ARISTOTLE.

ARISTOTLE.Thereis a natural sequence in the processes of social culture which is well illustrated by the history of Moral Philosophy among the Greeks. The man of action comes before the man of literature, the man of literature before the man of science. In Greek ethics Socrates was the man of action, Plato the man of literature, and Aristotle the man of science. Not, of course, that Plato was merely the literary man, in the trivial modern sense of that word; he was eminently the philosopher—not merely φιλόλογος but φιλόσοφος—but he put forth his philosophy in a popular form; he addressed himself to the imagination as well as the reason; he appealed, as we would say, to the general public; and speaking to men in a human way, on the most interesting of human topics, through the medium of language artistically handled, he falls manifestly under the broad category of the literary as opposed to the scientific man, who works on a special subject, and with a special faculty. But Aristotle was pre-eminently, and with very marked features, the man of knowledge; he came with the dissecting knife in hand and addressed himself to those who were willing to make special dissections with him for the mere purpose of knowing, and drew a broad line ofdemarcation between the speculative and the practical world. Nevertheless the Stagirite was something more than a knowing machine; he was a man, and by virtue of his Hellenic birth also a citizen. He could not therefore avoid occupying to a certain extent the province of the practical man; and so it has come to pass that in three great works, theEthics, thePolitics, and theRhetoric, he has transported himself from the teacher’s chair, and entered into competition with Socrates and Plato as a preacher of social morals and a guide to civic conduct. This was well both for him and for us: well for him, because mere knowing can never exhaust the riches of a nature so essentially practical as that of man: well for us, because otherwise we could scarcely have imagined the phenomenon of an intellect at once so complete in all the categories of scientific cognition, and so strongly marked with all the sagacity that belongs to the so-called practical man, the man of society, the man of business, the accomplished citizen. And it is to this walking out into the realm of common life, instead of confining himself like so many erudite Germans within the limits of a library or a laboratory, that Aristotle owes no small part of the influence which he has so long exercised, not only in the schools but among intelligent men of all classes. In ancient times, when Moral Philosophy was justly regarded as the principal part of that wisdom which it concerns all men to possess, the Philosopher of the Lyceum never would have been able to assert his place as a public teacher alongside of Socrates and Plato had he bestowed only a secondary consideration on the grand arts of living and governing. As it was, the poet-philosopher of the Academy could not but remainthe more popular and the more effective moral teacher of the two; but if Plato was more attractive and more interesting, and by these qualities commanded a wider audience, it was a great consolation to the lesser circle of the Stagirite’s disciples that, though in his discourses on moral matters he was more angular and more severe, he was at the same time more shrewd, more sagacious, and more practical. The reputation which Aristotle thus maintained among ancient Greeks and Romans, both as a speculator and as a wise guide in the conduct of life, was increased rather than diminished when brought into contact with the new moral force of Christianity. No doubt Plato at first was the natural vestibule through which the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria entered the temple of Christian faith; but after that faith, partly in league with Plato, and partly in spite of Plato, had achieved its natural triumph, Aristotle, the clear, cold, and keen, but by no means devout master of all knowledge, by a sort of reaction, as it should seem, in the middle ages began to assert an exclusive dominance in the schools, both of Christian Europe and, through the Arabians, in the East. To all who were anxious for clear and exact knowledge in matters visible and tangible, the Stagirite was the only guide. As the high priest of science he acted in those days of sacerdotal direction as the natural complement of faith, not as its antagonist; and for this reason he is praised by Dante among the solemn forms of the mighty dead that pace through the dim halls of the unseen world, as“Il gran maestro di color chi sanno.”The dethronement which he afterwards suffered atthe hands of those twin innovators Luther and Lord Bacon was again a mere matter of reaction, and could in its nature be only temporary. Honest Martin raged in his own way very furiously against the great dictator of the schools, almost as if he had been the Pope:—“Aristotle, that histrionic mountebank, who from behind a Greek mask has so long bewitched the Church of Christ, that most cunning juggler of souls, whom, if he had not been accredited as of human blood and bone, we should have been justified in maintaining to be the veritable devil.”[130.1]But this we plainly see to be the language of a man not with the balance of truth in his hand, but with the sword of sacred wrath in his tongue; and, indeed, the sword was at that time very needful, and wielded with a wise hostility, not against the true. Aristotle whom we now read and admire, but against the so-called Aristotelian fence of the schools, used oftener for subtle and shadowy exercitation and in defence of the grossest abuses than in the honest search after truth. Of the real Aristotle Luther knew as little in those days as not a few Christians at the present hour know of true Christianity, coming as it does to them through the strangely distorting media of scholastic subtleties, sacerdotal usurpations, and pure human stupidities of all kinds. As for Lord Bacon, he was no doubt equally right in stoutly protesting against the then Aristotelian logic as a hindrance rather than a help to the true knowledge of nature; while, at the same time, he was no less certainly in the wrong if he imagined, or led men to imagine, either that induction was the only method which leads to the discovery of important truth, or thatAristotle’s writings lent any countenance to those baseless and unfruitful methods of speculation which were presented under the authority of his name. It was necessary, however, that the human mind should be thoroughly emancipated from the dictatorial oppression of the false Aristotle before the true Aristotle could be reinstated on his throne; and this required time. Accordingly we find that some of the most original thinkers and ingenious scholars of the last century seem to have imagined that Aristotle and the Pope were two great usurpers, the one in the intellectual, the other in the religious world, whom the great Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, in the interest both of learning and religion, had rightfully dethroned. “Mr. Harris, for example,” says his biographer, “had imbibed a prejudice, very common at that time even among scholars, that Aristotle was an obscure and unprofitable author, whose philosophy had deservedly been superseded by that of Mr. Locke.”[131.1]And in perfect harmony with this, Mr. Burton, in his life of Hume, remarks that “the name of Aristotle is not once mentioned in Hume’s treatise of human nature.”[131.2]Strange revolution of thought in a country where, in the days of John Knox, it had been customary for famous academical teachers to say—“Stultum est dicere Aristotelem errasse!” And, indeed, not only Hume, but Bentham, James Mill, and all the thinkers of that century, manifested a strange lust of spinning knowledge out of their own bowels, so to speak, with a careless or insolent neglect of the great truths handed down for the use of all ages by the masterthinkers of ancient times. But not even in Scotland, never famous for Greek, could such ignorance last for ever. The French Revolution of 1789 shook all men violently out of their old complacencies, and blew their dainty conceits of all kinds to the winds; things were now to be built up from the foundations, not in the political world only, but in the intellectual and religious world no less; torpid Churches were suddenly fevered with hot activity; in literature the forgotten language of a natural and passionate poetry was to be restored; and in philosophy the ancient foundations of stable knowledge were to be laid bare. Under such a violent volcanic action it could not be but that both Plato and Aristotle should be made to stand out before lesser names in their true dimensions. Aristotle especially revealed himself to many thoughtful Germans, and a few thoughtful Englishmen, as the precursor of Bacon in the use of the great organon of induction; and the hard and cautious genius of the Scotch, under the guidance of a polyhistoric Hamilton, found in the Stagirite a more dignified corner-stone than in Reid for the erection of a philosophical edifice which rather sought safety in narrowing than glory in extending the bounds of human speculation. In Oxford, the stiff conservatism of the College tutors, men trained to the exact knowledge of a few traditional books, more certainly than any profound philosophical insight, preserved the Ethics, along with the Logic, of Aristotle as one of the general instruments of juvenile drill; while, outside the academic precincts, liberal statesmen like Cornewall Lewis and democratic historians like Grote continued to quote the Stagirite as the wisest at once and the most cautious of allancient political speculators. Thus the natural balance of judgment was restored; and Aristotle, redeemed at once from the ignorant idolatry of pseudo disciples and the local conceit of men who spurned to learn from any but themselves, took his place for ever as an intellectual dictator of the first rank, with whom if a man did not happen to agree, it was always more likely that the dissentient had wandered into error than that the authority from whom he dissented had failed to fasten his glance upon the truth.Before attempting to set forth in its great salient points the ethical system of Aristotle, it will be at once interesting and useful to sketch shortly the leading events of his life, omitting altogether, as a matter of course, those hundred and one points of uncertain report and slippery slander which are wont to attach themselves to the fame of any great man as to a natural nucleus. And when a man like Aristotle is not only a great man according to the common measure of human greatness, but an altogether extraordinary man, it is as natural that he should be spoken against from all sides as that dogs should bark at a stranger. The epiphany of an intellectual giant in any assembly of men of average talent makes those appear dwarfs who had previously, not without reason, accounted themselves of reputable stature; and as no man likes to be dwarfed, the necessary result of such an apparition is to set men’s wits agog to find out cunning devices, whereby the overwhelming stature of the huge intruder may seem to be curtailed. So Aristotle, we are told, had “a whole host of enemies;” and we shall therefore, as just judges, be justified in throwing out of court, as vitiated in its source, the greater part of the merely anecdotalaccretions that cling to the name of the mighty Stagirite.The adjuncts of high social position and freedom from pecuniary pressure, always advantageous to wise men, hurtful only to fools, Aristotle enjoyed in a remarkable degree. Born 384 B.C. in a Greek town, but under Macedonian influence, his father, who belonged to an old Asclepiad family, as court physician to King Amyntas, had ample opportunities of launching him into the world with all the training, equipment, and supports that are the natural harbingers of a prosperous career. He was not therefore a Greek in the strict sense of the word; and, though he borrowed his language and culture from Attica, and sympathized mainly with popular institutions, as his great work on Politics shows, he had good reason to congratulate himself that he did not lose his original citizenship when the eloquence of Demosthenes thundered in vain against the gold and the iron of the Macedonian. In the period of Aristotle’s youth there was nothing in Greece proper to make any thoughtful person lament that he had been born a subject of a sturdy and semi-barbarous but rising monarchy, rather than a citizen of an exhausted and decaying democracy; for though the victories of Chabrias had restored in some sort the supremacy of the Athenians at sea, the brilliant career of Epaminondas had elevated Thebes for a moment only to make general Greece more divided and less able to resist the growing power of Macedonia. Whether his father had destined him to follow his own profession is uncertain; there are however in theEthics, and elsewhere in his works, frequent allusions to the medical art, such as might have been expected fromthe associations of his parentage; and the prominent place given to physical science in his writings seems to indicate a tendency partly favoured by the circumstances of his birth, partly evoked by the natural progress of the Greek mind in the then stage of its development. This only we know certainly, that at the age of seventeen, about the time when young men in Scotland generally leave school for the university, the future father of encyclopædic science was sent to Athens, where he remained for twenty years as a pupil of Plato in the Academy. But though a pupil, he was anything but a disciple. Naturally of an inductive rather than a speculative habit of mind, and disposed to dissect and to tabulate rather than to collect and to construct, he displayed from year to year a more marked divergence from the great ideal thinker who at that time was impressing his type on the rising intellect of Greece. The reported gossip of antiquity has much to say about some bitter rivalry that arose, and unseemly quarrel that broke out, between the dictatorial master and the independent pupil; but we need believe nothing of this, except in so far as it may be an indication of a radical difference of intellectual character in the two men, which could not but make itself felt in various ways, more or less inconsistent with the relation of a merely receptive and responsive discipleship. Nothing is more common in the intercourse of cultivated men, than that one of the parties finds himself in a condition to respect profoundly what he cannot at all agree with, and what he feels bound, ever and anon, decidedly to controvert. So it fared no doubt with young Aristotle in relation to old Plato. Confluence between two souls so differently constituted therecould be none. They cannot be compared as one rose may be compared with another, or even as one flower may be contrasted with another flower, but only as things of a totally different nature, may be named in the same sentence to make their incommensurability more patent. The intellect of Aristotle was a granite palace, that of Plato a garden of paradise; Aristotle’s wit was like a sharp knife and a weighty hammer, Plato’s like a rolling river and a shining ocean; the one bristled with all carious knowledge, the other blossomed with all lofty speculation; Aristotle analysed all things great and small; Plato harmonized all things beautiful and grand. Along with this inborn diversity of intellectual character, we have reason to suppose that there were certain habits of life and social peculiarities about the Stagirite, which were not without offence to the more strict and devoted Platonists. For that there was a certain tinge of Puritanism, and even a sort of lofty pedantry, occasionally manifested in the great architect of ideas, can, I think, scarcely be doubted by any one who has read his great work—theRepublic—with an unbribed judgment. Now if Plato was somewhat of a philosophical Puritan, in Aristotle there was presented that combination of a philosopher and a man of the world, of the man of principle with the man of practice, which, because it is difficult to produce, is always rare, and because it is rare is always admired. A physician, and above all a court physician, must be a man who enjoys and who understands society: such was Aristotle’s father; and the son, while betaking himself to the quiet bowers of the Athenian Academy for the cultivation of thought, could not forget that there was a large busy world withoutwhich imperiously asserted itself, and from which not even a philosopher could be allowed to withdraw with impunity. It was a characteristic tenet of the Peripatetic school that the external trappings and decorations of life are not to be looked down on with a lofty contempt, but rather cared for as serviceable, and in some cases necessary, aids to a perfect life; and so those Quaker-like affectations of plain garb, and those over-virtuous abstinences from “cakes and ale” and other delights of the merely sensuous part of our nature, which some Platonic and Stoic philosophers affected, could not but meet from Aristotle with a practical protest, of which some significant hint peeps out here and there among the scraps of ancient anecdote-mongers and memoir-writers. Plato, we are told, “was not pleased with Aristotle’s manner of life, nor with his dress. For indeed he was somewhat nice and curious in his apparel, and there was a particular tidiness about his shoes; and his hair also he had cut after a jaunty fashion, not approved of by men of Plato’s following; and he made a display of many rings on his finger. Moreover, there was a peculiar sarcastic play about his mouth, and, when he spoke, he could prattle away with a notable fluency; all which things seemed not to be quite in keeping with the character of a philosopher, and were the occasion that Plato preferred Speusippus and Xenocrates, who afterwards became his successors in the Academy.” This picture is, no doubt, in the main true; and it can only excite our admiration when we consider that the same man of whom this is told was also noted as the most severe and persistent reader in Athens; his house, indeed, was called by Plato “the house of the reader;” and thelearned geographer Strabo notes him as the first Greek who collected books on a large scale, and supplied to the Ptolemies of the succeeding age the model of those systematic stores of books with which they made Alexandria famous. Aristotle therefore may justly be regarded as the great prototype of those modern Germans who, like the mailed knights of the middle ages, stand up in our libraries, cased in the invulnerable panoply of polyhistoric and encyclopædic erudition; and he gave birth to that curious sort of intellectual laboriosity, which when divorced from his genius and his sagacity, produced those accumulations of written and printed record, under which the shelves of so many libraries groan, by which also, we may justly say, not a few strong intellects have been lost to the living world, smothered beneath heaps of cumbrous babblement, in extent infinite, in value infinitesimal.After the death of Plato in the year 347, Aristotle retired for a few years to the court of his fellow-student and friend Hermias, then ruler of Atarnæ, on the coast of Asia Minor. This change of scene was necessary for him, while on the one hand his scheme of establishing a new school of philosophy was yet immature, and, on the other hand, the political relations between Macedonia and Athens were not such as that it would be pleasant for him to be identified with a city which might soon be forced into hostility with his natural sovereign. It was fruitful also, no doubt, in those shrewd observations on men and manners which stamp so many sagacious pages in his moral and political treatises. From this judicious retirement after a few years he was called to a field of morehonourable and influential activity. In the year 342 he received a letter from Philip of Macedon, requesting him to undertake the office of tutor to his young son Alexander. The duties of this position he performed with such results to his royal pupil as in such circumstances were to be expected; and with the great advantage to himself of adding the resources of an absolute monarch and a great conqueror to his own private instruments for the prosecution of scientific research. The unexpected death of Philip by the hands of an assassin, called Alexander prematurely to dash into that brilliant career of Asiatic victory which has made his name no less famous than that of his tutor, who by this event relieved at once from personal responsibility and political apprehension, found himself in a position to establish that independent school of wisdom at Athens, which now for more than two thousand years has propagated itself in the world as the natural and necessary complement to the Platonic style of thought. In the year 334 he pitched his intellectual camp at the Lyceum, in the eastern suburbs of Athens, under Mount Lycabettus, and here during the space of thirteen years he remained exercising towards his scholars the diverse functions of fatherhood and fraternity, which in the ancient philosophical associations, as in the early Christian Churches, were so happily combined. After the death of Alexander, in the year 322, he left Athens and retired to Chalcis, in Eubœa, where he had a small property; a migration to which political considerations must have been the main inducement, for so distinguished a dependant of the Macedonian court could scarcely look upon himself as safe inthe Attic capital the moment that the death of the great conqueror opened up to the most distinguished people whom his arms had subjugated the prospect of political liberation. The philosopher, accordingly, when leaving the city of his adoption, as it turned out for the last time, with an obvious allusion to the fate of Socrates, is reported to have said that he did so in order that the Athenians might not again have the opportunity of signalizing themselves by the murder of a philosopher; for, indeed, in unlimited democracy generally, and specially in the extreme democracy of that time, he had no faith, observing sarcastically that while the Athenians had discovered two useful things, wheat and freedom, they understood how to use the one, but the other they had possessed for a short time, only to abuse. And no doubt he acted wisely in retreating from a scene where no weight of character or reputation for grave wisdom could have shielded him from the combined assault of personal malignity and political rancour so ready in every democratic soil to rise with jealous spite against individual eminence and independence. The philosopher was threatened, we are told, with prosecution for atheism; a charge which, however unfounded to the eye of reason, might have been brought against the Stagirite from the orthodox Athenian point of view with much more justice than about eighty years before it had been brought against the great father of moral science. An atheist certainly, in the strict sense of the term, Aristotle was not, but a pious believer in the polytheistic theology of his country he was even less; piety indeed of any kind is not at all a pronounced feature in the composition of his character. Like many amodern man of science, he had cultivated acuteness at the expense of wonder; and, while indulging in the omnivorous lust of knowledge, had starved veneration, and stunted the growth of some of the most delicate emotions of the soul. For devotion is of the very finest fragrance of the emotional life; and as there are some flowers without smell, so there are some souls without piety. In point of religious feeling, beyond all question, both Socrates and Plato were infinitely superior to Aristotle.Such are the few trustworthy notices that have been preserved to us of the outward fortunes of this great hierarch of encyclopædic knowledge. He died shortly after his retirement to Chalcis, at the early age of sixty-three, followed immediately by his great contemporary Demosthenes. On his deathbed he named Theophrastus as his successor in the chair of the great school of philosophy which he had founded.We now proceed to place before the reader a short statement of the most striking characteristics of the ethical philosophy of Aristotle as they are set forth in that compact little book, theNicomachean Ethics. And the first observation proper to make here is the extreme practicality that appears not more in the general colour and tone than in the individual chapters and paragraphs of this remarkable volume. In criticising the sermons delivered in our Christian pulpits we are accustomed to distinguish between doctrinal and practical preaching, and to believe that while, in Scotland at least, the former is the more popular and the more easy, the latter is always the more difficult and the more efficient style of moral address. Now what we have to say of Aristotle, as he appears in theEthics, is that he is not a merewriter on ethics, an acute speculator or a subtle casuist, but he presents himself with all the seriousness of a preacher, and an eminently practical preacher. No doubt in this capacity he must be regarded both by natural genius and in the general tone of his ethical writings as second to his great master Plato; but his influence on the moral culture of the world has not for that reason been less. A large class of men, especially in this practical country, are apt to suspect Plato of nonsense; and these are unwilling to take advice in the affairs of common life from a man who, in his flights of ideal constructiveness, so far transcends the narrow range of their own hard-faced realism. But Aristotle is a man whom no man can suspect of nonsense. He takes what lies before him, and in the most cool practical way conceivable proceeds to analyse it, and to spell out its significance. He is not ambitious—at least not in the department of morals—of piling a grand system, or of tabulating an exhaustive scheme. He is a practical man, as much as you or I am, and sees with marked distinctness always what lies in his way. There is no fear that under his guidance you will lose yourself in a mist or be carried off your feet in a balloon. He is therefore peculiarly fitted for being put forward as a lay-preacher to a British public; and the Oxford scholars have done good service to the English youth by giving his famous work on Ethics such a prominent place among classical books of the first rank. He is as sensible as Dr. Paley, and a great deal more profound; while, on the other hand, it never occurs to him that it is necessary to prepare the way for a plain practical discourse on the conduct of life by abstract discussionson the liberty of the will and the responsibility of free agents. This omission Principal Grant considers a weakness; I consider it a sign of good sense, or, at all events, a remarkable piece of good luck. He assumes morality in the moral world, just as he assumes light and air and water in the physical; he describes a moral man with strong lines and a firm hand, just as he would describe a healthy man as contrasted with a diseased man. If you have a single eye and an honest purpose, you will not fail to know what he means; if you have not, his book is not for you. There never was a more practical preacher. This wordpractical, therefore, I desire the reader to emphasize doubly when he applies himself to the thorough comprehension of theNicomachean Ethics. There are, no doubt, in this treatise, as in almost every Greek book, some half-dozen curious questions raised, which, like the subtle casuistry of the Jesuit doctors, have little practical value; for Aristotle was a Greek, and as such a habitual dealer in ἀπορήματα, or knotty points, in the solution of which a hard practical Scot or a broad burly Englishman would think a single sentence wasted. These however belong to the soil, grow up like weeds among the best wheat, and, like bad puns in Shakespeare, must be taken with the lot. In the gross and scope of his handling, as we have said, the Stagirite systematically waives all unpractical questions; and in the very arrangement of his book an attentive reader will not fail to discern that there are certain scientific deficiencies which can be explained fully only from the consideration that the writer had vividly realized the difference between what we could call an academical lecture and a sermon, and wasdetermined to make it felt that a lecture on morals, through which the undertones of seriousness that belong to a sermon are not heard, is one of the most absurd and unmeaning of all human performances. No doubt this defect in respect of strictly scientific method may arise partly from the fact that the treatise seems to have been composed at different times, and packed up, so to speak, in bundles rather than reared up architecturally into a jointed structure; it is also plain enough to any one who can read with a discerning eye that the work was left incomplete by the great author, and that the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, as we now have then, are from a different hand, and of manifestly inferior workmanship; but I consider it not less certain that, had it not been for the dominance of the practical point of view, not a few chapters in this most valuable treatise would have been compacted more aptly into the firmness of a complete organism. Once and again in the first two books of his treatise does he repeat the solemn warning that our object in inquiring into the nature of virtue is, not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may be virtuous. Once and again does he enter a protest against the supersubtle tendencies of his countrymen, always ready to stand and debate, even where the solution of the problem was to be found only in motion and in action. Subtleties of any kind, indeed, are not suitable for a moral discourse; the entertainment of them shows that the inquirer has not yet conceived what the purport of the inquiry is; ethical philosophy refers as distinctly to a deed as a sword refers to a cut; and all questions about morals are idle, and even pernicious, that do not bear directly on some practical result.We must therefore, so Aristotle argues, in our method of discussion here, not insist on having always those exact proofs and nice definitions which in the sciences of measurement and number may fairly be demanded. We should rather seek for an analogy to moral science in such arts as medicine, and say that propriety of conduct, like the health of the body, is liable to much indeterminateness and variation; that to seek for scientific rules which might apply with exactitude to all cases is absurd; that no wise man will attempt to cut logs with razors, and that in such matters of complex practice we must content ourselves with stating some such broad general principles as suit the great majority of cases, and which every man must be left to apply for himself in the experience of life. Of the deep tone of practical seriousness which underlies the whole of theNicomachean Ethics, I know no more striking proof than an utterance of Maurice, in the preface to his exposition of the Epistles of John, which I shall here extract. “I owe unspeakable gratitude,” says that truly evangelical moralist, “to the University of Oxford for having put Aristotle’sEthicsinto my hands, and induced me to read it, and to think of it. I doubt if I could have received a greater boon from any university or any teacher. I will tell you what this book did for me. First, it assured me that the principles of morals cannot belong to one time or another; that they must belong to all times. Here was an old heathen Greek making me aware of things that were passing within me, detecting my laziness and my insincerity, showing how little I was doing the things which I professed to do, forcing me to confess that with all theadvantages which I enjoyed he was better than I was. That was one great thing. Next, I could not but learn from him—for he took immense pains to tell me—that it is not by reading a book or learning a set of maxims by heart that one gets to know anything of morality, that it belongs to life, and must be learned in the daily practice of life. English and Christian writers no doubt might have told me the same thing. But I am not sure that their words would have gone as much home as Aristotle’s did. I might have thought that it was their business, part of their profession, to utter those stern maxims, and to hold up such lofty ideals of conduct.” And what adds immense force to Aristotle’s preaching, especially with young men, is the feeling that they have here to do not only with a non-professional preacher but with a thorough gentleman, and a shrewd man of the world, the friend of princes, and of great statesmen and mighty captains. It is seldom indeed that young men in the heat of their blood and the glow of their fancy will listen with much attention to sermons of any kind, even from the best preachers; but if they will not receive the word of warning from such a prophet as Aristotle they will at least have no excuse for sneering either at the doctor or the doctrine. In him they will find no sarcastic Cynic, content with the negative pleasure of snarling from his private kennel at the faults of men, instead of rising to help their infirmities; no sickly devotee whose principal occupation through the dreariness of the present life is to dream and maunder about the glories of the future; no curious registrar of morbid frames of mind or dainty nurse of unproductive sentiment. Such caricatures of the spiritual man,justly odious to the vigorous, generous, and sanguineous temper of youth, may be found cropping out largely in the histories both of philosophical and religious sectaries; but not a hint of them appears in the thoroughly masculine, thoroughly manly, and thoroughly healthy Ethics of Aristotle.The corner-stone of Aristotle’s moral doctrine, as in that of Socrates, lies in the single word λόγος, which, whether in its internal side as Reason, or with its outer face as Discourse, was so peculiarly the watchword of the Hellenic race. “The Greeks seek after wisdom;” and wisdom, or σοφία, is in all cases the result, and the only possible result, of the just exercise of λόγος or reason. We shall not therefore expect to find in the Stagirite any fundamental principle different from that on which the moral doctrine of Socrates rests—nay, just as some of the most characteristic maxims of the New Testament can be pointed out in, and no doubt were actually borrowed from, the Old Testament, even so, and in a much greater degree, was the ethical doctrine of Aristotle borrowed in its great leading points from Socrates and Plato. This borrowing, however, was not in the style of patchwork; it was an affair of natural growth. What we find in Aristotle is not a new ethical doctrine, but the emphasizing and systematizing of certain important aspects of an old doctrine. Now the aspect which Aristotle strongly emphasizes as the starting-point of his ethical teaching is the τέλος and the ἀγαθόν. All men profess to have some object after which they strive in their life and by their deeds; no man in this world, as Goethe says, can safely live at random: the ship that sails at random will be wreckedeven in a calm, and the man who lives at random will be ruined without the help of any positive vice. What then is it that men must propose to themselves as the τέλος, the end, object, or purpose of their existence? Generally, all men profess to be seeking for the ἀγαθόν, or the Good. The question, therefore, which ethical science has to answer is, in the words of the Westminster Catechism,What is the chief end of man?What is the ultimate aim and highest Good, thesummum bonum, of which the creature called Man is capable? How are we to discover this? Plainly in the same way that we discover the chief good of any special kind of man,—a man exercising any special professional function. What is thesummum bonumof a flute-player? Of course to play the flute, and to play the flute well; of a soldier, to fight well; of a shoemaker, to make good shoes; of a brewer, to brew good beer; of a fowler, to snare birds; and of an angler, to hook fish. The chief end, therefore, of any creature is found by discovering his natural work or business in the world,—for all things are full of labour, and a man’s duty is always some kind of work. As, then, there is a special work for the flute-player or the fowler, which determines his chief good, so, if we are to find the chief end of man, we must put our finger on some general work or business, which belongs to all men as men, and not as engaged in special occupations and practising particular arts. How is this work found? Of course by fixing our attention on the differentiating element in the human creature. The differentiating element in birds is wings, in fish fins, in worms rings. By this differentiation, stamped on every creature by the absolute dictatorship ofNature, the destiny and the duty, the privilege and the glory, of each type of organized existence is inevitably determined. The creature has nothing to do in the matter but to recognise and to obey; unreasoning creatures unconsciously and blindly, choice. The proper work of man, therefore, can lie only in what in him is most distinctively human; not therefore of course in any function of the merely vegetative life which he has in common with the plant; nor again in any function of the merely sensuous life, which he enjoys in common with, oxen; but in the exercise of that faculty which he alone possesses, and which alone stamps him as distinctively human, viz.,Reason. The work of a man, accordingly, and the chief end of all men, will be an energizing of the soul, according to reason, or not without reason; and a life according to reason will be good, and the chief good; and not only so, but it must also be the pleasure, and the highest pleasure, of the reasonable being who leads such a life; for the pleasure of every creature lies in acting freely and without hindrance according to its distinctive nature; and as horses are the pleasure of the rider, and views of the landscape painter, so good actions are the pleasure of good men, and reasonable actions the delight of all who live by the use of reason; so much so indeed, that he cannot even claim to be numbered amongst good men who, besides doing good deeds, does not likewise rejoice in doing such deeds. Charity given with an unwilling hand is not charity; it is a boon extorted.This statement taken almost literally from the first eight chapters of the first book of theEthics, will, it is hoped, make the moral attitude of Aristotlesufficiently intelligible. He does not say, with Bentham and the modern utilitarians, “Look round about you for what is pleasurable; and that which affords pleasure to you, and to the greatest possible number of creatures with whom you are socially connected, is your duty;” but he looks about to find your distinctive excellence, your peculiar faculty among all creatures,—“Exercise that,” he says, “and you fulfil your destiny, and attain your chief good. As for pleasure, that you will have also, not as an amulet hung about your neck, but in the very necessity of your energy exercised according to your special nature. Cultivate what is noblest in you, and you cannot fail to find what is most agreeable. The doing of this, however, is by no means so simple a matter as in the mere abstract statement might appear. It is the business of a man, no doubt, to act reasonably, that is virtuously, just as much as it is the business of a bee to bag honey; but it is a much easier thing for the bee to suck honey from the flowers than for a man to force fragrant deeds from the stuff that daily life presents. How is this? The difficulty lies in the compound nature of man: a nature not compound only, but composed of parts of which one is found to be often strangely at variance with the others; so much so, indeed, that while reason is the distinctive faculty of man, and to act reasonably is at once his safety, his happiness, and his glory, he bears within himself likewise a principle of unreason, an ἄλογον opposed to his λόγος,—a principle in the normal state of man altogether dependent and servile, but which, as things are, has a strong tendency to rebel, assert an unruly independence, and even cast down from his thronethe lawful regent of the soul. This, the reader will remark, is exactly the doctrine of St. Paul, with regard to the contrariety of Flesh and Spirit, in the eighth chapter of the Romans, and expressed in almost the same terms. The exact words of Aristotle are: “There appear manifestly in human beings some strong natural tendencies different from reason, and not only different, but fighting with and resisting reason.” But this remarkable peculiarity in the complex creature Man does not in the least change the nature of human good; it only adds to it another element which makes it in the end more glorious—the element of resistance, struggle, victory, and triumph,—of course always with the necessary alternative of possible feebleness, cowardice, and defeat. And the same fact,—the same original sin, as our theologians term it,—nicely considered, raises a noticeable question about the origin of laws and moral obligation; that old question so often discussed by the Sophists, and argued, as we have seen, by Socrates, in his discourse with Hippias, whether right and wrong exist by nature or by institution, φύσει as they expressed it, or νόμῳ; and the answer given to this question by the Stagirite, characterized by his usual good sense, is that, while the determination of right and wrong is not a matter of arbitrary, compulsory imposition, according to the selfish theory of Hobbes, but lies deeply rooted in the innermost recesses of human nature, it is nevertheless true that it is the nature of man, more perhaps than of any other animal, to require training and discipline to bring out what is in him; and that virtue, in fact, is not virtue till the inborn impulses towards excellence have been fostered and strengthened by those socialappliances which lie in the very primary conditions of human life. We are made virtuous, therefore, neither by nature, nor contrary to nature, nor independently of nature, but wegrowvirtuous by repeated acts of living according to reason, as we learn to see by using our eyes. Virtue is, in fact, a habit;[152.1]and as one fit of drunkenness does not make a man a drunkard, so one act of generosity does not make a generous man, and the whole roll of the virtues practised only once or twice, however completely, does not make a virtuous man. Hence the immense importance of education, which other animals may dispense with, but not man, and on which, accordingly, both Plato and Aristotle insist, as the one thing needful for the well-being, whether of the individual or of society. The existence of innate tendencies towards the Good does not in the least imply that human nature in its early stages may be safely left to itself. These good tendencies may be counteracted by opposite tendencies; they may be overwhelmed by adverse circumstance; they may be extinguished; and experience proves that they not seldom are extinguished.Having laid this sure foundation in the differentiating element of man, the philosopher might naturally have proceeded to prove that, assuming man to be naturally a social animal, and widowed with those instincts which make social organization necessary to his normal existence, any application of reason to social existence, that is, every assertion of practical reason in a creature so constituted, is what we callright, and every omission to assert it, or direct assertion of the contrary, is what we call wrong. A right action is an action according to the real constitution of things, which reality it is the business of reason to discern; a wrong act is an act in contravention of the real constitution of things, and can be performed only when reason is undeveloped or asleep, or by some violent impulse or blind illusion led astray: it is an act insulated, contumacious, and rebellious, issuing necessarily in confusion and chaos and ruin; for no single unit in a complex whole can assert its mere capricious independent self in practical denial of the totality to which it belongs, without producing discomfort at first, and ultimately being crushed by the firm compactness of the mighty machinery which it has recklessly dared to disturb. How this might have been demonstrated in detail the reader of the preceding discourse on Socrates cannot be ignorant; but however much it lay in his way, the Stagirite in his Nicomachean treatise did not choose to enter upon this theme. For this procedure he may have had two sufficient reasons; for, in the first place, he may have thought that view of the matter lay too obviously in the whole scheme and handling both of Plato and Socrates, to be susceptible of much novelty at his hands; and in the second place, he may have considered such a demonstration, however cogent in a book, to be less practically useful than some test of right and wrong, which he might be able to formulate. And in the test which he hits upon, as we shall presently see, it is quite evident that practical utility rather than theoretic invulnerability was his main object; and this is precisely what, in consistency at once with the nature of thesubject, and his own introductory observations, he was directly led to do. His test was simply this, that virtue, or right conduct, is generally found in the mean between two extremes; for though there may be the same difficulty in pronouncing about the quality of particular actions, sometimes, as there is in pronouncing about the state of bodily health in any individual, yet, upon a broad view of both cases, nothing seems more obvious and more certain than that the unhealthy condition, whether of body or soul, is chiefly indicated by some deficiency or excess. In other words, virtue is a medium, a balance, a proportion, a symmetry, a harmony, a nice adjustment of the force of each part in reference to the calculated action of the whole. Now, it will at once be seen that this principle is not put forth as anything new; its truth rather consists in its antiquity, and in the deep-rooted experience of all human individuals and all human associations. It is a principle which forms part of the proverbial wisdom of all peoples; and the Greeks especially from the oldest times were strong on this point. Μηδὲν ἄγαν—μέτρον ἄριστον—παντὶ μέσω τὸ κράτος θεὸς ὤπασεν—were maxims familiar to every Greek ear long before Aristotle; and in the realm of speculation, the ἀριθμός, ornumberof Pythagoras, when applied to morals, really meant nothing else. So in the Proverbs of Solomon we find the well-known utterances—“Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it.” And again: “Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldst thou die before thytime?” And our Shakespeare, whose plays are a grand equestrian march of all wisdom, says to the same effect in his own admirable style—

Thereis a natural sequence in the processes of social culture which is well illustrated by the history of Moral Philosophy among the Greeks. The man of action comes before the man of literature, the man of literature before the man of science. In Greek ethics Socrates was the man of action, Plato the man of literature, and Aristotle the man of science. Not, of course, that Plato was merely the literary man, in the trivial modern sense of that word; he was eminently the philosopher—not merely φιλόλογος but φιλόσοφος—but he put forth his philosophy in a popular form; he addressed himself to the imagination as well as the reason; he appealed, as we would say, to the general public; and speaking to men in a human way, on the most interesting of human topics, through the medium of language artistically handled, he falls manifestly under the broad category of the literary as opposed to the scientific man, who works on a special subject, and with a special faculty. But Aristotle was pre-eminently, and with very marked features, the man of knowledge; he came with the dissecting knife in hand and addressed himself to those who were willing to make special dissections with him for the mere purpose of knowing, and drew a broad line ofdemarcation between the speculative and the practical world. Nevertheless the Stagirite was something more than a knowing machine; he was a man, and by virtue of his Hellenic birth also a citizen. He could not therefore avoid occupying to a certain extent the province of the practical man; and so it has come to pass that in three great works, theEthics, thePolitics, and theRhetoric, he has transported himself from the teacher’s chair, and entered into competition with Socrates and Plato as a preacher of social morals and a guide to civic conduct. This was well both for him and for us: well for him, because mere knowing can never exhaust the riches of a nature so essentially practical as that of man: well for us, because otherwise we could scarcely have imagined the phenomenon of an intellect at once so complete in all the categories of scientific cognition, and so strongly marked with all the sagacity that belongs to the so-called practical man, the man of society, the man of business, the accomplished citizen. And it is to this walking out into the realm of common life, instead of confining himself like so many erudite Germans within the limits of a library or a laboratory, that Aristotle owes no small part of the influence which he has so long exercised, not only in the schools but among intelligent men of all classes. In ancient times, when Moral Philosophy was justly regarded as the principal part of that wisdom which it concerns all men to possess, the Philosopher of the Lyceum never would have been able to assert his place as a public teacher alongside of Socrates and Plato had he bestowed only a secondary consideration on the grand arts of living and governing. As it was, the poet-philosopher of the Academy could not but remainthe more popular and the more effective moral teacher of the two; but if Plato was more attractive and more interesting, and by these qualities commanded a wider audience, it was a great consolation to the lesser circle of the Stagirite’s disciples that, though in his discourses on moral matters he was more angular and more severe, he was at the same time more shrewd, more sagacious, and more practical. The reputation which Aristotle thus maintained among ancient Greeks and Romans, both as a speculator and as a wise guide in the conduct of life, was increased rather than diminished when brought into contact with the new moral force of Christianity. No doubt Plato at first was the natural vestibule through which the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria entered the temple of Christian faith; but after that faith, partly in league with Plato, and partly in spite of Plato, had achieved its natural triumph, Aristotle, the clear, cold, and keen, but by no means devout master of all knowledge, by a sort of reaction, as it should seem, in the middle ages began to assert an exclusive dominance in the schools, both of Christian Europe and, through the Arabians, in the East. To all who were anxious for clear and exact knowledge in matters visible and tangible, the Stagirite was the only guide. As the high priest of science he acted in those days of sacerdotal direction as the natural complement of faith, not as its antagonist; and for this reason he is praised by Dante among the solemn forms of the mighty dead that pace through the dim halls of the unseen world, as

“Il gran maestro di color chi sanno.”

“Il gran maestro di color chi sanno.”

The dethronement which he afterwards suffered atthe hands of those twin innovators Luther and Lord Bacon was again a mere matter of reaction, and could in its nature be only temporary. Honest Martin raged in his own way very furiously against the great dictator of the schools, almost as if he had been the Pope:—“Aristotle, that histrionic mountebank, who from behind a Greek mask has so long bewitched the Church of Christ, that most cunning juggler of souls, whom, if he had not been accredited as of human blood and bone, we should have been justified in maintaining to be the veritable devil.”[130.1]But this we plainly see to be the language of a man not with the balance of truth in his hand, but with the sword of sacred wrath in his tongue; and, indeed, the sword was at that time very needful, and wielded with a wise hostility, not against the true. Aristotle whom we now read and admire, but against the so-called Aristotelian fence of the schools, used oftener for subtle and shadowy exercitation and in defence of the grossest abuses than in the honest search after truth. Of the real Aristotle Luther knew as little in those days as not a few Christians at the present hour know of true Christianity, coming as it does to them through the strangely distorting media of scholastic subtleties, sacerdotal usurpations, and pure human stupidities of all kinds. As for Lord Bacon, he was no doubt equally right in stoutly protesting against the then Aristotelian logic as a hindrance rather than a help to the true knowledge of nature; while, at the same time, he was no less certainly in the wrong if he imagined, or led men to imagine, either that induction was the only method which leads to the discovery of important truth, or thatAristotle’s writings lent any countenance to those baseless and unfruitful methods of speculation which were presented under the authority of his name. It was necessary, however, that the human mind should be thoroughly emancipated from the dictatorial oppression of the false Aristotle before the true Aristotle could be reinstated on his throne; and this required time. Accordingly we find that some of the most original thinkers and ingenious scholars of the last century seem to have imagined that Aristotle and the Pope were two great usurpers, the one in the intellectual, the other in the religious world, whom the great Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, in the interest both of learning and religion, had rightfully dethroned. “Mr. Harris, for example,” says his biographer, “had imbibed a prejudice, very common at that time even among scholars, that Aristotle was an obscure and unprofitable author, whose philosophy had deservedly been superseded by that of Mr. Locke.”[131.1]And in perfect harmony with this, Mr. Burton, in his life of Hume, remarks that “the name of Aristotle is not once mentioned in Hume’s treatise of human nature.”[131.2]Strange revolution of thought in a country where, in the days of John Knox, it had been customary for famous academical teachers to say—“Stultum est dicere Aristotelem errasse!” And, indeed, not only Hume, but Bentham, James Mill, and all the thinkers of that century, manifested a strange lust of spinning knowledge out of their own bowels, so to speak, with a careless or insolent neglect of the great truths handed down for the use of all ages by the masterthinkers of ancient times. But not even in Scotland, never famous for Greek, could such ignorance last for ever. The French Revolution of 1789 shook all men violently out of their old complacencies, and blew their dainty conceits of all kinds to the winds; things were now to be built up from the foundations, not in the political world only, but in the intellectual and religious world no less; torpid Churches were suddenly fevered with hot activity; in literature the forgotten language of a natural and passionate poetry was to be restored; and in philosophy the ancient foundations of stable knowledge were to be laid bare. Under such a violent volcanic action it could not be but that both Plato and Aristotle should be made to stand out before lesser names in their true dimensions. Aristotle especially revealed himself to many thoughtful Germans, and a few thoughtful Englishmen, as the precursor of Bacon in the use of the great organon of induction; and the hard and cautious genius of the Scotch, under the guidance of a polyhistoric Hamilton, found in the Stagirite a more dignified corner-stone than in Reid for the erection of a philosophical edifice which rather sought safety in narrowing than glory in extending the bounds of human speculation. In Oxford, the stiff conservatism of the College tutors, men trained to the exact knowledge of a few traditional books, more certainly than any profound philosophical insight, preserved the Ethics, along with the Logic, of Aristotle as one of the general instruments of juvenile drill; while, outside the academic precincts, liberal statesmen like Cornewall Lewis and democratic historians like Grote continued to quote the Stagirite as the wisest at once and the most cautious of allancient political speculators. Thus the natural balance of judgment was restored; and Aristotle, redeemed at once from the ignorant idolatry of pseudo disciples and the local conceit of men who spurned to learn from any but themselves, took his place for ever as an intellectual dictator of the first rank, with whom if a man did not happen to agree, it was always more likely that the dissentient had wandered into error than that the authority from whom he dissented had failed to fasten his glance upon the truth.

Before attempting to set forth in its great salient points the ethical system of Aristotle, it will be at once interesting and useful to sketch shortly the leading events of his life, omitting altogether, as a matter of course, those hundred and one points of uncertain report and slippery slander which are wont to attach themselves to the fame of any great man as to a natural nucleus. And when a man like Aristotle is not only a great man according to the common measure of human greatness, but an altogether extraordinary man, it is as natural that he should be spoken against from all sides as that dogs should bark at a stranger. The epiphany of an intellectual giant in any assembly of men of average talent makes those appear dwarfs who had previously, not without reason, accounted themselves of reputable stature; and as no man likes to be dwarfed, the necessary result of such an apparition is to set men’s wits agog to find out cunning devices, whereby the overwhelming stature of the huge intruder may seem to be curtailed. So Aristotle, we are told, had “a whole host of enemies;” and we shall therefore, as just judges, be justified in throwing out of court, as vitiated in its source, the greater part of the merely anecdotalaccretions that cling to the name of the mighty Stagirite.

The adjuncts of high social position and freedom from pecuniary pressure, always advantageous to wise men, hurtful only to fools, Aristotle enjoyed in a remarkable degree. Born 384 B.C. in a Greek town, but under Macedonian influence, his father, who belonged to an old Asclepiad family, as court physician to King Amyntas, had ample opportunities of launching him into the world with all the training, equipment, and supports that are the natural harbingers of a prosperous career. He was not therefore a Greek in the strict sense of the word; and, though he borrowed his language and culture from Attica, and sympathized mainly with popular institutions, as his great work on Politics shows, he had good reason to congratulate himself that he did not lose his original citizenship when the eloquence of Demosthenes thundered in vain against the gold and the iron of the Macedonian. In the period of Aristotle’s youth there was nothing in Greece proper to make any thoughtful person lament that he had been born a subject of a sturdy and semi-barbarous but rising monarchy, rather than a citizen of an exhausted and decaying democracy; for though the victories of Chabrias had restored in some sort the supremacy of the Athenians at sea, the brilliant career of Epaminondas had elevated Thebes for a moment only to make general Greece more divided and less able to resist the growing power of Macedonia. Whether his father had destined him to follow his own profession is uncertain; there are however in theEthics, and elsewhere in his works, frequent allusions to the medical art, such as might have been expected fromthe associations of his parentage; and the prominent place given to physical science in his writings seems to indicate a tendency partly favoured by the circumstances of his birth, partly evoked by the natural progress of the Greek mind in the then stage of its development. This only we know certainly, that at the age of seventeen, about the time when young men in Scotland generally leave school for the university, the future father of encyclopædic science was sent to Athens, where he remained for twenty years as a pupil of Plato in the Academy. But though a pupil, he was anything but a disciple. Naturally of an inductive rather than a speculative habit of mind, and disposed to dissect and to tabulate rather than to collect and to construct, he displayed from year to year a more marked divergence from the great ideal thinker who at that time was impressing his type on the rising intellect of Greece. The reported gossip of antiquity has much to say about some bitter rivalry that arose, and unseemly quarrel that broke out, between the dictatorial master and the independent pupil; but we need believe nothing of this, except in so far as it may be an indication of a radical difference of intellectual character in the two men, which could not but make itself felt in various ways, more or less inconsistent with the relation of a merely receptive and responsive discipleship. Nothing is more common in the intercourse of cultivated men, than that one of the parties finds himself in a condition to respect profoundly what he cannot at all agree with, and what he feels bound, ever and anon, decidedly to controvert. So it fared no doubt with young Aristotle in relation to old Plato. Confluence between two souls so differently constituted therecould be none. They cannot be compared as one rose may be compared with another, or even as one flower may be contrasted with another flower, but only as things of a totally different nature, may be named in the same sentence to make their incommensurability more patent. The intellect of Aristotle was a granite palace, that of Plato a garden of paradise; Aristotle’s wit was like a sharp knife and a weighty hammer, Plato’s like a rolling river and a shining ocean; the one bristled with all carious knowledge, the other blossomed with all lofty speculation; Aristotle analysed all things great and small; Plato harmonized all things beautiful and grand. Along with this inborn diversity of intellectual character, we have reason to suppose that there were certain habits of life and social peculiarities about the Stagirite, which were not without offence to the more strict and devoted Platonists. For that there was a certain tinge of Puritanism, and even a sort of lofty pedantry, occasionally manifested in the great architect of ideas, can, I think, scarcely be doubted by any one who has read his great work—theRepublic—with an unbribed judgment. Now if Plato was somewhat of a philosophical Puritan, in Aristotle there was presented that combination of a philosopher and a man of the world, of the man of principle with the man of practice, which, because it is difficult to produce, is always rare, and because it is rare is always admired. A physician, and above all a court physician, must be a man who enjoys and who understands society: such was Aristotle’s father; and the son, while betaking himself to the quiet bowers of the Athenian Academy for the cultivation of thought, could not forget that there was a large busy world withoutwhich imperiously asserted itself, and from which not even a philosopher could be allowed to withdraw with impunity. It was a characteristic tenet of the Peripatetic school that the external trappings and decorations of life are not to be looked down on with a lofty contempt, but rather cared for as serviceable, and in some cases necessary, aids to a perfect life; and so those Quaker-like affectations of plain garb, and those over-virtuous abstinences from “cakes and ale” and other delights of the merely sensuous part of our nature, which some Platonic and Stoic philosophers affected, could not but meet from Aristotle with a practical protest, of which some significant hint peeps out here and there among the scraps of ancient anecdote-mongers and memoir-writers. Plato, we are told, “was not pleased with Aristotle’s manner of life, nor with his dress. For indeed he was somewhat nice and curious in his apparel, and there was a particular tidiness about his shoes; and his hair also he had cut after a jaunty fashion, not approved of by men of Plato’s following; and he made a display of many rings on his finger. Moreover, there was a peculiar sarcastic play about his mouth, and, when he spoke, he could prattle away with a notable fluency; all which things seemed not to be quite in keeping with the character of a philosopher, and were the occasion that Plato preferred Speusippus and Xenocrates, who afterwards became his successors in the Academy.” This picture is, no doubt, in the main true; and it can only excite our admiration when we consider that the same man of whom this is told was also noted as the most severe and persistent reader in Athens; his house, indeed, was called by Plato “the house of the reader;” and thelearned geographer Strabo notes him as the first Greek who collected books on a large scale, and supplied to the Ptolemies of the succeeding age the model of those systematic stores of books with which they made Alexandria famous. Aristotle therefore may justly be regarded as the great prototype of those modern Germans who, like the mailed knights of the middle ages, stand up in our libraries, cased in the invulnerable panoply of polyhistoric and encyclopædic erudition; and he gave birth to that curious sort of intellectual laboriosity, which when divorced from his genius and his sagacity, produced those accumulations of written and printed record, under which the shelves of so many libraries groan, by which also, we may justly say, not a few strong intellects have been lost to the living world, smothered beneath heaps of cumbrous babblement, in extent infinite, in value infinitesimal.

After the death of Plato in the year 347, Aristotle retired for a few years to the court of his fellow-student and friend Hermias, then ruler of Atarnæ, on the coast of Asia Minor. This change of scene was necessary for him, while on the one hand his scheme of establishing a new school of philosophy was yet immature, and, on the other hand, the political relations between Macedonia and Athens were not such as that it would be pleasant for him to be identified with a city which might soon be forced into hostility with his natural sovereign. It was fruitful also, no doubt, in those shrewd observations on men and manners which stamp so many sagacious pages in his moral and political treatises. From this judicious retirement after a few years he was called to a field of morehonourable and influential activity. In the year 342 he received a letter from Philip of Macedon, requesting him to undertake the office of tutor to his young son Alexander. The duties of this position he performed with such results to his royal pupil as in such circumstances were to be expected; and with the great advantage to himself of adding the resources of an absolute monarch and a great conqueror to his own private instruments for the prosecution of scientific research. The unexpected death of Philip by the hands of an assassin, called Alexander prematurely to dash into that brilliant career of Asiatic victory which has made his name no less famous than that of his tutor, who by this event relieved at once from personal responsibility and political apprehension, found himself in a position to establish that independent school of wisdom at Athens, which now for more than two thousand years has propagated itself in the world as the natural and necessary complement to the Platonic style of thought. In the year 334 he pitched his intellectual camp at the Lyceum, in the eastern suburbs of Athens, under Mount Lycabettus, and here during the space of thirteen years he remained exercising towards his scholars the diverse functions of fatherhood and fraternity, which in the ancient philosophical associations, as in the early Christian Churches, were so happily combined. After the death of Alexander, in the year 322, he left Athens and retired to Chalcis, in Eubœa, where he had a small property; a migration to which political considerations must have been the main inducement, for so distinguished a dependant of the Macedonian court could scarcely look upon himself as safe inthe Attic capital the moment that the death of the great conqueror opened up to the most distinguished people whom his arms had subjugated the prospect of political liberation. The philosopher, accordingly, when leaving the city of his adoption, as it turned out for the last time, with an obvious allusion to the fate of Socrates, is reported to have said that he did so in order that the Athenians might not again have the opportunity of signalizing themselves by the murder of a philosopher; for, indeed, in unlimited democracy generally, and specially in the extreme democracy of that time, he had no faith, observing sarcastically that while the Athenians had discovered two useful things, wheat and freedom, they understood how to use the one, but the other they had possessed for a short time, only to abuse. And no doubt he acted wisely in retreating from a scene where no weight of character or reputation for grave wisdom could have shielded him from the combined assault of personal malignity and political rancour so ready in every democratic soil to rise with jealous spite against individual eminence and independence. The philosopher was threatened, we are told, with prosecution for atheism; a charge which, however unfounded to the eye of reason, might have been brought against the Stagirite from the orthodox Athenian point of view with much more justice than about eighty years before it had been brought against the great father of moral science. An atheist certainly, in the strict sense of the term, Aristotle was not, but a pious believer in the polytheistic theology of his country he was even less; piety indeed of any kind is not at all a pronounced feature in the composition of his character. Like many amodern man of science, he had cultivated acuteness at the expense of wonder; and, while indulging in the omnivorous lust of knowledge, had starved veneration, and stunted the growth of some of the most delicate emotions of the soul. For devotion is of the very finest fragrance of the emotional life; and as there are some flowers without smell, so there are some souls without piety. In point of religious feeling, beyond all question, both Socrates and Plato were infinitely superior to Aristotle.

Such are the few trustworthy notices that have been preserved to us of the outward fortunes of this great hierarch of encyclopædic knowledge. He died shortly after his retirement to Chalcis, at the early age of sixty-three, followed immediately by his great contemporary Demosthenes. On his deathbed he named Theophrastus as his successor in the chair of the great school of philosophy which he had founded.

We now proceed to place before the reader a short statement of the most striking characteristics of the ethical philosophy of Aristotle as they are set forth in that compact little book, theNicomachean Ethics. And the first observation proper to make here is the extreme practicality that appears not more in the general colour and tone than in the individual chapters and paragraphs of this remarkable volume. In criticising the sermons delivered in our Christian pulpits we are accustomed to distinguish between doctrinal and practical preaching, and to believe that while, in Scotland at least, the former is the more popular and the more easy, the latter is always the more difficult and the more efficient style of moral address. Now what we have to say of Aristotle, as he appears in theEthics, is that he is not a merewriter on ethics, an acute speculator or a subtle casuist, but he presents himself with all the seriousness of a preacher, and an eminently practical preacher. No doubt in this capacity he must be regarded both by natural genius and in the general tone of his ethical writings as second to his great master Plato; but his influence on the moral culture of the world has not for that reason been less. A large class of men, especially in this practical country, are apt to suspect Plato of nonsense; and these are unwilling to take advice in the affairs of common life from a man who, in his flights of ideal constructiveness, so far transcends the narrow range of their own hard-faced realism. But Aristotle is a man whom no man can suspect of nonsense. He takes what lies before him, and in the most cool practical way conceivable proceeds to analyse it, and to spell out its significance. He is not ambitious—at least not in the department of morals—of piling a grand system, or of tabulating an exhaustive scheme. He is a practical man, as much as you or I am, and sees with marked distinctness always what lies in his way. There is no fear that under his guidance you will lose yourself in a mist or be carried off your feet in a balloon. He is therefore peculiarly fitted for being put forward as a lay-preacher to a British public; and the Oxford scholars have done good service to the English youth by giving his famous work on Ethics such a prominent place among classical books of the first rank. He is as sensible as Dr. Paley, and a great deal more profound; while, on the other hand, it never occurs to him that it is necessary to prepare the way for a plain practical discourse on the conduct of life by abstract discussionson the liberty of the will and the responsibility of free agents. This omission Principal Grant considers a weakness; I consider it a sign of good sense, or, at all events, a remarkable piece of good luck. He assumes morality in the moral world, just as he assumes light and air and water in the physical; he describes a moral man with strong lines and a firm hand, just as he would describe a healthy man as contrasted with a diseased man. If you have a single eye and an honest purpose, you will not fail to know what he means; if you have not, his book is not for you. There never was a more practical preacher. This wordpractical, therefore, I desire the reader to emphasize doubly when he applies himself to the thorough comprehension of theNicomachean Ethics. There are, no doubt, in this treatise, as in almost every Greek book, some half-dozen curious questions raised, which, like the subtle casuistry of the Jesuit doctors, have little practical value; for Aristotle was a Greek, and as such a habitual dealer in ἀπορήματα, or knotty points, in the solution of which a hard practical Scot or a broad burly Englishman would think a single sentence wasted. These however belong to the soil, grow up like weeds among the best wheat, and, like bad puns in Shakespeare, must be taken with the lot. In the gross and scope of his handling, as we have said, the Stagirite systematically waives all unpractical questions; and in the very arrangement of his book an attentive reader will not fail to discern that there are certain scientific deficiencies which can be explained fully only from the consideration that the writer had vividly realized the difference between what we could call an academical lecture and a sermon, and wasdetermined to make it felt that a lecture on morals, through which the undertones of seriousness that belong to a sermon are not heard, is one of the most absurd and unmeaning of all human performances. No doubt this defect in respect of strictly scientific method may arise partly from the fact that the treatise seems to have been composed at different times, and packed up, so to speak, in bundles rather than reared up architecturally into a jointed structure; it is also plain enough to any one who can read with a discerning eye that the work was left incomplete by the great author, and that the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, as we now have then, are from a different hand, and of manifestly inferior workmanship; but I consider it not less certain that, had it not been for the dominance of the practical point of view, not a few chapters in this most valuable treatise would have been compacted more aptly into the firmness of a complete organism. Once and again in the first two books of his treatise does he repeat the solemn warning that our object in inquiring into the nature of virtue is, not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may be virtuous. Once and again does he enter a protest against the supersubtle tendencies of his countrymen, always ready to stand and debate, even where the solution of the problem was to be found only in motion and in action. Subtleties of any kind, indeed, are not suitable for a moral discourse; the entertainment of them shows that the inquirer has not yet conceived what the purport of the inquiry is; ethical philosophy refers as distinctly to a deed as a sword refers to a cut; and all questions about morals are idle, and even pernicious, that do not bear directly on some practical result.We must therefore, so Aristotle argues, in our method of discussion here, not insist on having always those exact proofs and nice definitions which in the sciences of measurement and number may fairly be demanded. We should rather seek for an analogy to moral science in such arts as medicine, and say that propriety of conduct, like the health of the body, is liable to much indeterminateness and variation; that to seek for scientific rules which might apply with exactitude to all cases is absurd; that no wise man will attempt to cut logs with razors, and that in such matters of complex practice we must content ourselves with stating some such broad general principles as suit the great majority of cases, and which every man must be left to apply for himself in the experience of life. Of the deep tone of practical seriousness which underlies the whole of theNicomachean Ethics, I know no more striking proof than an utterance of Maurice, in the preface to his exposition of the Epistles of John, which I shall here extract. “I owe unspeakable gratitude,” says that truly evangelical moralist, “to the University of Oxford for having put Aristotle’sEthicsinto my hands, and induced me to read it, and to think of it. I doubt if I could have received a greater boon from any university or any teacher. I will tell you what this book did for me. First, it assured me that the principles of morals cannot belong to one time or another; that they must belong to all times. Here was an old heathen Greek making me aware of things that were passing within me, detecting my laziness and my insincerity, showing how little I was doing the things which I professed to do, forcing me to confess that with all theadvantages which I enjoyed he was better than I was. That was one great thing. Next, I could not but learn from him—for he took immense pains to tell me—that it is not by reading a book or learning a set of maxims by heart that one gets to know anything of morality, that it belongs to life, and must be learned in the daily practice of life. English and Christian writers no doubt might have told me the same thing. But I am not sure that their words would have gone as much home as Aristotle’s did. I might have thought that it was their business, part of their profession, to utter those stern maxims, and to hold up such lofty ideals of conduct.” And what adds immense force to Aristotle’s preaching, especially with young men, is the feeling that they have here to do not only with a non-professional preacher but with a thorough gentleman, and a shrewd man of the world, the friend of princes, and of great statesmen and mighty captains. It is seldom indeed that young men in the heat of their blood and the glow of their fancy will listen with much attention to sermons of any kind, even from the best preachers; but if they will not receive the word of warning from such a prophet as Aristotle they will at least have no excuse for sneering either at the doctor or the doctrine. In him they will find no sarcastic Cynic, content with the negative pleasure of snarling from his private kennel at the faults of men, instead of rising to help their infirmities; no sickly devotee whose principal occupation through the dreariness of the present life is to dream and maunder about the glories of the future; no curious registrar of morbid frames of mind or dainty nurse of unproductive sentiment. Such caricatures of the spiritual man,justly odious to the vigorous, generous, and sanguineous temper of youth, may be found cropping out largely in the histories both of philosophical and religious sectaries; but not a hint of them appears in the thoroughly masculine, thoroughly manly, and thoroughly healthy Ethics of Aristotle.

The corner-stone of Aristotle’s moral doctrine, as in that of Socrates, lies in the single word λόγος, which, whether in its internal side as Reason, or with its outer face as Discourse, was so peculiarly the watchword of the Hellenic race. “The Greeks seek after wisdom;” and wisdom, or σοφία, is in all cases the result, and the only possible result, of the just exercise of λόγος or reason. We shall not therefore expect to find in the Stagirite any fundamental principle different from that on which the moral doctrine of Socrates rests—nay, just as some of the most characteristic maxims of the New Testament can be pointed out in, and no doubt were actually borrowed from, the Old Testament, even so, and in a much greater degree, was the ethical doctrine of Aristotle borrowed in its great leading points from Socrates and Plato. This borrowing, however, was not in the style of patchwork; it was an affair of natural growth. What we find in Aristotle is not a new ethical doctrine, but the emphasizing and systematizing of certain important aspects of an old doctrine. Now the aspect which Aristotle strongly emphasizes as the starting-point of his ethical teaching is the τέλος and the ἀγαθόν. All men profess to have some object after which they strive in their life and by their deeds; no man in this world, as Goethe says, can safely live at random: the ship that sails at random will be wreckedeven in a calm, and the man who lives at random will be ruined without the help of any positive vice. What then is it that men must propose to themselves as the τέλος, the end, object, or purpose of their existence? Generally, all men profess to be seeking for the ἀγαθόν, or the Good. The question, therefore, which ethical science has to answer is, in the words of the Westminster Catechism,What is the chief end of man?What is the ultimate aim and highest Good, thesummum bonum, of which the creature called Man is capable? How are we to discover this? Plainly in the same way that we discover the chief good of any special kind of man,—a man exercising any special professional function. What is thesummum bonumof a flute-player? Of course to play the flute, and to play the flute well; of a soldier, to fight well; of a shoemaker, to make good shoes; of a brewer, to brew good beer; of a fowler, to snare birds; and of an angler, to hook fish. The chief end, therefore, of any creature is found by discovering his natural work or business in the world,—for all things are full of labour, and a man’s duty is always some kind of work. As, then, there is a special work for the flute-player or the fowler, which determines his chief good, so, if we are to find the chief end of man, we must put our finger on some general work or business, which belongs to all men as men, and not as engaged in special occupations and practising particular arts. How is this work found? Of course by fixing our attention on the differentiating element in the human creature. The differentiating element in birds is wings, in fish fins, in worms rings. By this differentiation, stamped on every creature by the absolute dictatorship ofNature, the destiny and the duty, the privilege and the glory, of each type of organized existence is inevitably determined. The creature has nothing to do in the matter but to recognise and to obey; unreasoning creatures unconsciously and blindly, choice. The proper work of man, therefore, can lie only in what in him is most distinctively human; not therefore of course in any function of the merely vegetative life which he has in common with the plant; nor again in any function of the merely sensuous life, which he enjoys in common with, oxen; but in the exercise of that faculty which he alone possesses, and which alone stamps him as distinctively human, viz.,Reason. The work of a man, accordingly, and the chief end of all men, will be an energizing of the soul, according to reason, or not without reason; and a life according to reason will be good, and the chief good; and not only so, but it must also be the pleasure, and the highest pleasure, of the reasonable being who leads such a life; for the pleasure of every creature lies in acting freely and without hindrance according to its distinctive nature; and as horses are the pleasure of the rider, and views of the landscape painter, so good actions are the pleasure of good men, and reasonable actions the delight of all who live by the use of reason; so much so indeed, that he cannot even claim to be numbered amongst good men who, besides doing good deeds, does not likewise rejoice in doing such deeds. Charity given with an unwilling hand is not charity; it is a boon extorted.

This statement taken almost literally from the first eight chapters of the first book of theEthics, will, it is hoped, make the moral attitude of Aristotlesufficiently intelligible. He does not say, with Bentham and the modern utilitarians, “Look round about you for what is pleasurable; and that which affords pleasure to you, and to the greatest possible number of creatures with whom you are socially connected, is your duty;” but he looks about to find your distinctive excellence, your peculiar faculty among all creatures,—“Exercise that,” he says, “and you fulfil your destiny, and attain your chief good. As for pleasure, that you will have also, not as an amulet hung about your neck, but in the very necessity of your energy exercised according to your special nature. Cultivate what is noblest in you, and you cannot fail to find what is most agreeable. The doing of this, however, is by no means so simple a matter as in the mere abstract statement might appear. It is the business of a man, no doubt, to act reasonably, that is virtuously, just as much as it is the business of a bee to bag honey; but it is a much easier thing for the bee to suck honey from the flowers than for a man to force fragrant deeds from the stuff that daily life presents. How is this? The difficulty lies in the compound nature of man: a nature not compound only, but composed of parts of which one is found to be often strangely at variance with the others; so much so, indeed, that while reason is the distinctive faculty of man, and to act reasonably is at once his safety, his happiness, and his glory, he bears within himself likewise a principle of unreason, an ἄλογον opposed to his λόγος,—a principle in the normal state of man altogether dependent and servile, but which, as things are, has a strong tendency to rebel, assert an unruly independence, and even cast down from his thronethe lawful regent of the soul. This, the reader will remark, is exactly the doctrine of St. Paul, with regard to the contrariety of Flesh and Spirit, in the eighth chapter of the Romans, and expressed in almost the same terms. The exact words of Aristotle are: “There appear manifestly in human beings some strong natural tendencies different from reason, and not only different, but fighting with and resisting reason.” But this remarkable peculiarity in the complex creature Man does not in the least change the nature of human good; it only adds to it another element which makes it in the end more glorious—the element of resistance, struggle, victory, and triumph,—of course always with the necessary alternative of possible feebleness, cowardice, and defeat. And the same fact,—the same original sin, as our theologians term it,—nicely considered, raises a noticeable question about the origin of laws and moral obligation; that old question so often discussed by the Sophists, and argued, as we have seen, by Socrates, in his discourse with Hippias, whether right and wrong exist by nature or by institution, φύσει as they expressed it, or νόμῳ; and the answer given to this question by the Stagirite, characterized by his usual good sense, is that, while the determination of right and wrong is not a matter of arbitrary, compulsory imposition, according to the selfish theory of Hobbes, but lies deeply rooted in the innermost recesses of human nature, it is nevertheless true that it is the nature of man, more perhaps than of any other animal, to require training and discipline to bring out what is in him; and that virtue, in fact, is not virtue till the inborn impulses towards excellence have been fostered and strengthened by those socialappliances which lie in the very primary conditions of human life. We are made virtuous, therefore, neither by nature, nor contrary to nature, nor independently of nature, but wegrowvirtuous by repeated acts of living according to reason, as we learn to see by using our eyes. Virtue is, in fact, a habit;[152.1]and as one fit of drunkenness does not make a man a drunkard, so one act of generosity does not make a generous man, and the whole roll of the virtues practised only once or twice, however completely, does not make a virtuous man. Hence the immense importance of education, which other animals may dispense with, but not man, and on which, accordingly, both Plato and Aristotle insist, as the one thing needful for the well-being, whether of the individual or of society. The existence of innate tendencies towards the Good does not in the least imply that human nature in its early stages may be safely left to itself. These good tendencies may be counteracted by opposite tendencies; they may be overwhelmed by adverse circumstance; they may be extinguished; and experience proves that they not seldom are extinguished.

Having laid this sure foundation in the differentiating element of man, the philosopher might naturally have proceeded to prove that, assuming man to be naturally a social animal, and widowed with those instincts which make social organization necessary to his normal existence, any application of reason to social existence, that is, every assertion of practical reason in a creature so constituted, is what we callright, and every omission to assert it, or direct assertion of the contrary, is what we call wrong. A right action is an action according to the real constitution of things, which reality it is the business of reason to discern; a wrong act is an act in contravention of the real constitution of things, and can be performed only when reason is undeveloped or asleep, or by some violent impulse or blind illusion led astray: it is an act insulated, contumacious, and rebellious, issuing necessarily in confusion and chaos and ruin; for no single unit in a complex whole can assert its mere capricious independent self in practical denial of the totality to which it belongs, without producing discomfort at first, and ultimately being crushed by the firm compactness of the mighty machinery which it has recklessly dared to disturb. How this might have been demonstrated in detail the reader of the preceding discourse on Socrates cannot be ignorant; but however much it lay in his way, the Stagirite in his Nicomachean treatise did not choose to enter upon this theme. For this procedure he may have had two sufficient reasons; for, in the first place, he may have thought that view of the matter lay too obviously in the whole scheme and handling both of Plato and Socrates, to be susceptible of much novelty at his hands; and in the second place, he may have considered such a demonstration, however cogent in a book, to be less practically useful than some test of right and wrong, which he might be able to formulate. And in the test which he hits upon, as we shall presently see, it is quite evident that practical utility rather than theoretic invulnerability was his main object; and this is precisely what, in consistency at once with the nature of thesubject, and his own introductory observations, he was directly led to do. His test was simply this, that virtue, or right conduct, is generally found in the mean between two extremes; for though there may be the same difficulty in pronouncing about the quality of particular actions, sometimes, as there is in pronouncing about the state of bodily health in any individual, yet, upon a broad view of both cases, nothing seems more obvious and more certain than that the unhealthy condition, whether of body or soul, is chiefly indicated by some deficiency or excess. In other words, virtue is a medium, a balance, a proportion, a symmetry, a harmony, a nice adjustment of the force of each part in reference to the calculated action of the whole. Now, it will at once be seen that this principle is not put forth as anything new; its truth rather consists in its antiquity, and in the deep-rooted experience of all human individuals and all human associations. It is a principle which forms part of the proverbial wisdom of all peoples; and the Greeks especially from the oldest times were strong on this point. Μηδὲν ἄγαν—μέτρον ἄριστον—παντὶ μέσω τὸ κράτος θεὸς ὤπασεν—were maxims familiar to every Greek ear long before Aristotle; and in the realm of speculation, the ἀριθμός, ornumberof Pythagoras, when applied to morals, really meant nothing else. So in the Proverbs of Solomon we find the well-known utterances—“Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it.” And again: “Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldst thou die before thytime?” And our Shakespeare, whose plays are a grand equestrian march of all wisdom, says to the same effect in his own admirable style—

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