ARISTOTLE.

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 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 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.”

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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.

“I would do all that best beseems a man; Who would do less is none.”

Or, as Burns has it in the well-known lines,—

“The fear o’ hell’s the hangman’s whip To haud the wretch in order; But whaur you feel your honour grip, Let that aye be your border.”

This is not a bad driving power by any means in the world, as things go. True, it may not make a man a missionary, but it will keep him out of the mire, and teach him sooner to die than to do a base action. Certainly it will not confine him to the performance of virtues of mere prudential calculation.

So far well. But there is another view which, if we honestly take, we shall find it impossible to acquit the Aristotelian morals of a very serious defect. This defect is the want of the religious element. In saying this I do not mean to assert that God—or rather the gods—are not mentioned from beginning to end of his famous book; they are alluded to in several places, but merely in the form of a passing remark, as a pedestrian with a long day’s journey before him may pick up a primrose from a moist bank, or a fragrant orchis from a dry brae, and fling it away. Now, there is nothing more nobly characteristic of Christianity than this, that piety is identical with morality; that faith and works—not ritual, or ceremonial, or externally imposed works at all, of course, but genuine works of moral fervour and moral firmness—are one; stand to one another, at least, as the root does to the flower, or the fruit of a wholesome plant, of which not the root but the fruit is the valuable part. That this is the only true and philosophical relation of the two great moral potencies no thinker will deny. Or, to take another simile, which will suit equally well: Every arch must have its keystone; and the keystone of every solid doctrine of ethics, as of every close compacted system of speculative philosophy, is God. That there is a great defect here in the Aristotelian ethics is plain. A man might as well write a treatise on the Affections without mention of reverence, as set forth a system of morals without mention of God. As the discipline of a well-ordered family implies the recognition of the father as the great source from which the family flows—as the prime power by which it is regulated—so a treatise on human ethics implies a chapter on human piety, or rather a pervading soul of human piety, without which all other chapters want their highest inspiration. And in this view the Aristotelian author of the “Magna Moralia” is wrong in blaming Plato for mingling up the doctrine of Virtue with discussions on the Absolute Good—that is, God. It is important to inquire what was the cause of this defect. That the subject was not altogether ignored by our philosopher is plain from the single sentence of allusion in Book viii. 12. 5; and, indeed, that a man of such reach of intellect should by mere accident or carelessness have omitted such an important factor in all moral calculations seems in the highest degree improbable; but so far is the idea of God from giving any colour to his system of Moral Philosophy, that the very occurrence of the phrase, θεραπεύειν τὸν θεόν, in the last section of the Eudemian Ethics, has been justly adduced by Grant among the many proofs of the inauthenticity of that treatise. That Aristotle was a theist is certain, both from other places of his voluminous writings, and specially from a famous passage in the Metaphysics which has lately been brought forward with due prominence by the noble-minded Bunsen in his great work, God in History; it seems impossible, indeed, for such a profound thinker as Aristotle to be an atheist, because, as Schleiermacher well remarks, “Philosophy cannot inquire into the totality of things, without at the same time inquiring into their unity, and as the totality of things is the world, so the unity of things is God;” or, as Spinoza has it in one of his propositions—“Quicquid est in Deo est, et nihil sine Deo neque esse neque concipi potest.” But it is one thing to be a theist as a matter of speculative belief, and another thing to be a man of devout temper and pious practice. And herein, if I mistake not, lies the real cause of the defect in the Ethics now under consideration. For if Aristotle had been a man of any fervour of religious sentiment, he had two courses before him with regard to the Greek religion, neither of which he has followed—he might either, like his great master Plato, or Xenophanes of Colophon among the pre-Socratic thinkers, have attacked the Homeric theology, and shown how its general tendency and some of its most distinctive features were inconsistent with a pure and elevated morality, or, like Socrates, Xenophon, Pindar, Æschylus, Plutarch, and many other far-sighted and large-hearted men, he might have taken Jove as the impersonated Providence of Hellenic piety, and, allowing the immoral deities quietly to drop, shown how all the highest qualities of the moral nature of man are collected and concentrated in the supreme sovereign of gods and men. In the one case, he would have shown his zeal for true religion by his zealous iconoclasm of false gods; in the other case, he might have shown a still nobler form of piety by his kindly exhibition of the soul of good in things evil. But he did neither of these things; and the conclusion plainly is that the omission arose from a defect in his mental constitution, which curtailed the reverential faculties of their fair proportions. From all which we learn a most important lesson: that the analytic work of the mere understanding, even when practised by a Titan like Aristotle, is an inadequate method of reaching the highest form of vital reality, or, to use the words of Grant, it forces even the greatest minds at times to degenerate into a sort of smallness; and, generally, that mere intellectual culture never can of itself produce a complete and healthy manhood—never can elaborate for a human soul that rich blood which then only appears when the watery element of the understanding is thoroughly permeated by the red particles of the moral and emotional nature. So true is it, to use St. Paul’s language, that “knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth;” and of charity there is no perfect form except that reverential recognition of the common fatherhood of God, and the common brotherhood of man, which we call religion. Let this want of the devout element, therefore, stand strongly pronounced as a defect in the ethical system of Aristotle; he is less than Socrates and Plato as a moralist, principally because he is less in this. Omitting from his calculation one element of that Nature which is stronger than all philosophies and wider than all churches, he has so far failed; and the failure of such a man in such a field should teach our modern philosophers, physical, mechanical, and utilitarian, to beware of following his example.