what

great things it refers; and here it is of no consequence whether we

talk formally of the moral habitude itself, or of the person who

possesses that habitude. Now, a great-minded person is one who esteems

himself worthy of great things, being in fact so worthy; for the man

who claims for himself what he does not deserve is a fool; but in

virtue there can be nothing foolish or unintelligent. This therefore

is the great-minded man. For though a person’s estimate of himself

should be just, for example, if, being worthy of little consideration,

he esteems himself accordingly, such an one we call sober-minded, but

not great-minded; for without a certain magnitude there is no

greatness of soul, just as beauty demands a certain stature, and

little people may indeed be pretty and well-proportioned, but they

{173} are never called beautiful.[173.1] On the other hand, the man

who esteems himself worthy of great things, being not so worthy, we

call pretentious and conceited; though not every one who

over-estimates in some degree his real worth is justly charged with

conceit. And in the opposite extreme to this, the man who claims less

than he deserves is small or mean-minded, whether his real desert be

something great or something moderate; and he remains small-minded

also, if, while he is worthy of little, he rates himself at less. But

the greatest offender in this case is he who, being worthy of great

things, nevertheless considers himself worthy of little or of nothing;

for how deep might such a man’s self-esteem have fallen if he had

been really as devoid of moral desert as even with so much real merit

he rates himself? Now the great-minded man, in respect of comparative

magnitude, seems to stand at an extreme, but in respect of

self-estimate he is the just mean; for his estimate of himself falls

neither within nor beyond the mark of truth, while the others fail on

the one side by excess, and on the other by defect. Further, the man

who deems himself worthy of great things, being so worthy, of course

deems himself worthy of the greatest things, and of one thing,

whatever that be, pre-eminently great. What then do we mean when we

say that a man is worthy, that he may justly claim great things or

small things? We use {174} this language always in reference to

something external. And the greatest of external things is that which

we pay to the gods, and that which men in the highest situations

chiefly desire, and for which among men there arises the most noble

struggle of the most noble. This, of course, is honour; for honour is

the greatest of external goods. It is in reference therefore to

demonstrations of honour and dishonour that the great-minded man

comports himself as a wise man ought. And indeed this is a point which

requires only to be stated, not argued; for it is manifest that

great-minded men everywhere are spoken of as being great-minded in

reference to honour; for it is honour above all things of which truly

great men think themselves worthy, and that in the measure of their

desert. But the small-minded man is deficient both in relation to

himself and in relation to the dignity that belongs to the

great-minded, while the conceited man no doubt sins by excess in

reference to his own merit, but not in reference to the high estimate

of himself justly entertained by the great-minded man.

“Again, it is obvious that the great-minded man, if he is worthy of

the greatest consideration, must be not only a good man, but one of

the very best; for always the better a man is the greater is his

desert, and the best man alone may claim the most. The really

great-minded man, therefore, must be good; or rather, let us say that

to be entitled to the praise of great-mindedness a man must be great

in all virtue. Least of all, certainly, is it consistent with the

character of a great-minded man to droop his crest at the face of

danger and run away, or to do any act of injustice; for why should a

man do anything dishonourable, {175} to whom even the greatest things

in the world are small measured by the estimate that he entertains of

his own worth? And, indeed, it is quite ridiculous to imagine a man of

genuine great-mindedness who is not at the same time a virtuous man.

For, if he is bad he is certainly not worthy of honour, honour which

is the reward of virtue, and is given only to the good. Let us say

therefore that great-mindedness is a sort of crown and blossom of the

virtues, for it elevates all the virtues, and without them it cannot

exist. For which reason it is a hard thing to be truly great-minded;

for this elevation of the soul is not possible without general

goodness. We see therefore that it is with demonstrations of honour

and dishonour that the great-minded man is principally concerned; and

it is characteristic of him, that when great honour is done him by

good persons, he is pleased, but always moderately, because on every

occasion he only gets what he deserves, or perhaps less; because, in

fact, virtue never can receive a proper equivalent for itself in the

shape of anything external: he will not, however, reject any such

offering, however inferior to his merits, because he will consider

that people have given the best they had to give. But the honour that

he receives for small services, and from persons of no excellence, he

will hold very cheap; for it is not of such respect that he considers

himself worthy. Exactly similar is his relation to dishonour; for

disrespect in no kind can under any circumstances have reference to

him. But honour, though the principal, is not the only external thing

that belongs to the great-minded man; money, and power, and

prosperity, and their opposites, affect him also in their proper place

and degree, in such a {176} fashion always as that he shall neither be

much elevated by their presence, nor much depressed by their absence.

For not even the absence of that honour, which he justly claims, will

he allow to affect his peace very deeply, much less the withholding of

that wealth and that influence, which are desired by the good only for

the sake of the honour which they bring with them. He therefore who

can look calmly on the absence of that which is most desired, will not

break his heart because he finds himself destitute of those things

which are valued only as they contribute to the attainment of that

desire. For this reason it is that men of a high self-esteem are apt

to appear proud and contemptuous. It would appear also that the

accidents of birth and fortune contribute in some degree towards

great-mindedness; for persons of noble birth are considered worthy of

honour, and persons of great influence, and wealthy persons; and there

is a superiority belonging to all such persons, which brings a certain

amount of honour along with it that is grateful to a good man. And it

cannot be denied that such things have a tendency to engender a

certain loftiness of soul, for they are never without honour from some

quarter. Nevertheless the only thing really deserving of honour is

virtue, though where virtue is conjoined with these external

advantages it will always command a latter share of public respect.

But those who possess such external advantages without virtue have

neither any reason for thinking themselves deserving of great

consideration, nor are they properly called great-minded; for it is

only of those who possess virtue that such things can be predicated.

On the contrary, those who possess such external goods are apt to

{177} become insolent and haughty. For without virtue it is by no

means easy to bear prosperity well; and, not bearing it well, such

persons are apt to conceit themselves better than their neighbours,

and to despise them, while themselves spend their lives at random, and

do what chance throws in their way. For they imitate the manner of the

great-minded man, not being like him in soul; and, while they do

nothing on which a lofty estimate of themselves might justly be

founded, they find it easy to usurp an apparent superiority by looking

down upon their fellow-men. This superiority belongs of right to the

great-minded man, for his opinion of himself is founded on reality;

but these, as chance may have thrown some exceptional tag of

distinction in their way, despise their neighbours. Again, the

great-minded man is not fond of running petty risks, nor indeed is it

by rash and hasty ventures in any shape that he would catch a small

breath of honour; but when a great risk presents itself then he

willingly confronts danger, and spares not his life, as deeming life

secondary when higher interests are concerned. Moreover, in reference

to benefits, he is more given to confer than to receive them; for he

who confers a benefit always stands in a position of superiority,

while he on whom it is conferred feels inferior. And when a benefit is

conferred on him, he will repay it in larger measure; for thus the

benefactor will seem to be put under a new obligation, having received

more than he gave. He seems also to have a more wakeful memory for

those on whom he has conferred benefits, than for those from whom he

has received them; for the person benefited is always inferior to the

person conferring the benefit, {178} and the great-minded man always

wishes to feel superior. And he does not hear of benefits conferred on

him with the same pleasure as benefits which he has conferred on

others, for which reason in Homer Thetis does not commemorate her

services to Jove; and in the same way the Spartans do not speak to the

Athenians of the benefits they have conferred on Athens, but of those

which they have received. It is also a mark of the great-minded man

that he will either not ask a favour at all, or do it with difficulty;

on the other hand, he is ready to do a service to all, but with this

difference, that while he bears himself loftily to those high in

position and worldly fortune, he is of easy access and condescending

to the common man; for not to bow before the mighty is not easy, and

is possible only to those who are inspired by a high sense of personal

worth, whereas with common men any man may plant himself on an

equality; and indeed even a little excess of pride in the presence of

the proud is never ignoble, while to be haughty to those beneath us is

always the sign of a vulgar mind, and a person of low ambition, as

when one makes a vaunt of strength before the weak. Again, the

great-minded man will not be the first to seize on honourable

distinctions when offered, but he will gladly let others precede,

being slow and backward, except, indeed, where a difficult thing is to

be done, and a very rare honour achieved; generally he will meddle

with few things, but what he does put his hand to must be something

great and nameworthy. We may further note that he will be open and

above ground, whether in his hatreds or his friendships, for to

conceal a man’s feelings is usually a sign of fear. And in every

case he will {179} be found more concerned for truth than for opinion,

and he will shrink as little from an act as from a word that the

occasion may demand; for his contempt of small men and small things

makes him indifferent as to results, and inspires him with a lofty

confidence. For which reason also he is much given to speak the truth,

except indeed when he wishes to speak ironically; and it is his delight

to use a little humorous self-concealment or self-misrepresentation

when he speaks in mixed company. Neither is he able easily to adapt

himself to another person, unless, indeed, that person be a special

friend, for in this ready adaptability there is generally implied

something slavish, as we see that flatterers have always something

menial in their character, and low persons more readily condescend to

flatter. Nor again is the great-minded man much given to wonder; for

to him there is nothing great. As little is he apt to store up a

grudge; for a great-minded man will not remember trifles, especially

petty offences, but will rather overlook them. Nor will he indulge in

personal remarks of any kind, speaking little either about himself or

others; for neither is he careful to be praised, nor pleased that

others should be blamed; as little is he given to laud other people,

or, on the other hand, to speak evil of others, even when they are his

enemies, except perhaps occasionally, when insolence requires to be

chastised. Further, about necessary evils, or vexatious trifles, he is

not the man to make many bewailings and beseechings, for to behave in

this manner a man must take these things much to heart, which he never

can. And oftentimes he will be found preferring what is noble and

brings no profit, to what is useful and gainful, {180} for his

self-dependence stands out the more thereby. Finally, as to his

appearance and manner, it will be noted that the great-minded man is

slow in his movements, that his voice is deep, and his discourse

weighty, for it is not natural that one who is not anxious about small

matters should be in a hurry, or that a person should be very much

excited on common occasions, to whom common matters are unimportant.

Such then is the great-minded man. The two extremes between which he

represents the mean, are, as we have said, the man of low

self-estimate and the man of large pretensions and conceit. Now these

two are manifestly not bad men, for they are not evil-doers; they only

miss the ideal of what is true and noble in character. For the man who

thinks meanly of himself, depriving himself of what he might justly

claim as his due, though not a vicious man, suffers under a great vice

of character, the defect of not knowing himself; for had he known

himself, he would certainly have desired to possess the good things to

which he has a natural right. At the same time such a person is not to

be called foolish; he is only backward. But such a misprision of

one’s self, however removed from flagrant viciousness, has

unquestionably a tendency to deteriorate the character; for the

imagination of their own unworthiness, by which these persons are

possessed, not only cheats them of valuable external good which might

naturally have fallen to their lot, but it causes them also to retire

from many noble and excellent spheres of usefulness, and to shrink

from the performance of most excellent actions. A conceited man, on

the other hand, is both foolish and self-ignorant, and exhibits

himself in a more {181} ridiculous fashion to the general eye; for

deeming himself fit for some honourable office, the moment he appears

in public his inefficiency is exposed, and he parades himself in showy

dress, and puts himself into attitudes, and wishes that the whole

world should take notice of his good fortune, and claims honour as

rightfully due to him for such display. There is, however, a greater

opposition between the man who thinks meanly of himself and the

great-minded man, than between this man and the conceited, person; for

in truth the mean abnegation of self, the cheapening of a man’s

capabilities, and despair of all lofty achievement, is of more common

occurrence amongst the masses, and on account of its negative

character leads in the practical warfare of life to more sad

results.”[181.1]

For commenting on some of the remarkable characteristics of this

chapter, hovering as they do so delicately on the slippery border that

separates a justifiable pride from a salutary humility, more apt

occasion may present itself in our next discourse; in the meantime it

will serve more the purpose of the present inquiry to ask, whether

there may not be grave objections to a system of ethics based on the

mere prudential calculation of a mean? and whether, granting this

calculation to be wise and salutary, so far as it goes, it may not

require to be strengthened by some stronger force than any which the

philosophy of the Stagirite supplies? Now, in the first place, here

there is one very common class {182} of objections to the doctrine of

the μέσον, to which we hope the whole tone of our previous

remarks has already supplied the answer. “_Is it possible_,” some

one has often asked, “_to possess too much love? Of what good

emotion is envy the exaggeration? Can any modification of spite be

virtuous? Can any mere deficiency of the quality of truth account for

the viciousness of a positive lie?_” To some of these objections

Aristotle has himself supplied the answer; but the best general answer

to all is their impertinence as bearing upon a treatise which does not

pretend to set forth a curious definition, proof against every subtle

objection, but only to supply a useful practical rule. Whosoever

accepts the _Nicomachean Ethics_ in the practical spirit in which it

was written, will soon find, perhaps by no very pleasant experience,

that there is nothing more common among good people than to have too

much even of such a rare virtue as Christian love; for there is too

much always when there is too much for the occasion, or too much for

the use or the abuse that is likely to be made of it; and unchastened

generosity, inconsiderate philanthropy, and indiscriminate kindness

are certainly not among the rarest of social faults. Equally certain

is it that some of our most odious vices are only the despotic

usurpations of certain instincts, natural and healthy in themselves,

and when acting under the habitual check of other instincts equally

natural, so as to preserve the just balance of a harmonious whole.

Thus envy is merely the natural fruit of a salutary rivalry, when a

generous sympathy is wanting; it is an odious state of mind arising

out of an excess of rivalry on the one hand, and a deficiency of

sympathy on the other. Let this style {183} of objections therefore

pass. But a more serious deficiency in the Aristotelian doctrine seems

to reveal itself, when it is said, This morality is merely prudential

and calculating; it regulates but it does not move: it supplies the

pilot at the helm, and gives him a curiously marked compass to steer

by, but it leaves the ship in a stagnant ocean without wind and

without tides. Now there is something in this objection, but not

nearly so much as appears on the surface. Aristotle certainly is not

an emotional writer; he does not stir the affections; he will never be

a favourite with women, or with poets, or with evangelists, or with

any person--and this is by no means the worst sort of person--whose

head requires to be reached through his heart. It is not true,

however, that he commits the folly of attempting to construct a

steam-engine without steam. He finds the steam there, and the engine

too ready-made, and his only object is to supply a regulator, because

a regulator is the chief thing wanted. Whatever an unprincipled or

paradoxical Sophist here and there might assert, neither Aristotle nor

any notable philosopher of antiquity ever thought it necessary, to

commence his moral theory with a systematic controversion of the

Hobbesian doctrine that man is naturally all selfish, a creature that

if left without policemen and executioners would necessarily grow up

into a mere intellectual tigerhood. Aristotle assumed, and expressly

asserts, that man is naturally a social animal; the social instincts

which form families and friendships, clanships and nationalities,

being among the most marked peculiarities of his complex nature:

these instincts, he knew well, constantly exist in sufficient and more

{184} than sufficient strength; they bubble out like streams from the

mountain side, which require only a calculated control to make them

useful; they are the luxuriant overgrowth of a rich soil, which

demands, not the stimulus of a strong manure, but the check of a wise

pruning-hook. That this was Aristotle’s view is quite plain; for he

not only believes in nature generally, as opposed to the institutions

and conventions (νόμος) so much in favour with the Sophists, but

he devotes two whole books to what he calls Φιλία, a word

commonly translated “friendship,” but which in the Nicomachean

Ethics is used in the widest sense to designate all the social

sympathies and feelings implanted in man by Nature, with the relations

springing therefrom; and this part of his work, as Grant well

observes, is treated with a depth and moral earnestness that makes the

reader feel the supreme importance attached to it by its illustrious

author.[184.1] Aristotle therefore is not to be blamed for ignoring

the great motive powers of moral life; he only does not directly

address them; it was not his vocation; he was no poet, no apostle; and

even without poets and apostles, Nature, he might well imagine, was

always strong enough for that part of the business. But even without

the fervid wheels of passion there lies in the Aristotelian

philosophy, at least for a certain class of noble minds, a driving

power of the most approved efficiency. That driving power is simply

the love of perfection. “_Be ye therefore perfect, even as your

Father which is in heaven is perfect_.” To live in the most

excellent way, according {185} to the true excellence of man, is the

constant ideal of an Aristotelian philosopher. And so long as the

lofty consciousness of this ideal bears him up, he requires neither

whip nor spur to incite him to continue in a virtuous career. He acts

in the true spirit of the poet when he says--

“I would do all that best beseems a man;

Who would do less is none.”