CHAPTER VPRACTICAL PHILOSOPHYHitherto we have been concerned with the speculative branches of knowledge, we have now to turn to practice. Practice, too, is an activity of thought, but an activity which is never satisfied by the process of thinking itself. In practice our thinking is always directed towards the production of some result other than true thought itself. As in engineering it is not enough to find a solution of the problem how to build a bridge over a given river capable of sustaining a given strain, so in directing our thought on the problems of human conduct and the organisation of society we aim at something more than the understanding of human life. In the one case what we aim at is the construction of the bridge; in the other it is the production of goodness in ourselves and our fellow-men, and the establishment of right social relations in the state. Aristotle is careful to insist on this point throughout his whole treatment of moral and social problems. The principal object of his lectures on conduct is not to tell his hearers what goodness is, but to make them good, and similarly it is quite plain thatPoliticswas intended as a text-book for legislators. In close connection with this practical object stands his theory of the kind of truth which must be looked for in ethics and politics. He warns us against expecting precepts which have the exact and universal rigidity of the truths of speculative science. Practical science has to do with the affairs of men's lives, matters which are highly complex and variable, in a word, with "what may be otherwise." Hence we must be content if we can lay down precepts which hold good in the main, just as in medicine we do not expect to find directions which will effect a cure in all cases, but are content with general directions which require to be adapted to special cases by the experience and judgment of the practitioner. The object of practical science then is to formulate rules which will guide us in obtaining our various ends. Now when we consider these ends we see at once that some are subordinate to others. The manufacture of small-arms may be the end at which their maker aims, but it is to the military man a mere means tohisend, which is the effective use of them. Successful use of arms is again the end of the professional soldier, but it is a mere means among others to the statesman. Further, it is the military men who use the arms from whom the manufacturer has to take his directions as to the kind of arms that are wanted, and again it is the statesman to whom the professional soldiers have to look for directions as to when and with what general objects in view they shall fight. So the art which uses the things produced by another art is the superior and directing art; the art which makes the things, the inferior and subordinate art. Hence the supreme practical art is politics, since it is the art which uses the products turned out by all other arts as means to its ends. It is the business of politics, the art of the statesman, to prescribe to the practitioners of all other arts and professions the lines on which and the conditions under which they shall exercise their vocation with a view to securing the supreme practical end, the well-being of the community. Among the other professions and arts which make the materials the statesman employs, the profession of the educator stands foremost. The statesman is bound to demand certain qualities of mind and character in the individual citizens. The production of these mental and moral qualities must therefore be the work of the educator. It thus becomes an important branch of politics to specify the kind of mental and moral qualities which a statesman should require the educator to produce in his pupils.It is this branch of politics which Aristotle discusses in hisEthics. He never contemplates a study of the individual's good apart from politics, the study of the good of the society. What then is the good or the best kind of life for an individual member of society? Aristotle answers that as far as the mere name is concerned, there is a general agreement to call the best life,Eudaimonia, Happiness. But the real problem is one of fact. What kind of life deserves to be called happiness? Plato had laid it down that the happy life must satisfy three conditions. It must be desirable for its own sake, it must be sufficient of itself to satisfy us, and it must be the life a wise man would prefer to any other. The question is, What general formula can we find which will define the life which satisfies these conditions? To find the answer we have to consider what Plato and Aristotle call the work or function of man. By the work of anything we mean what can only be done by it, or by it better than by anything else. Thus the work of the eye is to see. You cannot see with any other organ, and when the eye does this work of seeing well you say it is a good eye. So we may say of any living being that its work is to live, and that it is a good being when it does this work of living efficiently. To do its own work efficiently is the excellence or virtue of the thing. The excellence or virtue of a man will thus be to live efficiently, but since life can be manifested at different levels, if we would know what man's work is we must ask whether there is not some form of life which canonlybe lived by man. Now the life which consists in merely feeding and growing belongs to all organisms and can be lived with equal vigour by them all. There is, however, a kind of life which can only be lived by man, the life which consists in conscious direction of one's actions by a rule. It is the work of man to live this kind of life, and his happiness consists in living it efficiently and well. So we may give as the definition of human well-being that it is "an active life in accord with excellence, or if there are more forms of excellence than one, in accord with the best and completest of them"; and we must add "in a complete life" to show that mere promise not crowned by performance does not suffice to entitle man's life to be called happy. We can see that this definition satisfies Plato's three conditions. A vigorous and active living in a way which calls into play the specifically human capacities of man is desirable for its own sake, and preferable to any other life which could be proposed to us. It too is the only life which can permanently satisfy men, but we must add that if such a life is to be lived adequately certain advantages of fortune must be presupposed. We cannot fully live a life of this kind if we are prevented from exercising our capacities by lack of means or health or friends and associates, and even the calamities which arise in the course of events may be so crushing as to hinder a man, for a time, from putting forth his full powers. These external good things are not constituents of happiness, but merely necessary conditions of that exercise of our own capacities which is the happy life.In our definition of the happy life we said that it was one of activity in accord with goodness or excellence, and we left it an open question whether there are more kinds of such goodness than one. On consideration we see that two kinds of goodness or excellence are required in living the happy life. The happy life for man is a life of conscious following of a rule. To live it well, then, you need to know what the right rule to follow is, and you need also to follow it. There are persons who deliberately follow a wrong rule of life--the wicked. There are others who know what the right rule is but fail to follow it because their tempers and appetites are unruly--the morally weak. To live the happy life, then, two sorts of goodness are required. You must have a good judgment as to what the right rule is (or if you cannot find it out for yourself, you must at least be able to recognise it when it is laid down by some one else, the teacher or lawgiver), and you must have your appetites, feelings, and emotions generally so trained that they obey the rule. Hence excellence, goodness, or virtue is divided into goodness of intellect and goodness of character (moral goodness), the wordcharacterbeing used for the complex of tempers, feelings, and the affective side of human nature generally. In education goodness of character has to be produced by training and discipline before goodness of intellect can be imparted. The young generally have to be trained to obey the right rule before they can see for themselves that it is the right rule, and if a man's tempers and passions are not first schooled into actual obedience to the rule he will in most cases never see that it is the right rule at all. Hence Aristotle next goes on to discuss the general character of the kind of goodness he calls goodness of character, the right state of the feelings and passions.The first step towards understanding what goodness of character is is to consider the way in which it is actually produced. We are not born with this goodness of tempers and feelings ready made, nor yet do we obtain it by theoretical instruction; it is a result of a training and discipline of the feelings and impulses. The possibility of such a training is due to the fact that feelings and impulses are rational capacities, and a rational capacity can be developed into either of two contrasted activities according to the training it receives. You cannot train stones to fall upwards, but you can train a hot temper to display itself either in the form of righteous resentment of wrong-doing or in that of violent defiance of all authority. Our natural emotions and impulses are in themselves neither good nor bad; they are the raw material out of which training makes good or bad character according to the direction it gives to them. The effect of training is to convert the indeterminate tendency into a fixed habit. We may say, then, that moral goodness is a fixed state of the soul produced by habituation. By being trained in habits of endurance, self-mastery, and fair dealing, we acquire the kind of character to which it is pleasing to act bravely, continently, and fairly, and disagreeable to act unfairly, profligately, or like a coward. When habituation has brought about this result the moral excellences in question have become part of our inmost self and we are in full possession of goodness of character. In a word, it is by repeated doing of right acts that we acquire the right kind of character.But what general characteristics distinguish right acts and right habits from wrong ones? Aristotle is guided in answering the question by an analogy which is really at the bottom of all Greek thinking on morality. The thought is that goodness is in the soul what health and fitness are in the body, and that the preceptor is for the soul what the physician or the trainer is for the body. Now it was a well-known medical theory, favoured by both Plato and Aristotle, that health in the body means a condition of balance or equilibration among the elements of which it is composed. When the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry in the composition of the human frame exactly balance one another, the body is in perfect health. Hence the object of the regimen of the physician or the trainer is to produce and maintain a proper balance or proportion between the ingredients of the body. Any course which disturbs this balance is injurious to health and strength. You damage your health if you take too much food or exercise, and also if you take too little. The same thing is true of health in the soul. Our soul's health may be injured by allowing too much or too little play to any of our natural impulses or feelings. We may lay it down, then, that the kind of training which gives rise to a good habit is training in the avoidance of the opposite errors of the too much and the too little. And since the effect of training is to produce habits which issue in the spontaneous performance of the same kind of acts by which the habits were acquired, we may say not merely that goodness of character is produced by acts which exhibit a proper balance or mean, but that it is a settled habit of acting so as to exhibit the same balance or proportion. Hence the formal definition of goodness of character is that it is "a settled condition of the soul which wills or chooses the mean relatively to ourselves, this mean being determined by a rule or whatever we like to call that by which the wise man determines it."There are several points in this definition of the mean upon which moral virtue depends of which we must take note unless we are to misunderstand Aristotle seriously. To begin with, the definition expressly says that "moral goodness is a state of will or choice." Thus it is not enough that one should follow the rule of the mean outwardly in one's actions; one's personal will must be regulated by it. Goodness of character is inward; it is not merely outward. Next we must not suppose that Aristotle means that the "just enough" is the same for all our feelings, that every impulse has a moral right to the same authority in shaping our conduct as any other. How much or how little is the just enough in connection with a given spring of action is one of the things which the wise man's rule has to determine, just as the wise physician's rule may determine that a very little quantity is the just enough in the case of some articles of diet or curative drugs, while in the case of others the just enough may be a considerable amount. Also the right mean is not the same for every one. What we have to attain is the mean relatively toourselves, and this will be different for persons of different constitutions and in different conditions. It is this relativity of the just enough to the individual's personality and circumstances which makes it impossible to lay down precise rules of conduct applicable alike to everybody, and renders the practical attainment of goodness so hard. It is my duty to spend some part of my income in buying books on philosophy, but no general rule will tell me what percentage of my income is the right amount for me to spend in this way. That depends on a host of considerations, such as the excess of my income above my necessary expenses and the like. Or again, the just enough may vary with the same man according to the circumstances of the particular case. No rule of thumb application of a formula will decide such problems. Hence Aristotle insists that the right mean in the individual case has always to be determined by immediate insight. This is precisely why goodness of intellect needs to be added to goodness of character. His meaning is well brought out by an illustration which I borrow from Professor Burnet. "On a given occasion there will be a temperature which is just right for my morning bath. If the bath is hotter than this, it will be too hot; if it is colder, it will be too cold. But as this just right temperature varies with the condition of my body, it cannot be ascertained by simply using a thermometer. If I am in good general health I shall, however, know by the feel of the water when the temperature is right. So if I am in good moral health I shall know, without appealing to a formal code of maxims, what is the right degree,e.g.of indignation to show in a given case, how it should be shown and towards whom." Thus we see why Aristotle demands goodness of character as a preliminary condition of goodness of intellect or judgment in moral matters. Finally, if we ask bywhatrule the mean is determined, the answer will be that the rule is the judgment of the legislator who determines what is the right mean by his knowledge of the conditions on which the well-being of the community depends. He then embodies his insight in the laws which he makes and the regulations he imposes on the educators of youth. The final aim of education in goodness is to make our immediate judgment as to what is right coincide with the spirit of a wise legislation.The introduction of the reference to will or choice into the definition of goodness of character leads Aristotle to consider the relation of will to conduct. His main object is to escape the paradoxical doctrine which superficial students might derive from the works of Plato, that wrong-doing is always well-meaning ignorance. Aristotle's point is that it is the condition of will revealed by men's acts which is the real object of our approval or blame. This is because in voluntary action the man himself is the efficient cause of his act. Hence the law recognises only two grounds on which a man may plead, that he is not answerable for what he does. (1) Actual physical compulsion byforce majeure. (2) Ignorance, not due to the man's own previous negligence, of some circumstances material to the issue. When either of these pleas can be made with truth the man does not really contribute by his choice to the resulting act, and therefore is not really its cause. But a plea of ignorance of the general laws of morality does not excuse. I cannot escape responsibility for a murder by pleading that I did not know that murder is wrong. Such a plea does not exempt me from having been the cause of the murder; it only shows that my moral principles are depraved.More precisely will is a process which has both an intellectual and an appetitive element. The appetitive element is our wish for some result. The intellectual factor is the calculation of the steps by which that result may be obtained. When we wish for the result we begin to consider how it might be brought about, and we continue our analysis until we find that the chain of conditions requisite may be started by the performance of some act now in our power to do. Will may thus be defined as the deliberate appetition of something within our power, and the very definition shows that our choice is an efficient cause of the acts we choose to do. This is why we rightly regard men as responsible or answerable for their acts of choice, good and bad alike.From the analysis of goodness of character, we proceed to that of goodness of intellect. The important point is to decide which of all the forms of goodness of intellect is that which must be combined with goodness of character to make a man fit to be a citizen of the state. It must be a kind of intellectual excellence which makes a man see what the right rule by which the mean is determined is. Now when we come to consider the different excellences of intellect we find that they all fall under one of two heads, theoretical or speculative wisdom and practical wisdom.Theoretical wisdom is contained in the sciences which give us universal truths about the fixed and unalterable relations of the things in the universe, or, as we should say, which teach us the laws of Nature. Its method is syllogism, the function of which is to make us see how the more complex truths are implied in simpler principles. Practical wisdom is intelligence as employed in controlling and directing human life to the production of the happy life for a community, and it is this form of intellectual excellence which we require of the statesman. It is required of him not only that he should know in general what things are good for man, but also that he should be able to judge correctly that in given circumstances such and such an act is the one which will secure the good. He must not only know the right rule itself, which corresponds to the major premiss of syllogism in theoretical science, but he must understand the character of particular acts so as to see that they fall under the right rule. Thus the method of practical wisdom will be analogous to that of theoretical wisdom. In both cases what we have to do is to see that certain special facts are cases of a general law or rule. Hence Aristotle calls the method of practical wisdom the practical syllogism or syllogism of action, since its peculiarity is that what issues from the putting together of the premisses is not an assertion but the performance of an act. In the syllogism of action, the conclusion, that is to say, the performance of a given act, just as in the syllogism of theory, is connected with the rule given in the major premiss by a statement of fact; thuse.g.the performance of a specific act such as the writing of this book is connected with the general rule what helps to spread knowledge ought to be done by the conviction that the writing of this book helps to spread knowledge. Our perception of such a fact is like a sense-perception in its directness and immediacy. We see therefore that the kind of intellectual excellence which the statesman must possess embraces at once a right conception of the general character of the life which is best for man, because it calls into play his specific capacities as a human being, and also a sound judgment in virtue of which he sees correctly that particular acts are expressions of this good for man. This, then, is what we mean by practical wisdom.So far, then, it would seem that the best life for man is just the life of co-operation in the life of the state, which man, being the only political animal or animal capable of life in a state, has as his peculiar work, and as if the end of all moral education should be to make us good and efficient citizens. But in theEthics, as elsewhere, the end of Aristotle's argument has a way of forgetting the beginning. We find that there is after all a still higher life open to man than that of public affairs. Affairs and business of all kinds are only undertaken as means to getting leisure, just as civilised men go to war, not for the love of war itself, but to secure peace. The highest aim of life, then, is not the carrying on of political business for its own sake, but the worthy and noble employment of leisure, the periods in which we are our own masters. It has the advantage that it depends more purely on ourselves and our own internal resources than any other life of which we know, for it needs very little equipment with external goods as compared with any form of the life of action. It calls into play the very highest of our own capacities as intelligent beings, and for that very reason the active living of it is attended with the purest of all pleasures. In it, moreover, we enter at intervals and for a little while, so far as the conditions of our mundane existence allow, into the life which God enjoys through an unbroken eternity. Thus we reach the curious paradox that while the life of contemplation is said to be that of our truest self, it is also maintained that this highest and happiest life is one which we live, not in respect of being human, but in respect of having a divine something in us. When we ask what this life of contemplation includes, we see from references in thePoliticsthat it includes the genuinely æsthetic appreciation of good literature and music and pictorial and plastic art, but there can be no doubt that what bulks most largely in Aristotle's mind is the active pursuit of science for its own sake, particularly of such studies as First Philosophy and Physics, which deal with the fundamental structure of the universe. Aristotle thus definitely ends by placing the life of the scholar and the student on the very summit of felicity.It is from this doctrine that mediæval Christianity derives its opposition between thevita contemplativaandvita activaand its preference for the former, though in the mediæval mind the contemplative life has come to mean generally a kind of brooding over theological speculations and of absorption in mystical ecstasy very foreign to the spirit of Aristotle. The types by which the contrast of the two lives is illustrated, Rachael and Leah, Mary and Martha, are familiar to all readers of Christian literature.+The Theory of the State+.--Man is by nature a political animal, a being who can only develop his capacities by sharing in the life of a community. Hence Aristotle definitely rejects the view that the state or society is a mere creature of convention or agreement, an institution made by compact between individuals for certain special ends, not growing naturally out of the universal demands and aspirations of humanity. Mankind, he urges, have never existed at all as isolated individuals. Some rudimentary form of social organisation is to be found wherever men are to be found. The actual stages in the development of social organisation have been three--the family, the village community, the city state. In the very rudest forms of social life known to us, the patriarchal family, not the individual, is the social unit. Men lived at first in separate families under the control of the head of the family. Now a family is made up in its simplest form of at least three persons, a man, his wife, and a servant or slave to do the hard work, though very poor men often have to replace the servant by an ox as the drudge of all work. Children when they come swell the number, and thus we see the beginnings of complex social relations of subordination in the family itself. It involves three such distinct relations, that of husband and wife, that of parent and child, that of master and man. The family passes into the village community, partly by the tendency of several families of common descent to remain together under the direction of the oldest male member of the group, partly by the association of a number of distinct families for purposes of mutual help and protection against common dangers. Neither of these forms of association, however, makes adequate provision for the most permanent needs of human nature. Complete security for a permanent supply of material necessaries and adequate protection only come when a number of such scattered communities pool their resources, and surround themselves with a city wall. The city state, which has come into being in this way, proves adequate to provide from its own internal resources for all the spiritual as well as the material needs of its members. Hence the independent city state does not grow as civilisation advances into any higher form of organisation, as the family and village grew into it. It is the end, the last word of social progress. It is amazing to us that this piece of cheap conservatism should have been uttered at the very time when the system of independent city states had visibly broken down, and a former pupil of Aristotle himself was founding a gigantic empire to take their place as the vehicle of civilisation.The end for which the state exists is not merely its own self-perpetuation. As we have seen, Aristotle assigns a higher value to the life of the student than to the life of practical affairs. Since it is only in the civilised state that the student can pursue his vocation, the ultimate reason for which the state exists is to educate its citizens in such a way as shall fit them to make the noble use of leisure. In the end the state itself is a means to the spiritual cultivation of its individual members. This implies that the chosen few, who have a vocation to make full use of the opportunities provided for leading this life of noble leisure, are the real end for the sake of which society exists. The other citizens who have no qualification for any life higher than that of business and affairs are making the most of themselves in devoting their lives to the conduct and maintenance of the organisation whose full advantages they are unequal to share in. It is from this point of view also that Aristotle treats the social problem of the existence of a class whose whole life is spent in doing the hard work of society, and thus setting the citizen body free to make the best use it can of leisure. In the conditions of life in the Greek world this class consisted mainly of slaves, and thus the problem Aristotle has to face is the moral justifiability of slavery. We must remember that he knew slavery only in its comparatively humane Hellenic form. The slaves of whom he speaks were household servants and assistants in small businesses. He had not before his eyes the system of enormous industries carried on by huge gangs of slaves under conditions of revolting degradation which disgraced the later Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, or the Southern States of North America. His problems are in all essentials much the same as those which concern us to-day in connection with the social position of the classes who do the hard bodily work of the community.Much consideration is given in thePoliticsto the classification of the different types of constitution possible for the city-state. The current view was that there are three main types distinguished by the number of persons who form the sovereign political authority, monarchy, in which sovereign power belongs to a single person; oligarchy, in which it is in the hands of a select few; democracy, in which it is enjoyed by the whole body of the citizens. Aristotle observes, correctly, that the really fundamental distinction between a Greek oligarchy and a Greek democracy was that the former was government by the propertied classes, the latter government by the masses. Hence the watchword of democracy was always that all political rights should belong equally to all citizens, that of oligarchy that a man's political status should be graded according to his "stake in the country." Both ideals are, according to him, equally mistaken, since the real end of government, which both overlook, is the promotion of the "good life." In a state which recognises this ideal, an aristocracy or government by the best, only the "best" men will possess the full rights of citizenship, whether they are many or few. There might even be a monarch at the head of such a state, if it happened to contain some one man of outstanding intellectual and moral worth. Such a state should be the very opposite of a great imperial power. It should, that its cultivation may be the more intensive, be as small as is compatible with complete independence of outside communities for its material and spiritual sustenance, and its territory should only be large enough to provide its members with the permanent possibility of ample leisure, so long as they are content with plain and frugal living. Though it ought not, for military and other reasons, to be cut off from communication with the sea, the great military and commercial high road of the Greek world, it ought not to be near enough to the coast to run any risk of imperilling its moral cultivation by becoming a great emporium, like the Athens of Pericles. In the organisation of the society care should be taken to exclude the agricultural and industrial population from full citizenship, which carries with it the right to appoint and to be appointed as administrative magistrates. This is because these classes, having no opportunity for the worthy employment of leisure, cannot be trusted to administer the state for the high ends which it is its true function to further.Thus Aristotle's political ideal is that of a small but leisured and highly cultivated aristocracy, without large fortunes or any remarkable differences in material wealth, free from the spirit of adventure and enterprise, pursuing the arts and sciences quietly while its material needs are supplied by the labour of a class excluded from citizenship, kindly treated but without prospects. Weimar, in the days when Thackeray knew it as a lad, would apparently reproduce the ideal better than any other modern state one can think of.The object of thePoliticsis, however, not merely to discuss the ideal state but to give practical advice to men who might be looking forward to actual political life, and would therefore largely have to be content with making the best of existing institutions. In the absence of the ideal aristocracy, Aristotle's preference is for what he calls Polity or constitutional government, a sort of compromise between oligarchy and democracy. Of course a practical statesman may have to work with a theoretically undesirable constitution, such as an oligarchy or an unqualified democracy. But it is only in an ideal constitution that the education which makes its subject a good man, in the philosopher's sense of the word, will also make him a good citizen. If the constitution is bad, then the education best fitted to make a man loyal to it may have to be very different from that which you would choose to make him a good man. The discussion of the kind of education desirable for the best kind of state, in which to be a loyal citizen and to be a good man are the same thing, is perhaps the most permanently valuable part of thePolitics. Though Aristotle's writings on "practical" philosophy have been more read in modern times than any other part of his works, they are far from being his best and most thorough performances. In no department of his thought is he quite so slavishly dependent on his master Plato as in the theory of the "good for man" and the character of "moral" excellence. No Aristotelian work is quite so commonplace in its handling of a vast subject as thePolitics. In truth his interest in these social questions is not of the deepest. He is, in accordance with his view of the superiority of "theoretical science," entirely devoid of the spirit of the social reformer. What he really cares about is "theology" and "physics," and the fact that the objects of the educational regulations of thePoliticsare all designed to encourage the study of these "theoretical" sciences, makes this section of thePoliticsstill one of the most valuable expositions of the aims and requirements of a "liberal" education.All education must be under public control, and education must be universal and compulsory. Public control is necessary, not merely to avoid educational anarchy, but because it is a matter of importance to the community that its future citizens should be trained in the way which will make them most loyal to the constitution and the ends it is designed to subserve. Even in one of the "bad" types of state, where the life which the constitution tends to foster is not the highest, the legislator's business is to see that education is directed towards fostering the "spirit of the constitution." There is to be an "atmosphere" which impregnates the whole of the teaching, and it is to be an "atmosphere" of public spirit. The only advantage which Aristotle sees in private education is that it allows of more modification of programme to meet the special needs of the individual pupil than a rigid state education which is to be the same for all. The actual regulations which Aristotle lays down are not very different from those of Plato. Both philosophers hold that "primary" education, in the early years of life, should aim partly at promoting bodily health and growth by a proper system of physical exercises, partly at influencing character and giving a refined and elevated tone to the mind by the study of letters, art, and music. Both agree that this should be followed in the later "teens" by two or three years of specially rigorous systematic military training combined with a taste of actual service in the less exhausting and less dangerous parts of a soldier's duty. It is only after this, at about the age at which young men now take a "university" course, that Plato and Aristotle would have the serious scientific training of the intellect begun. ThePoliticsleaves the subject just at the point where the young men are ready to undergo their special military training. Thus we do not know with certainty what scientific curriculum Aristotle would have recommended, though we may safely guess that it would have contained comparatively little pure mathematics, but a great deal of astronomy, cosmology, and biology.With respect to the "primary" education Aristotle has a good deal to say. As "forcing" is always injurious, it should not be begun too soon. For the first five years a child's life should be given up to healthy play. Great care must be taken that children are not allowed to be too much with "servants," from whom they may imbibe low tastes, and that they are protected against any familiarity with indecency. From five to seven a child may begin to make a first easy acquaintance with the life of the school by looking on at the lessons of its elders. The real work of school education is to begin at seven and not before.We next have to consider what should be the staple subjects of an education meant not for those who are to follow some particular calling, but for all the full citizens of a state. Aristotle's view is that some "useful" subjects must, of course, be taught. Reading and writing, for instance, are useful for the discharge of the business of life, though their commercial utility is not the highest value which they have for us. But care must be taken that only those "useful" studies which are also "liberal" should be taught; "illiberal" or "mechanical" subjects must not have any place in the curriculum. A "liberal" education means, as the name shows, one which will tend to make its recipient a "free man," and not a slave in body and soul. The mechanical crafts were felt by Aristotle to be illiberal because they leave a man no leisure to make the best of body and mind; practice of them sets a stamp on the body and narrows the mind's outlook. In principle then, no study should form a subject of the universal curriculum if its only value is that it prepares a man for a profession followed as a means of making a living. General education, all-round training which aims at the development of body and mind for its own sake, must be kept free from the intrusion of everything which has a merely commercial value and tends to contract the mental vision. It is the same principle which we rightly employ ourselves when we maintain that a university education ought not to include specialisation on merely "technical" or "professional" studies. The useful subjects which have at the same time a higher value as contributing to the formation of taste and character and serving to elevate and refine the mind include, besides reading and writing, which render great literature accessible to us, bodily culture (the true object of which is not merely to make the body strong and hardy, but to develop the moral qualities of grace and courage), music, and drawing. Aristotle holds that the real reason for making children learn music is (1) that the artistic appreciation of really great music is one of the ways in which "leisure" may be worthily employed, and to appreciate music rightly we must have some personal training in musical execution; (2) that all art, and music in particular, has a direct influence on character.Plato and Aristotle, though they differ on certain points of detail, are agreed that the influence of music on character, for good or bad, is enormous. Music, they say, is the most imitative of all the arts. The various rhythms, times, and scales imitate different tempers and emotional moods, and it is a fundamental law of our nature that we grow like what we take pleasure in seeing or having imitated or represented for us. Hence if we are early accustomed to take pleasure in the imitation of the manly, resolute, and orderly, these qualities will in time become part of our own nature. This is why right musical education is so important that Plato declared that the revolutionary spirit always makes its first appearance in innovations on established musical form.There is, however, one important difference between the two philosophers which must be noted, because it concerns Aristotle's chief contribution to the philosophy of fine art. Plato had in theRepublicproposed to expel florid, languishing, or unduly exciting forms of music not only from the schoolroom, but from life altogether, on the ground of their unwholesome tendency to foster an unstable and morbid character in those who enjoy them. For the same reason he had proposed the entire suppression of tragic drama. Aristotle has a theory which is directly aimed against this overstrained Puritanism. He holds that the exciting and sensational art which would be very bad as daily food may be very useful as an occasional medicine for the soul. He would retain even the most sensational forms of music on account of what he calls their "purgative" value. In the same spirit he asserts that the function of tragedy, with its sensational representations of the calamities of its heroes, is "by the vehicle of fear and pity to purge our minds of those and similar emotions." The explanation of the theory is to be sought in the literal sense of the medical term "purgative." According to the medical view which we have already found influencing his ethical doctrine, health consists in the maintenance of an equality between the various ingredients of the body. Every now and again it happens that there arise superfluous accretions of some one ingredient, which are not carried away in the normal routine of bodily life. These give rise to serious derangement of function and may permanently injure the working of the organism, unless they are removed in time by a medicine which acts as a purge, and clears the body of a superfluous accumulation. The same thing also happens in the life of the soul. So long as we are in good spiritual health our various feelings and emotional moods will be readily discharged in action, in the course of our daily life. But there is always the possibility of an excessive accumulation of emotional "moods" for which the routine of daily life does not provide an adequate discharge in action. Unless this tendency is checked we may contract dangerously morbid habits of soul. Thus we need some medicine for the soul against this danger, which may be to it what a purgative is to the body.Now it was a well-known fact, observed in connection with some of the more extravagant religious cults, that persons suffering from an excess of religious frenzy might be cured homoeopathically, so to say, by artificially arousing the very emotion in question by the use of exciting music. Aristotle extends the principle by suggesting that in the artificial excitement aroused by violently stimulating music or in the transports of sympathetic apprehension and pity with which we follow the disasters of the stage-hero, we have a safe and ready means of ridding ourselves of morbid emotional strain which might otherwise have worked havoc with the efficient conduct of real life.The great value of this defence of the occasional employment of sensation as a medicine for the soul is obvious. Unhappily it would seem to have so dominated Aristotle's thought on the functions of dramatic art as to blind him to what we are accustomed to think the nobler functions of tragedy. No book has had a more curious fate than the little manual for intending composers of tragedies which is all that remains to us of Aristotle's lectures on Poetry. This is not the place to tell the story of the way in which the great classical French playwrights, who hopelessly misunderstood the meaning of Aristotle's chief special directions, but quite correctly divined that his lectures were meant to be an actualVade Mecumfor the dramatist, deliberately constructed their masterpieces in absolute submission to regulations for which they had no better reasons than that they had once been given magisterially by an ancient Greek philosopher. But it may be worth while to remark that the worth of Aristotle's account of tragedy as art-criticism has probably been vastly overrated. From first to last the standpoint he assumes, in his verdicts on the great tragic poets, is that of the gallery. What he insists on all through, probably because he has the purgative effect of the play always in his mind, is a well-woven plot with plenty of melodramatic surprise in the incidents and a thoroughly sensational culmination in a sense of unrelieved catastrophe over which the spectator can have a good cry, and so get well "purged" of his superfluous emotion. It is clear from his repeated allusions that the play he admired above all others was theKing Oedipusof Sophocles, but it is equally clear that he admired it not for the profound insight into human life and destiny or the deep sense of the mystery of things which some modern critics have found in it, but because its plot is the best and most startling detective story ever devised, and its finale a triumph of melodramatic horror.BIBLIOGRAPHYThe English reader who wishes for further information about Aristotle and his philosophy may be referred to any or all of the following works:--E. Zeller.--Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics. English translation in 2 vols. by B. F. C. Costelloe and J. H. Muirhead. London. Longmans & Co.*E. Wallace.--Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle. Cambridge University Press.G. Grote.--Aristotle. London. John Murray.*W. D. Ross.--The Works of Aristotle translated into English, vol. viii.,Metaphysics. Oxford. Clarendon Press.*A. E. Taylor.--Aristotle on his Predecessor. (Metaphysics, Bk. I., translated with notes, &c.) Chicago. Open Court Publishing Co.G. D. Hicks.--Aristotle de Anima(Greek text, English translation, Commentary). Cambridge University Press.*D. P. Chase.--The Ethics of Aristotle. Walter Scott Co.*J. Burnet.--Aristotle on Education. (English translation ofEthics, Bks. I.-III. 5, X. 6 to end;Politics, VIII. 17, VIII.) Cambridge University Press.*B. Jowett.--The Politics of Aristotle. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
CHAPTER V
PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
Hitherto we have been concerned with the speculative branches of knowledge, we have now to turn to practice. Practice, too, is an activity of thought, but an activity which is never satisfied by the process of thinking itself. In practice our thinking is always directed towards the production of some result other than true thought itself. As in engineering it is not enough to find a solution of the problem how to build a bridge over a given river capable of sustaining a given strain, so in directing our thought on the problems of human conduct and the organisation of society we aim at something more than the understanding of human life. In the one case what we aim at is the construction of the bridge; in the other it is the production of goodness in ourselves and our fellow-men, and the establishment of right social relations in the state. Aristotle is careful to insist on this point throughout his whole treatment of moral and social problems. The principal object of his lectures on conduct is not to tell his hearers what goodness is, but to make them good, and similarly it is quite plain thatPoliticswas intended as a text-book for legislators. In close connection with this practical object stands his theory of the kind of truth which must be looked for in ethics and politics. He warns us against expecting precepts which have the exact and universal rigidity of the truths of speculative science. Practical science has to do with the affairs of men's lives, matters which are highly complex and variable, in a word, with "what may be otherwise." Hence we must be content if we can lay down precepts which hold good in the main, just as in medicine we do not expect to find directions which will effect a cure in all cases, but are content with general directions which require to be adapted to special cases by the experience and judgment of the practitioner. The object of practical science then is to formulate rules which will guide us in obtaining our various ends. Now when we consider these ends we see at once that some are subordinate to others. The manufacture of small-arms may be the end at which their maker aims, but it is to the military man a mere means tohisend, which is the effective use of them. Successful use of arms is again the end of the professional soldier, but it is a mere means among others to the statesman. Further, it is the military men who use the arms from whom the manufacturer has to take his directions as to the kind of arms that are wanted, and again it is the statesman to whom the professional soldiers have to look for directions as to when and with what general objects in view they shall fight. So the art which uses the things produced by another art is the superior and directing art; the art which makes the things, the inferior and subordinate art. Hence the supreme practical art is politics, since it is the art which uses the products turned out by all other arts as means to its ends. It is the business of politics, the art of the statesman, to prescribe to the practitioners of all other arts and professions the lines on which and the conditions under which they shall exercise their vocation with a view to securing the supreme practical end, the well-being of the community. Among the other professions and arts which make the materials the statesman employs, the profession of the educator stands foremost. The statesman is bound to demand certain qualities of mind and character in the individual citizens. The production of these mental and moral qualities must therefore be the work of the educator. It thus becomes an important branch of politics to specify the kind of mental and moral qualities which a statesman should require the educator to produce in his pupils.
It is this branch of politics which Aristotle discusses in hisEthics. He never contemplates a study of the individual's good apart from politics, the study of the good of the society. What then is the good or the best kind of life for an individual member of society? Aristotle answers that as far as the mere name is concerned, there is a general agreement to call the best life,Eudaimonia, Happiness. But the real problem is one of fact. What kind of life deserves to be called happiness? Plato had laid it down that the happy life must satisfy three conditions. It must be desirable for its own sake, it must be sufficient of itself to satisfy us, and it must be the life a wise man would prefer to any other. The question is, What general formula can we find which will define the life which satisfies these conditions? To find the answer we have to consider what Plato and Aristotle call the work or function of man. By the work of anything we mean what can only be done by it, or by it better than by anything else. Thus the work of the eye is to see. You cannot see with any other organ, and when the eye does this work of seeing well you say it is a good eye. So we may say of any living being that its work is to live, and that it is a good being when it does this work of living efficiently. To do its own work efficiently is the excellence or virtue of the thing. The excellence or virtue of a man will thus be to live efficiently, but since life can be manifested at different levels, if we would know what man's work is we must ask whether there is not some form of life which canonlybe lived by man. Now the life which consists in merely feeding and growing belongs to all organisms and can be lived with equal vigour by them all. There is, however, a kind of life which can only be lived by man, the life which consists in conscious direction of one's actions by a rule. It is the work of man to live this kind of life, and his happiness consists in living it efficiently and well. So we may give as the definition of human well-being that it is "an active life in accord with excellence, or if there are more forms of excellence than one, in accord with the best and completest of them"; and we must add "in a complete life" to show that mere promise not crowned by performance does not suffice to entitle man's life to be called happy. We can see that this definition satisfies Plato's three conditions. A vigorous and active living in a way which calls into play the specifically human capacities of man is desirable for its own sake, and preferable to any other life which could be proposed to us. It too is the only life which can permanently satisfy men, but we must add that if such a life is to be lived adequately certain advantages of fortune must be presupposed. We cannot fully live a life of this kind if we are prevented from exercising our capacities by lack of means or health or friends and associates, and even the calamities which arise in the course of events may be so crushing as to hinder a man, for a time, from putting forth his full powers. These external good things are not constituents of happiness, but merely necessary conditions of that exercise of our own capacities which is the happy life.
In our definition of the happy life we said that it was one of activity in accord with goodness or excellence, and we left it an open question whether there are more kinds of such goodness than one. On consideration we see that two kinds of goodness or excellence are required in living the happy life. The happy life for man is a life of conscious following of a rule. To live it well, then, you need to know what the right rule to follow is, and you need also to follow it. There are persons who deliberately follow a wrong rule of life--the wicked. There are others who know what the right rule is but fail to follow it because their tempers and appetites are unruly--the morally weak. To live the happy life, then, two sorts of goodness are required. You must have a good judgment as to what the right rule is (or if you cannot find it out for yourself, you must at least be able to recognise it when it is laid down by some one else, the teacher or lawgiver), and you must have your appetites, feelings, and emotions generally so trained that they obey the rule. Hence excellence, goodness, or virtue is divided into goodness of intellect and goodness of character (moral goodness), the wordcharacterbeing used for the complex of tempers, feelings, and the affective side of human nature generally. In education goodness of character has to be produced by training and discipline before goodness of intellect can be imparted. The young generally have to be trained to obey the right rule before they can see for themselves that it is the right rule, and if a man's tempers and passions are not first schooled into actual obedience to the rule he will in most cases never see that it is the right rule at all. Hence Aristotle next goes on to discuss the general character of the kind of goodness he calls goodness of character, the right state of the feelings and passions.
The first step towards understanding what goodness of character is is to consider the way in which it is actually produced. We are not born with this goodness of tempers and feelings ready made, nor yet do we obtain it by theoretical instruction; it is a result of a training and discipline of the feelings and impulses. The possibility of such a training is due to the fact that feelings and impulses are rational capacities, and a rational capacity can be developed into either of two contrasted activities according to the training it receives. You cannot train stones to fall upwards, but you can train a hot temper to display itself either in the form of righteous resentment of wrong-doing or in that of violent defiance of all authority. Our natural emotions and impulses are in themselves neither good nor bad; they are the raw material out of which training makes good or bad character according to the direction it gives to them. The effect of training is to convert the indeterminate tendency into a fixed habit. We may say, then, that moral goodness is a fixed state of the soul produced by habituation. By being trained in habits of endurance, self-mastery, and fair dealing, we acquire the kind of character to which it is pleasing to act bravely, continently, and fairly, and disagreeable to act unfairly, profligately, or like a coward. When habituation has brought about this result the moral excellences in question have become part of our inmost self and we are in full possession of goodness of character. In a word, it is by repeated doing of right acts that we acquire the right kind of character.
But what general characteristics distinguish right acts and right habits from wrong ones? Aristotle is guided in answering the question by an analogy which is really at the bottom of all Greek thinking on morality. The thought is that goodness is in the soul what health and fitness are in the body, and that the preceptor is for the soul what the physician or the trainer is for the body. Now it was a well-known medical theory, favoured by both Plato and Aristotle, that health in the body means a condition of balance or equilibration among the elements of which it is composed. When the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry in the composition of the human frame exactly balance one another, the body is in perfect health. Hence the object of the regimen of the physician or the trainer is to produce and maintain a proper balance or proportion between the ingredients of the body. Any course which disturbs this balance is injurious to health and strength. You damage your health if you take too much food or exercise, and also if you take too little. The same thing is true of health in the soul. Our soul's health may be injured by allowing too much or too little play to any of our natural impulses or feelings. We may lay it down, then, that the kind of training which gives rise to a good habit is training in the avoidance of the opposite errors of the too much and the too little. And since the effect of training is to produce habits which issue in the spontaneous performance of the same kind of acts by which the habits were acquired, we may say not merely that goodness of character is produced by acts which exhibit a proper balance or mean, but that it is a settled habit of acting so as to exhibit the same balance or proportion. Hence the formal definition of goodness of character is that it is "a settled condition of the soul which wills or chooses the mean relatively to ourselves, this mean being determined by a rule or whatever we like to call that by which the wise man determines it."
There are several points in this definition of the mean upon which moral virtue depends of which we must take note unless we are to misunderstand Aristotle seriously. To begin with, the definition expressly says that "moral goodness is a state of will or choice." Thus it is not enough that one should follow the rule of the mean outwardly in one's actions; one's personal will must be regulated by it. Goodness of character is inward; it is not merely outward. Next we must not suppose that Aristotle means that the "just enough" is the same for all our feelings, that every impulse has a moral right to the same authority in shaping our conduct as any other. How much or how little is the just enough in connection with a given spring of action is one of the things which the wise man's rule has to determine, just as the wise physician's rule may determine that a very little quantity is the just enough in the case of some articles of diet or curative drugs, while in the case of others the just enough may be a considerable amount. Also the right mean is not the same for every one. What we have to attain is the mean relatively toourselves, and this will be different for persons of different constitutions and in different conditions. It is this relativity of the just enough to the individual's personality and circumstances which makes it impossible to lay down precise rules of conduct applicable alike to everybody, and renders the practical attainment of goodness so hard. It is my duty to spend some part of my income in buying books on philosophy, but no general rule will tell me what percentage of my income is the right amount for me to spend in this way. That depends on a host of considerations, such as the excess of my income above my necessary expenses and the like. Or again, the just enough may vary with the same man according to the circumstances of the particular case. No rule of thumb application of a formula will decide such problems. Hence Aristotle insists that the right mean in the individual case has always to be determined by immediate insight. This is precisely why goodness of intellect needs to be added to goodness of character. His meaning is well brought out by an illustration which I borrow from Professor Burnet. "On a given occasion there will be a temperature which is just right for my morning bath. If the bath is hotter than this, it will be too hot; if it is colder, it will be too cold. But as this just right temperature varies with the condition of my body, it cannot be ascertained by simply using a thermometer. If I am in good general health I shall, however, know by the feel of the water when the temperature is right. So if I am in good moral health I shall know, without appealing to a formal code of maxims, what is the right degree,e.g.of indignation to show in a given case, how it should be shown and towards whom." Thus we see why Aristotle demands goodness of character as a preliminary condition of goodness of intellect or judgment in moral matters. Finally, if we ask bywhatrule the mean is determined, the answer will be that the rule is the judgment of the legislator who determines what is the right mean by his knowledge of the conditions on which the well-being of the community depends. He then embodies his insight in the laws which he makes and the regulations he imposes on the educators of youth. The final aim of education in goodness is to make our immediate judgment as to what is right coincide with the spirit of a wise legislation.
The introduction of the reference to will or choice into the definition of goodness of character leads Aristotle to consider the relation of will to conduct. His main object is to escape the paradoxical doctrine which superficial students might derive from the works of Plato, that wrong-doing is always well-meaning ignorance. Aristotle's point is that it is the condition of will revealed by men's acts which is the real object of our approval or blame. This is because in voluntary action the man himself is the efficient cause of his act. Hence the law recognises only two grounds on which a man may plead, that he is not answerable for what he does. (1) Actual physical compulsion byforce majeure. (2) Ignorance, not due to the man's own previous negligence, of some circumstances material to the issue. When either of these pleas can be made with truth the man does not really contribute by his choice to the resulting act, and therefore is not really its cause. But a plea of ignorance of the general laws of morality does not excuse. I cannot escape responsibility for a murder by pleading that I did not know that murder is wrong. Such a plea does not exempt me from having been the cause of the murder; it only shows that my moral principles are depraved.
More precisely will is a process which has both an intellectual and an appetitive element. The appetitive element is our wish for some result. The intellectual factor is the calculation of the steps by which that result may be obtained. When we wish for the result we begin to consider how it might be brought about, and we continue our analysis until we find that the chain of conditions requisite may be started by the performance of some act now in our power to do. Will may thus be defined as the deliberate appetition of something within our power, and the very definition shows that our choice is an efficient cause of the acts we choose to do. This is why we rightly regard men as responsible or answerable for their acts of choice, good and bad alike.
From the analysis of goodness of character, we proceed to that of goodness of intellect. The important point is to decide which of all the forms of goodness of intellect is that which must be combined with goodness of character to make a man fit to be a citizen of the state. It must be a kind of intellectual excellence which makes a man see what the right rule by which the mean is determined is. Now when we come to consider the different excellences of intellect we find that they all fall under one of two heads, theoretical or speculative wisdom and practical wisdom.
Theoretical wisdom is contained in the sciences which give us universal truths about the fixed and unalterable relations of the things in the universe, or, as we should say, which teach us the laws of Nature. Its method is syllogism, the function of which is to make us see how the more complex truths are implied in simpler principles. Practical wisdom is intelligence as employed in controlling and directing human life to the production of the happy life for a community, and it is this form of intellectual excellence which we require of the statesman. It is required of him not only that he should know in general what things are good for man, but also that he should be able to judge correctly that in given circumstances such and such an act is the one which will secure the good. He must not only know the right rule itself, which corresponds to the major premiss of syllogism in theoretical science, but he must understand the character of particular acts so as to see that they fall under the right rule. Thus the method of practical wisdom will be analogous to that of theoretical wisdom. In both cases what we have to do is to see that certain special facts are cases of a general law or rule. Hence Aristotle calls the method of practical wisdom the practical syllogism or syllogism of action, since its peculiarity is that what issues from the putting together of the premisses is not an assertion but the performance of an act. In the syllogism of action, the conclusion, that is to say, the performance of a given act, just as in the syllogism of theory, is connected with the rule given in the major premiss by a statement of fact; thuse.g.the performance of a specific act such as the writing of this book is connected with the general rule what helps to spread knowledge ought to be done by the conviction that the writing of this book helps to spread knowledge. Our perception of such a fact is like a sense-perception in its directness and immediacy. We see therefore that the kind of intellectual excellence which the statesman must possess embraces at once a right conception of the general character of the life which is best for man, because it calls into play his specific capacities as a human being, and also a sound judgment in virtue of which he sees correctly that particular acts are expressions of this good for man. This, then, is what we mean by practical wisdom.
So far, then, it would seem that the best life for man is just the life of co-operation in the life of the state, which man, being the only political animal or animal capable of life in a state, has as his peculiar work, and as if the end of all moral education should be to make us good and efficient citizens. But in theEthics, as elsewhere, the end of Aristotle's argument has a way of forgetting the beginning. We find that there is after all a still higher life open to man than that of public affairs. Affairs and business of all kinds are only undertaken as means to getting leisure, just as civilised men go to war, not for the love of war itself, but to secure peace. The highest aim of life, then, is not the carrying on of political business for its own sake, but the worthy and noble employment of leisure, the periods in which we are our own masters. It has the advantage that it depends more purely on ourselves and our own internal resources than any other life of which we know, for it needs very little equipment with external goods as compared with any form of the life of action. It calls into play the very highest of our own capacities as intelligent beings, and for that very reason the active living of it is attended with the purest of all pleasures. In it, moreover, we enter at intervals and for a little while, so far as the conditions of our mundane existence allow, into the life which God enjoys through an unbroken eternity. Thus we reach the curious paradox that while the life of contemplation is said to be that of our truest self, it is also maintained that this highest and happiest life is one which we live, not in respect of being human, but in respect of having a divine something in us. When we ask what this life of contemplation includes, we see from references in thePoliticsthat it includes the genuinely æsthetic appreciation of good literature and music and pictorial and plastic art, but there can be no doubt that what bulks most largely in Aristotle's mind is the active pursuit of science for its own sake, particularly of such studies as First Philosophy and Physics, which deal with the fundamental structure of the universe. Aristotle thus definitely ends by placing the life of the scholar and the student on the very summit of felicity.
It is from this doctrine that mediæval Christianity derives its opposition between thevita contemplativaandvita activaand its preference for the former, though in the mediæval mind the contemplative life has come to mean generally a kind of brooding over theological speculations and of absorption in mystical ecstasy very foreign to the spirit of Aristotle. The types by which the contrast of the two lives is illustrated, Rachael and Leah, Mary and Martha, are familiar to all readers of Christian literature.
+The Theory of the State+.--Man is by nature a political animal, a being who can only develop his capacities by sharing in the life of a community. Hence Aristotle definitely rejects the view that the state or society is a mere creature of convention or agreement, an institution made by compact between individuals for certain special ends, not growing naturally out of the universal demands and aspirations of humanity. Mankind, he urges, have never existed at all as isolated individuals. Some rudimentary form of social organisation is to be found wherever men are to be found. The actual stages in the development of social organisation have been three--the family, the village community, the city state. In the very rudest forms of social life known to us, the patriarchal family, not the individual, is the social unit. Men lived at first in separate families under the control of the head of the family. Now a family is made up in its simplest form of at least three persons, a man, his wife, and a servant or slave to do the hard work, though very poor men often have to replace the servant by an ox as the drudge of all work. Children when they come swell the number, and thus we see the beginnings of complex social relations of subordination in the family itself. It involves three such distinct relations, that of husband and wife, that of parent and child, that of master and man. The family passes into the village community, partly by the tendency of several families of common descent to remain together under the direction of the oldest male member of the group, partly by the association of a number of distinct families for purposes of mutual help and protection against common dangers. Neither of these forms of association, however, makes adequate provision for the most permanent needs of human nature. Complete security for a permanent supply of material necessaries and adequate protection only come when a number of such scattered communities pool their resources, and surround themselves with a city wall. The city state, which has come into being in this way, proves adequate to provide from its own internal resources for all the spiritual as well as the material needs of its members. Hence the independent city state does not grow as civilisation advances into any higher form of organisation, as the family and village grew into it. It is the end, the last word of social progress. It is amazing to us that this piece of cheap conservatism should have been uttered at the very time when the system of independent city states had visibly broken down, and a former pupil of Aristotle himself was founding a gigantic empire to take their place as the vehicle of civilisation.
The end for which the state exists is not merely its own self-perpetuation. As we have seen, Aristotle assigns a higher value to the life of the student than to the life of practical affairs. Since it is only in the civilised state that the student can pursue his vocation, the ultimate reason for which the state exists is to educate its citizens in such a way as shall fit them to make the noble use of leisure. In the end the state itself is a means to the spiritual cultivation of its individual members. This implies that the chosen few, who have a vocation to make full use of the opportunities provided for leading this life of noble leisure, are the real end for the sake of which society exists. The other citizens who have no qualification for any life higher than that of business and affairs are making the most of themselves in devoting their lives to the conduct and maintenance of the organisation whose full advantages they are unequal to share in. It is from this point of view also that Aristotle treats the social problem of the existence of a class whose whole life is spent in doing the hard work of society, and thus setting the citizen body free to make the best use it can of leisure. In the conditions of life in the Greek world this class consisted mainly of slaves, and thus the problem Aristotle has to face is the moral justifiability of slavery. We must remember that he knew slavery only in its comparatively humane Hellenic form. The slaves of whom he speaks were household servants and assistants in small businesses. He had not before his eyes the system of enormous industries carried on by huge gangs of slaves under conditions of revolting degradation which disgraced the later Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire, or the Southern States of North America. His problems are in all essentials much the same as those which concern us to-day in connection with the social position of the classes who do the hard bodily work of the community.
Much consideration is given in thePoliticsto the classification of the different types of constitution possible for the city-state. The current view was that there are three main types distinguished by the number of persons who form the sovereign political authority, monarchy, in which sovereign power belongs to a single person; oligarchy, in which it is in the hands of a select few; democracy, in which it is enjoyed by the whole body of the citizens. Aristotle observes, correctly, that the really fundamental distinction between a Greek oligarchy and a Greek democracy was that the former was government by the propertied classes, the latter government by the masses. Hence the watchword of democracy was always that all political rights should belong equally to all citizens, that of oligarchy that a man's political status should be graded according to his "stake in the country." Both ideals are, according to him, equally mistaken, since the real end of government, which both overlook, is the promotion of the "good life." In a state which recognises this ideal, an aristocracy or government by the best, only the "best" men will possess the full rights of citizenship, whether they are many or few. There might even be a monarch at the head of such a state, if it happened to contain some one man of outstanding intellectual and moral worth. Such a state should be the very opposite of a great imperial power. It should, that its cultivation may be the more intensive, be as small as is compatible with complete independence of outside communities for its material and spiritual sustenance, and its territory should only be large enough to provide its members with the permanent possibility of ample leisure, so long as they are content with plain and frugal living. Though it ought not, for military and other reasons, to be cut off from communication with the sea, the great military and commercial high road of the Greek world, it ought not to be near enough to the coast to run any risk of imperilling its moral cultivation by becoming a great emporium, like the Athens of Pericles. In the organisation of the society care should be taken to exclude the agricultural and industrial population from full citizenship, which carries with it the right to appoint and to be appointed as administrative magistrates. This is because these classes, having no opportunity for the worthy employment of leisure, cannot be trusted to administer the state for the high ends which it is its true function to further.
Thus Aristotle's political ideal is that of a small but leisured and highly cultivated aristocracy, without large fortunes or any remarkable differences in material wealth, free from the spirit of adventure and enterprise, pursuing the arts and sciences quietly while its material needs are supplied by the labour of a class excluded from citizenship, kindly treated but without prospects. Weimar, in the days when Thackeray knew it as a lad, would apparently reproduce the ideal better than any other modern state one can think of.
The object of thePoliticsis, however, not merely to discuss the ideal state but to give practical advice to men who might be looking forward to actual political life, and would therefore largely have to be content with making the best of existing institutions. In the absence of the ideal aristocracy, Aristotle's preference is for what he calls Polity or constitutional government, a sort of compromise between oligarchy and democracy. Of course a practical statesman may have to work with a theoretically undesirable constitution, such as an oligarchy or an unqualified democracy. But it is only in an ideal constitution that the education which makes its subject a good man, in the philosopher's sense of the word, will also make him a good citizen. If the constitution is bad, then the education best fitted to make a man loyal to it may have to be very different from that which you would choose to make him a good man. The discussion of the kind of education desirable for the best kind of state, in which to be a loyal citizen and to be a good man are the same thing, is perhaps the most permanently valuable part of thePolitics. Though Aristotle's writings on "practical" philosophy have been more read in modern times than any other part of his works, they are far from being his best and most thorough performances. In no department of his thought is he quite so slavishly dependent on his master Plato as in the theory of the "good for man" and the character of "moral" excellence. No Aristotelian work is quite so commonplace in its handling of a vast subject as thePolitics. In truth his interest in these social questions is not of the deepest. He is, in accordance with his view of the superiority of "theoretical science," entirely devoid of the spirit of the social reformer. What he really cares about is "theology" and "physics," and the fact that the objects of the educational regulations of thePoliticsare all designed to encourage the study of these "theoretical" sciences, makes this section of thePoliticsstill one of the most valuable expositions of the aims and requirements of a "liberal" education.
All education must be under public control, and education must be universal and compulsory. Public control is necessary, not merely to avoid educational anarchy, but because it is a matter of importance to the community that its future citizens should be trained in the way which will make them most loyal to the constitution and the ends it is designed to subserve. Even in one of the "bad" types of state, where the life which the constitution tends to foster is not the highest, the legislator's business is to see that education is directed towards fostering the "spirit of the constitution." There is to be an "atmosphere" which impregnates the whole of the teaching, and it is to be an "atmosphere" of public spirit. The only advantage which Aristotle sees in private education is that it allows of more modification of programme to meet the special needs of the individual pupil than a rigid state education which is to be the same for all. The actual regulations which Aristotle lays down are not very different from those of Plato. Both philosophers hold that "primary" education, in the early years of life, should aim partly at promoting bodily health and growth by a proper system of physical exercises, partly at influencing character and giving a refined and elevated tone to the mind by the study of letters, art, and music. Both agree that this should be followed in the later "teens" by two or three years of specially rigorous systematic military training combined with a taste of actual service in the less exhausting and less dangerous parts of a soldier's duty. It is only after this, at about the age at which young men now take a "university" course, that Plato and Aristotle would have the serious scientific training of the intellect begun. ThePoliticsleaves the subject just at the point where the young men are ready to undergo their special military training. Thus we do not know with certainty what scientific curriculum Aristotle would have recommended, though we may safely guess that it would have contained comparatively little pure mathematics, but a great deal of astronomy, cosmology, and biology.
With respect to the "primary" education Aristotle has a good deal to say. As "forcing" is always injurious, it should not be begun too soon. For the first five years a child's life should be given up to healthy play. Great care must be taken that children are not allowed to be too much with "servants," from whom they may imbibe low tastes, and that they are protected against any familiarity with indecency. From five to seven a child may begin to make a first easy acquaintance with the life of the school by looking on at the lessons of its elders. The real work of school education is to begin at seven and not before.
We next have to consider what should be the staple subjects of an education meant not for those who are to follow some particular calling, but for all the full citizens of a state. Aristotle's view is that some "useful" subjects must, of course, be taught. Reading and writing, for instance, are useful for the discharge of the business of life, though their commercial utility is not the highest value which they have for us. But care must be taken that only those "useful" studies which are also "liberal" should be taught; "illiberal" or "mechanical" subjects must not have any place in the curriculum. A "liberal" education means, as the name shows, one which will tend to make its recipient a "free man," and not a slave in body and soul. The mechanical crafts were felt by Aristotle to be illiberal because they leave a man no leisure to make the best of body and mind; practice of them sets a stamp on the body and narrows the mind's outlook. In principle then, no study should form a subject of the universal curriculum if its only value is that it prepares a man for a profession followed as a means of making a living. General education, all-round training which aims at the development of body and mind for its own sake, must be kept free from the intrusion of everything which has a merely commercial value and tends to contract the mental vision. It is the same principle which we rightly employ ourselves when we maintain that a university education ought not to include specialisation on merely "technical" or "professional" studies. The useful subjects which have at the same time a higher value as contributing to the formation of taste and character and serving to elevate and refine the mind include, besides reading and writing, which render great literature accessible to us, bodily culture (the true object of which is not merely to make the body strong and hardy, but to develop the moral qualities of grace and courage), music, and drawing. Aristotle holds that the real reason for making children learn music is (1) that the artistic appreciation of really great music is one of the ways in which "leisure" may be worthily employed, and to appreciate music rightly we must have some personal training in musical execution; (2) that all art, and music in particular, has a direct influence on character.
Plato and Aristotle, though they differ on certain points of detail, are agreed that the influence of music on character, for good or bad, is enormous. Music, they say, is the most imitative of all the arts. The various rhythms, times, and scales imitate different tempers and emotional moods, and it is a fundamental law of our nature that we grow like what we take pleasure in seeing or having imitated or represented for us. Hence if we are early accustomed to take pleasure in the imitation of the manly, resolute, and orderly, these qualities will in time become part of our own nature. This is why right musical education is so important that Plato declared that the revolutionary spirit always makes its first appearance in innovations on established musical form.
There is, however, one important difference between the two philosophers which must be noted, because it concerns Aristotle's chief contribution to the philosophy of fine art. Plato had in theRepublicproposed to expel florid, languishing, or unduly exciting forms of music not only from the schoolroom, but from life altogether, on the ground of their unwholesome tendency to foster an unstable and morbid character in those who enjoy them. For the same reason he had proposed the entire suppression of tragic drama. Aristotle has a theory which is directly aimed against this overstrained Puritanism. He holds that the exciting and sensational art which would be very bad as daily food may be very useful as an occasional medicine for the soul. He would retain even the most sensational forms of music on account of what he calls their "purgative" value. In the same spirit he asserts that the function of tragedy, with its sensational representations of the calamities of its heroes, is "by the vehicle of fear and pity to purge our minds of those and similar emotions." The explanation of the theory is to be sought in the literal sense of the medical term "purgative." According to the medical view which we have already found influencing his ethical doctrine, health consists in the maintenance of an equality between the various ingredients of the body. Every now and again it happens that there arise superfluous accretions of some one ingredient, which are not carried away in the normal routine of bodily life. These give rise to serious derangement of function and may permanently injure the working of the organism, unless they are removed in time by a medicine which acts as a purge, and clears the body of a superfluous accumulation. The same thing also happens in the life of the soul. So long as we are in good spiritual health our various feelings and emotional moods will be readily discharged in action, in the course of our daily life. But there is always the possibility of an excessive accumulation of emotional "moods" for which the routine of daily life does not provide an adequate discharge in action. Unless this tendency is checked we may contract dangerously morbid habits of soul. Thus we need some medicine for the soul against this danger, which may be to it what a purgative is to the body.
Now it was a well-known fact, observed in connection with some of the more extravagant religious cults, that persons suffering from an excess of religious frenzy might be cured homoeopathically, so to say, by artificially arousing the very emotion in question by the use of exciting music. Aristotle extends the principle by suggesting that in the artificial excitement aroused by violently stimulating music or in the transports of sympathetic apprehension and pity with which we follow the disasters of the stage-hero, we have a safe and ready means of ridding ourselves of morbid emotional strain which might otherwise have worked havoc with the efficient conduct of real life.
The great value of this defence of the occasional employment of sensation as a medicine for the soul is obvious. Unhappily it would seem to have so dominated Aristotle's thought on the functions of dramatic art as to blind him to what we are accustomed to think the nobler functions of tragedy. No book has had a more curious fate than the little manual for intending composers of tragedies which is all that remains to us of Aristotle's lectures on Poetry. This is not the place to tell the story of the way in which the great classical French playwrights, who hopelessly misunderstood the meaning of Aristotle's chief special directions, but quite correctly divined that his lectures were meant to be an actualVade Mecumfor the dramatist, deliberately constructed their masterpieces in absolute submission to regulations for which they had no better reasons than that they had once been given magisterially by an ancient Greek philosopher. But it may be worth while to remark that the worth of Aristotle's account of tragedy as art-criticism has probably been vastly overrated. From first to last the standpoint he assumes, in his verdicts on the great tragic poets, is that of the gallery. What he insists on all through, probably because he has the purgative effect of the play always in his mind, is a well-woven plot with plenty of melodramatic surprise in the incidents and a thoroughly sensational culmination in a sense of unrelieved catastrophe over which the spectator can have a good cry, and so get well "purged" of his superfluous emotion. It is clear from his repeated allusions that the play he admired above all others was theKing Oedipusof Sophocles, but it is equally clear that he admired it not for the profound insight into human life and destiny or the deep sense of the mystery of things which some modern critics have found in it, but because its plot is the best and most startling detective story ever devised, and its finale a triumph of melodramatic horror.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The English reader who wishes for further information about Aristotle and his philosophy may be referred to any or all of the following works:--
E. Zeller.--Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics. English translation in 2 vols. by B. F. C. Costelloe and J. H. Muirhead. London. Longmans & Co.
*E. Wallace.--Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle. Cambridge University Press.
G. Grote.--Aristotle. London. John Murray.
*W. D. Ross.--The Works of Aristotle translated into English, vol. viii.,Metaphysics. Oxford. Clarendon Press.
*A. E. Taylor.--Aristotle on his Predecessor. (Metaphysics, Bk. I., translated with notes, &c.) Chicago. Open Court Publishing Co.
G. D. Hicks.--Aristotle de Anima(Greek text, English translation, Commentary). Cambridge University Press.
*D. P. Chase.--The Ethics of Aristotle. Walter Scott Co.
*J. Burnet.--Aristotle on Education. (English translation ofEthics, Bks. I.-III. 5, X. 6 to end;Politics, VIII. 17, VIII.) Cambridge University Press.
*B. Jowett.--The Politics of Aristotle. Oxford. Clarendon Press.