Note 184.1 — ARISTOTLE.

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 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 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 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 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—