Part 4

The details of the death of Socrates, sketched with such graceful power and kindly simplicity by Plato in the concluding chapters of the Phædo, are well known; but the present paper would seem imperfect without some glimpse of that last and most beautiful scene of the philosopher’s career. We shall therefore conclude with that extract; and to make the picture of his last days as complete as possible, introduce it by an extract from Plato’s Apology, in which the dignified self-reliance and serene courage of the sage {112} is described with all that rich fulness and easy grace of which the writer was so consummate a master:--

“I should have done what was decidedly wrong, O Athenians, if, when the archons whom you elected ordered me, at Potidæa, at Amphipolis, and at Delium, to accept the post given me in the war, and stand where I was ordered to stand at the risk of death,--if then, I say, I had not obeyed the command, and exposed my life willingly for the good of my country; but when the order comes from a god--as I had the best reason to believe that a god did order me to spend my life in philosophizing, and in proving myself and others, whether we were living according to right reason,--if in such circumstances I should now, from fear of death, or from any other motive, leave my post, and become a deserter, this were indeed a sin; and for such an offence any one might justly bring me before this court on a charge of impiety, saying that I had disobeyed the voice of the god by flinching from death, and conceiting myself to be wise when I was not wise. For to be afraid of death, O Athenians, is in fact nothing else than to seem to be wise when a man is not wise: for it is to seem to have a knowledge of things which a man does not know. For no man really knows whether death may not be to mortal men of all blessings perhaps the greatest; and yet they do fear it, as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And how, I ask, can this be other than the most shameful folly to imagine that a man knows what he does not know? or perhaps do I differ from most other men in this, and if I am wiser at all than any one, am I wiser in this, that, while not possessing any exact knowledge of the state of matters in Hades, I do not {113} imagine that I possess such knowledge; but as to right and wrong, I know for certain, that to disobey a better than myself whether man or god, is both bad and base. On no account therefore will I ever fear and seek to avoid what may or may not be an evil, rather than that which I most certainly know to be bad; in so much that if, on the present occasion, you should be willing to acquit me, and refuse to listen to Anytus, who maintained that I either should never have been brought before you at all, or you could not do otherwise than condemn me to death, because your sons, putting in practice the lessons of Socrates, must needs go on without redemption to their ruin--if, notwithstanding this declaration of my prosecutor, you should still be unconvinced, and say--O Socrates, for the present we discharge you, but on this condition, that for the future you shall not go on philosophizing and proving, as you have hitherto done; and, if you are caught doing so, then you shall die--if on these conditions you were now willing to acquit me, I should say to you, O Athenians, that, while I cherish all loyal respect and love for you, I choose to obey the gods rather than men, and so long as I live and breathe I will never cease philosophizing: and exhorting any of you with whom I may happen to converse, and addressing him as I have been wont, thus,--O my excellent fellow-citizen, the citizen of a State the most famous for wisdom and for resources, is it seemly in you to feel no shame if, while you are spending your strength in the accumulation of money, and in the acquisition of civic reputation, you bestow not the slightest pains to have your soul as well furnished with intelligence as your life is with prosperity? And if any man to {114} this question should reply, that, so far as he is concerned, he really does bestow as much care on wisdom as on wealth, then I will not forthwith let him go, but will proceed, as I was wont, to interrogate, and to prove, and to argue; and if, as the result of the discussion, he shall appear to me not to possess virtue, but merely to say that he possesses it, I will then go on to reprove him in that by his deeds he prefers what is base to what is noble, and foolishly sets the highest value upon that which has the least worth. And in this wise I will speak to every man whom I shall converse with, be he citizen, or be he stranger, and the rather if he be a fellow-citizen to whom I am bound by nearer and more indissoluble ties. For this is precisely what I am commanded to do by the god; and if the god did indeed give forth this command, then must I distinctly declare that no greater blessing could be to this city than that, so long as I do live, I should live to execute the divine command. For what I do day after day treading your streets is simply this, that, speaking to both young and old, I exhort them not to seek in the first place money or anything material, but to stretch every nerve that their soul may be as excellent as possible; for that virtue and all excellence grow not from gold, but rather that gold and all things truly good, both in private and public life, grow to men from the possession of virtue as the root of all good. If by preaching this doctrine I corrupt the youth, let such teaching be declared corrupt: but if any one asserts that I teach other doctrine than this, he is talking unreason. Therefore, O Athenians, do as seemeth you good; listen to Anytus, or listen to him not; acquit me or acquit me not, I can do no otherwise than {115} I have done, though I should die a hundred times.

(At these words murmurs of dissent and disapprobation are heard from the jury.)

“Be not surprised, O Athenians, nor express displeasure at what I have said; listen rather and hear, for you will be the better and not the worse for anything that I have said, and I have some other things to say also of a nature to bring out similar expressions of your dissent; but hear me, I beseech you, with patience. This I must plainly tell you, that if you put me to death, being such an one as I have described, and doing such things as I do, you will not hurt me so much as you will hurt yourselves; or, more properly speaking, no man can hurt me, neither Anytus nor Meletus nor any one else; for it is not in the nature of things that a better man should receive essential harm from a worse. No doubt a worse man may kill me, or banish me, or brand me with statutable infamy--evils these the greatest possible in the estimation of some, but not certainly in my conviction, who hold the greatest infamy to be even that which this man has brought upon himself, in that wrongfully he endeavours to take away the life of his fellow. I am not therefore, in making this present defence, pleading my own cause so much as speaking in your behalf, O Athenians, lest ye should be found sinning against the god in condemning a just man unjustly. For if you put me aside you will not easily find another (though it may excite a smile when I say so) who may be able or willing to perform the same service for the public good; for even as a large and mettlesome, though from the size of its body somewhat slow, horse requires {116} a goad to make it run, even so the god seems to have attached me to you, that by spurring and goading, and exhorting and reproving you day after day with a pious persistency, I should rouse you to the performance of what your dignity requires. Such an honest counsellor, and one who shall as faithfully apply when necessary the profitable pain that belongs to the successful treatment of your malady, you may not so readily find again; for which reason I say, fellow-citizens, hear me and spare my life; but if, as is natural enough, you take offence, and, like other sleepers, begin to kick and to butt at the man who rouses you from your lethargy, nothing is easier than killing me; and then when I am gone you will be allowed to sleep on in uninterrupted sloth, unless indeed the god shall be pleased to send some other messenger of grace to pluck you from destruction. And that I truly am such a person as I here profess to be, a real messenger of the gods to you, you may gather from hence that no mere human motive could have induced me now for so many years to have neglected my own affairs, and devoted myself to your good, looking upon every man as my father or my brother, and exhorting him by every possible suasion to seek for virtue as the only good. And this also I may say, that if in the exercise of this my vocation I had exacted any payment or received any pecuniary reward my accusers might have had some ground for their charge; but as the case stands you perceive plainly that, while my enemies have brought forward every possible charge against me with the most shameless effrontery, to substantiate which they might imagine themselves in possession of some {117} shadow of proof, none of them has produced a single witness to the effect that I ever either received or sought a wage of any kind for the instructions which I imparted. But there is one witness which I can produce to rebut such a charge if it were made, a witness which will not fail to silence even the bitterest of my accusers,--even that poverty in which I have lived and in which I shall die.

“So much for the character of my teaching. But perhaps it may seem strange to some one, that, while I go about the city giving counsel to every man in this busy fashion, with all my fondness for business I have not found my way into public life, nor come forward on this stage to advise you on public affairs. Now the cause of this is none other than that which you have frequently heard me mention, namely, THAT SOMETHING DIVINE AND SUPERHUMAN to which Meletus in his address scoffingly alluded; for this is the sober truth, O ye judges, that from my boyhood I have on all important occasions been wont to hear a voice which, whenever it speaks in reference to what I am about to do, always warns me to refrain, but never urges me to perform.[117.1] This voice it is, {118} and nothing else, which forbade me to meddle with public affairs, and forbade me very wisely, as I can now clearly perceive, and with a most excellent result; for of this, O Athenians, be assured, if I had essayed at an early period of my life to manage your public business, I should without doubt have perished long ago, and done no good either to you or to {119} myself. And be not wroth with me if in this I tell you the truth; the man does not exist who shall be able to save his life anywhere, if he shall set himself honestly and persistently to oppose you or any other multitude of people when you are violently bent on doing things unjust and unlawful; whosoever therefore would live on this earth as the champion of right and justice, if only for a little while, amongst men, must make up his mind to do good as a private person, and forego all ambition to serve the public in a political capacity.”

This is not the tone certainly which any accused person anxious to save his life in pleading before a democratic jury would have adopted, whether at Athens or New York. By the majority of his judges, who came predisposed to condemn him, such language could only be interpreted as adding insult to injury. If he thinks himself too good to live amongst us, why, then, let him die! And in accordance with this sentiment a verdict was brought in--only by a small majority however--that he was guilty of the charge. This verdict, according to Athenian law, did not necessarily determine the punishment; the accuser asked for death; but from the smallness of the majority there was every reason to believe that a less punishment would have satisfied the jury, if only the accused had shown any willingness to accept it. But in the short address which he made after the verdict of guilty had been given in, though he professed himself willing to pay a fine of thirty minæ, which his friends had guaranteed, for himself was too poor, yet he made this declaration with such an air of calm superiority, and accompanied it with such a proud claim of reward {120} for great public services as his proper civic due, instead of punishment for any public offence, that his judges, being, as they were, made of the common human stuff, under the feelings of the moment could scarcely do otherwise than take it as an insult, and so they passed sentence of death upon the philosopher for contumacy towards themselves, not less than for blasphemy against the gods.

The fate of Socrates was now fixed; nor did he show any desire to have it altered. To such a strict observer of the laws, and a person to whom his moral position before men was of infinitely more consequence than his life, any attempt to escape from prison could have been suggested only to provoke refusal; so he remained in ward thirty days, till the sacred ship should return from the Delian festival, during the absence of which Attic usage forbade the infliction of capital punishment on any citizen. Through all this period he is represented as preserving the same tone of cheerful seriousness and playful dignity which characterized him in his defence before the judges. He discoursed with his friends on the immortality of the soul; and the record of this conversation, no doubt, in the argumentative part largely Platonized, but in the fundamental scheme substantially true, has been preserved to the world in the well-known dialogue of the Phædo; the closing chapters of which, exhibiting with a graceful and graphic simplicity, never surpassed, the last moments of the revered teacher’s mortal career, supply all that is further required to complete the present sketch:--“Well, friends, we have been discoursing for this last hour on the immortality of the soul, and there are many points about that matter {121} on which he were a bold man who should readily dogmatize; but one thing I seem to know full certainly, that whosoever during his earthly life has flung sensual pleasures behind him, and been studious to adorn his soul, not with conventional and adventitious trappings, but with its own proper decoration, temperance and justice, and courage and freedom and truth,--the person so prepared waits cheerfully to perform the journey to the unseen world at whatever period Fate may choose to call him. You, Simmias, and Cebes, and the rest of you, my dear friends, will go that road some day, when your hour comes: as for me, to use the phrase of the tragic poets, ‘Destiny even now calls me,’ and it is about the hour that I should be going to the bath; for I think it better to take a bath first before I drink the drug, so that the women may not have the trouble to wash my body when I am gone.

“Here Crito interposed and said, Be it so! but have you no last commands to give to these your friends or to me, in relation to your children, or any matter by attending to which we might do you a pleasure? Nothing but what I am always saying, O Crito: if you will seriously attend to your own lives and characters, you will do what is most pleasurable to me and mine, and to yourselves, even though you should not be able to agree with me in all that we have been discoursing; but if you live at random, and neglect yourselves, and do not strive to follow in the traces of a virtuous life, such as we have marked out now, and in many former conversations, you will do no good either to me or to yourselves. Well then, said Crito, we will apply ourselves with all our hearts to this matter; but in {122} what way do you wish that we should bury you? Any way you like, said he, if you can only get hold of me! then with a quiet smile, and looking round upon us, he said: I cannot persuade this good Crito that I who am now talking to him, and marshalling the heads of my argument, am the veritable Socrates; but he persists in thinking Socrates is that body which he will see by and by stretched out on the floor, and he asks how he is to bury me? but as to what I have been asserting with many words, that after I have drunk the hemlock I shall be with you no longer, but shall depart to some blessedness of the blest, this I seem to have spoken all in vain, so far as he is concerned. Only, for a little comfort to you, and to myself, I beseech you, dear friends, give Crito security for me, and pledge yourself to the opposite effect of the pledge he gave in my behalf before the jury. For he stood guarantee that I should remain and wait the result of the trial; but from you I request that you give him security that, after I die, I shall not remain, but forthwith depart, that, in this way, my excellent friend may suffer less grief, and when he sees my body either burnt or inhumated, may not grieve for me, as if I were suffering maltreatment, nor say in reference to my body, that they are either laying out Socrates on a bier, or carrying him forth to the place of the dead, or laying him in the ground. For be assured of this, most excellent Crito, that to use words in an improper sense is not only a bad thing in itself, but it generates a bad habit in the soul. Be of good cheer therefore, and talk about burying my body, not burying me; and as to the manner, manage this business as it shall seem best to you, or as may be most in accordance with law and custom.

{123}

“With these words he rose and went into a side chamber for the bath, with Crito following; but the rest of us he requested to remain. Accordingly we remained, conversing with one another on the subject of the recent discourse, and considering sorrowfully our unhappy condition, destined as we were to spend the rest of our days as orphans deprived of a beloved father. Then after he had bathed, and his children were brought to him--for he had two sons, one full-grown,--and the women also came in--he spoke to them for some time in the presence of Crito, and gave his last commands, and having sent them home, came back to us. And now it was near sunset, for he had been a considerable time within; and he came and sat down, and after that did not speak much; and then the officer of the Eleven came in and said to him, O Socrates, I shall not have to blame you as I am in the way of blaming others, because they reproach me for giving them the draught--me, who have nothing to do with the offence, but who only execute what I am commanded to do by the Archons. But you, as during the whole time that you have been here, you showed a nobility and gentleness of disposition which I never knew in another, so now I am convinced that you will accuse not me but those who are the real authors of your death. Now therefore, for you know my message, farewell! and endeavour to bear what must be borne with a light heart. And with this he wept, and turned and went out. And Socrates, looking after him, said, Fare thou, too, well; and we will do even as you say. Then turning to us. What a kind-hearted fellow this is! During the whole period of my abode here he would often come {124} up to me, like the best of men, and now he weeps for me with such generous tears. But come, let us do his bidding, and let some one bring in the drug, if it is rubbed down; if not, let the man grate it. But I think, said Crito, that the sun is yet on the mountains, and is not set; and I have known others in your condition who delayed the drinking of the draught till the latest moment, and, even after the officer had made his intimation, continued eating and drinking and talking with their friends, whom they desired to have beside them. Be not therefore in a hurry; there is abundance of time. Likely enough, said Socrates; and they did wisely what they did, thinking that they would gain something thereby; but it were not seemly in me to follow their example, for I should gain nothing by delaying the draught for a few moments except to laugh at myself for having clung so eagerly to the remnant of a life that had already run its course. But come, do as I bid you, and not otherwise.

“On this Crito gave a nod to the boy who was standing near; and the boy went out, and after spending some time in grating down the herb, returned, bringing with him the man whose duty it was to administer the drug mingled in a bowl. Well, said Socrates, my good fellow, do you understand this affair, so as to give directions how we are to proceed? You have nothing to do, said the man, but to drink the draught, and to walk about till you feel a heaviness about your limbs, and then lie down; after that the drink will work for itself. And with this he gave the bowl to Socrates; and he, taking it very graciously, and without trembling or changing colour, but in his usual way looking the man broadly {125} in the face, said to him, What do you say as to this draught, may one make a libation of a part of it, or not? We grate down just what we think is a proper measure to drink, and nothing more. I understand, said he; but at all events it is lawful to pray to the gods, that our migration hence may take place with good omens, even as I pray now; and so be it. And with these words, bringing the bowl to his lips, he quaffed the draught lightly and pleasantly to the dregs. Whereupon we, who had hitherto been able to repress our sorrow, now that we saw him drinking the poison, and not a drop remaining in the bowl, in spite of every effort burst into tears; and I, covering my head with my mantle, began to bewail my fate--my fate, not his, considering of what a man and what a friend I was now deprived. But Crito, even before me, not being able to restrain his tears, rose up; and as for Apollodorus, who had been weeping all along, he now broke out into such a piteous wail as to rend the hearts of all present and crush them with sorrow, except only Socrates himself, who quietly remarked--What is this you are about, my good sirs? Did I not send the women away expressly for this purpose, that there might be no extravagant lamentings at my exit, for I have always heard that in a sacrifice it is a good omen when the victim receives the blow peacefully. Be quiet, therefore, and possess your souls in patience. Whereat we, being ashamed, made an effort to restrain our tears. Then he walked up and down, till, feeling his legs become heavy, he came, according to the direction, and laid himself down on his back; whereupon the man who gave the bowl came up to him and touched him, and at short intervals examined his feet, and {126} his legs, and then, pressing his foot closely, inquired if he felt anything, to which he replied, No; then the man gradually brought his hand further and further up, first to his shins and then along the leg, asking always if he had any sensation; and when he gave no sign we saw that his limbs were cold and stiff. Then he himself likewise touched his body with his hand and said, When the numbness comes up to my heart then I shall depart. And after that, when the numbness had reached the lower part of the belly, he suddenly uncovered himself--for when he lay down he had thrown his mantle over his face--and said,--which were the last words he uttered--O Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius; pay the vow and do not forget; and with that drew the mantle again over his face. It shall be done, said Crito; have you nothing else to say? But now there was no reply; and, after a short interval, a convulsive motion shook the body, and the man going up uncovered his face, and we saw that his eyes were fixed. Then Crito going up closed his mouth and his eyes. And this, O Echecrates, was the end of our beloved companion and friend, a man of whom we may truly say, OF ALL MEN WHOM WE HAVE KNOWN, HE WAS THE BEST, THE WISEST, AND THE MOST JUST.”

ARISTOTLE.

{127}

THERE is a natural sequence in the processes of social culture which is well illustrated by the history of Moral Philosophy among the Greeks. The man of action comes before the man of literature, the man of literature before the man of science. In Greek ethics Socrates was the man of action, Plato the man of literature, and Aristotle the man of science. Not, of course, that Plato was merely the literary man, in the trivial modern sense of that word; he was eminently the philosopher--not merely φιλόλογος but φιλόσοφος--but he put forth his philosophy in a popular form; he addressed himself to the imagination as well as the reason; he appealed, as we would say, to the general public; and speaking to men in a human way, on the most interesting of human topics, through the medium of language artistically handled, he falls manifestly under the broad category of the literary as opposed to the scientific man, who works on a special subject, and with a special faculty. But Aristotle was pre-eminently, and with very marked features, the man of knowledge; he came with the dissecting knife in hand and addressed himself to those who were willing to make special dissections with him for the mere purpose of knowing, and drew a broad line of {128} demarcation between the speculative and the practical world. Nevertheless the Stagirite was something more than a knowing machine; he was a man, and by virtue of his Hellenic birth also a citizen. He could not therefore avoid occupying to a certain extent the province of the practical man; and so it has come to pass that in three great works, the Ethics, the Politics, and the Rhetoric, he has transported himself from the teacher’s chair, and entered into competition with Socrates and Plato as a preacher of social morals and a guide to civic conduct. This was well both for him and for us: well for him, because mere knowing can never exhaust the riches of a nature so essentially practical as that of man: well for us, because otherwise we could scarcely have imagined the phenomenon of an intellect at once so complete in all the categories of scientific cognition, and so strongly marked with all the sagacity that belongs to the so-called practical man, the man of society, the man of business, the accomplished citizen. And it is to this walking out into the realm of common life, instead of confining himself like so many erudite Germans within the limits of a library or a laboratory, that Aristotle owes no small part of the influence which he has so long exercised, not only in the schools but among intelligent men of all classes. In ancient times, when Moral Philosophy was justly regarded as the principal part of that wisdom which it concerns all men to possess, the Philosopher of the Lyceum never would have been able to assert his place as a public teacher alongside of Socrates and Plato had he bestowed only a secondary consideration on the grand arts of living and governing. As it was, the poet-philosopher of the Academy could not but remain {129} the more popular and the more effective moral teacher of the two; but if Plato was more attractive and more interesting, and by these qualities commanded a wider audience, it was a great consolation to the lesser circle of the Stagirite’s disciples that, though in his discourses on moral matters he was more angular and more severe, he was at the same time more shrewd, more sagacious, and more practical. The reputation which Aristotle thus maintained among ancient Greeks and Romans, both as a speculator and as a wise guide in the conduct of life, was increased rather than diminished when brought into contact with the new moral force of Christianity. No doubt Plato at first was the natural vestibule through which the cultivated Greeks of Alexandria entered the temple of Christian faith; but after that faith, partly in league with Plato, and partly in spite of Plato, had achieved its natural triumph, Aristotle, the clear, cold, and keen, but by no means devout master of all knowledge, by a sort of reaction, as it should seem, in the middle ages began to assert an exclusive dominance in the schools, both of Christian Europe and, through the Arabians, in the East. To all who were anxious for clear and exact knowledge in matters visible and tangible, the Stagirite was the only guide. As the high priest of science he acted in those days of sacerdotal direction as the natural complement of faith, not as its antagonist; and for this reason he is praised by Dante among the solemn forms of the mighty dead that pace through the dim halls of the unseen world, as

“Il gran maestro di color chi sanno.”

The dethronement which he afterwards suffered at {130} the hands of those twin innovators Luther and Lord Bacon was again a mere matter of reaction, and could in its nature be only temporary. Honest Martin raged in his own way very furiously against the great dictator of the schools, almost as if he had been the Pope:--“Aristotle, that histrionic mountebank, who from behind a Greek mask has so long bewitched the Church of Christ, that most cunning juggler of souls, whom, if he had not been accredited as of human blood and bone, we should have been justified in maintaining to be the veritable devil.”[130.1] But this we plainly see to be the language of a man not with the balance of truth in his hand, but with the sword of sacred wrath in his tongue; and, indeed, the sword was at that time very needful, and wielded with a wise hostility, not against the true. Aristotle whom we now read and admire, but against the so-called Aristotelian fence of the schools, used oftener for subtle and shadowy exercitation and in defence of the grossest abuses than in the honest search after truth. Of the real Aristotle Luther knew as little in those days as not a few Christians at the present hour know of true Christianity, coming as it does to them through the strangely distorting media of scholastic subtleties, sacerdotal usurpations, and pure human stupidities of all kinds. As for Lord Bacon, he was no doubt equally right in stoutly protesting against the then Aristotelian logic as a hindrance rather than a help to the true knowledge of nature; while, at the same time, he was no less certainly in the wrong if he imagined, or led men to imagine, either that induction was the only method which leads to the discovery of important truth, or that {131} Aristotle’s writings lent any countenance to those baseless and unfruitful methods of speculation which were presented under the authority of his name. It was necessary, however, that the human mind should be thoroughly emancipated from the dictatorial oppression of the false Aristotle before the true Aristotle could be reinstated on his throne; and this required time. Accordingly we find that some of the most original thinkers and ingenious scholars of the last century seem to have imagined that Aristotle and the Pope were two great usurpers, the one in the intellectual, the other in the religious world, whom the great Protestant movement of the sixteenth century, in the interest both of learning and religion, had rightfully dethroned. “Mr. Harris, for example,” says his biographer, “had imbibed a prejudice, very common at that time even among scholars, that Aristotle was an obscure and unprofitable author, whose philosophy had deservedly been superseded by that of Mr. Locke.”[131.1] And in perfect harmony with this, Mr. Burton, in his life of Hume, remarks that “the name of Aristotle is not once mentioned in Hume’s treatise of human nature.”[131.2] Strange revolution of thought in a country where, in the days of John Knox, it had been customary for famous academical teachers to say--“Stultum est dicere Aristotelem errasse!” And, indeed, not only Hume, but Bentham, James Mill, and all the thinkers of that century, manifested a strange lust of spinning knowledge out of their own bowels, so to speak, with a careless or insolent neglect of the great truths handed down for the use of all ages by the master {132} thinkers of ancient times. But not even in Scotland, never famous for Greek, could such ignorance last for ever. The French Revolution of 1789 shook all men violently out of their old complacencies, and blew their dainty conceits of all kinds to the winds; things were now to be built up from the foundations, not in the political world only, but in the intellectual and religious world no less; torpid Churches were suddenly fevered with hot activity; in literature the forgotten language of a natural and passionate poetry was to be restored; and in philosophy the ancient foundations of stable knowledge were to be laid bare. Under such a violent volcanic action it could not be but that both Plato and Aristotle should be made to stand out before lesser names in their true dimensions. Aristotle especially revealed himself to many thoughtful Germans, and a few thoughtful Englishmen, as the precursor of Bacon in the use of the great organon of induction; and the hard and cautious genius of the Scotch, under the guidance of a polyhistoric Hamilton, found in the Stagirite a more dignified corner-stone than in Reid for the erection of a philosophical edifice which rather sought safety in narrowing than glory in extending the bounds of human speculation. In Oxford, the stiff conservatism of the College tutors, men trained to the exact knowledge of a few traditional books, more certainly than any profound philosophical insight, preserved the Ethics, along with the Logic, of Aristotle as one of the general instruments of juvenile drill; while, outside the academic precincts, liberal statesmen like Cornewall Lewis and democratic historians like Grote continued to quote the Stagirite as the wisest at once and the most cautious of all {133} ancient political speculators. Thus the natural balance of judgment was restored; and Aristotle, redeemed at once from the ignorant idolatry of pseudo disciples and the local conceit of men who spurned to learn from any but themselves, took his place for ever as an intellectual dictator of the first rank, with whom if a man did not happen to agree, it was always more likely that the dissentient had wandered into error than that the authority from whom he dissented had failed to fasten his glance upon the truth.

Before attempting to set forth in its great salient points the ethical system of Aristotle, it will be at once interesting and useful to sketch shortly the leading events of his life, omitting altogether, as a matter of course, those hundred and one points of uncertain report and slippery slander which are wont to attach themselves to the fame of any great man as to a natural nucleus. And when a man like Aristotle is not only a great man according to the common measure of human greatness, but an altogether extraordinary man, it is as natural that he should be spoken against from all sides as that dogs should bark at a stranger. The epiphany of an intellectual giant in any assembly of men of average talent makes those appear dwarfs who had previously, not without reason, accounted themselves of reputable stature; and as no man likes to be dwarfed, the necessary result of such an apparition is to set men’s wits agog to find out cunning devices, whereby the overwhelming stature of the huge intruder may seem to be curtailed. So Aristotle, we are told, had “a whole host of enemies;” and we shall therefore, as just judges, be justified in throwing out of court, as vitiated in its source, the greater part of the merely anecdotal {134} accretions that cling to the name of the mighty Stagirite.

The adjuncts of high social position and freedom from pecuniary pressure, always advantageous to wise men, hurtful only to fools, Aristotle enjoyed in a remarkable degree. Born 384 B.C. in a Greek town, but under Macedonian influence, his father, who belonged to an old Asclepiad family, as court physician to King Amyntas, had ample opportunities of launching him into the world with all the training, equipment, and supports that are the natural harbingers of a prosperous career. He was not therefore a Greek in the strict sense of the word; and, though he borrowed his language and culture from Attica, and sympathized mainly with popular institutions, as his great work on Politics shows, he had good reason to congratulate himself that he did not lose his original citizenship when the eloquence of Demosthenes thundered in vain against the gold and the iron of the Macedonian. In the period of Aristotle’s youth there was nothing in Greece proper to make any thoughtful person lament that he had been born a subject of a sturdy and semi-barbarous but rising monarchy, rather than a citizen of an exhausted and decaying democracy; for though the victories of Chabrias had restored in some sort the supremacy of the Athenians at sea, the brilliant career of Epaminondas had elevated Thebes for a moment only to make general Greece more divided and less able to resist the growing power of Macedonia. Whether his father had destined him to follow his own profession is uncertain; there are however in the Ethics, and elsewhere in his works, frequent allusions to the medical art, such as might have been expected from {135} the associations of his parentage; and the prominent place given to physical science in his writings seems to indicate a tendency partly favoured by the circumstances of his birth, partly evoked by the natural progress of the Greek mind in the then stage of its development. This only we know certainly, that at the age of seventeen, about the time when young men in Scotland generally leave school for the university, the future father of encyclopædic science was sent to Athens, where he remained for twenty years as a pupil of Plato in the Academy. But though a pupil, he was anything but a disciple. Naturally of an inductive rather than a speculative habit of mind, and disposed to dissect and to tabulate rather than to collect and to construct, he displayed from year to year a more marked divergence from the great ideal thinker who at that time was impressing his type on the rising intellect of Greece. The reported gossip of antiquity has much to say about some bitter rivalry that arose, and unseemly quarrel that broke out, between the dictatorial master and the independent pupil; but we need believe nothing of this, except in so far as it may be an indication of a radical difference of intellectual character in the two men, which could not but make itself felt in various ways, more or less inconsistent with the relation of a merely receptive and responsive discipleship. Nothing is more common in the intercourse of cultivated men, than that one of the parties finds himself in a condition to respect profoundly what he cannot at all agree with, and what he feels bound, ever and anon, decidedly to controvert. So it fared no doubt with young Aristotle in relation to old Plato. Confluence between two souls so differently constituted there {136} could be none. They cannot be compared as one rose may be compared with another, or even as one flower may be contrasted with another flower, but only as things of a totally different nature, may be named in the same sentence to make their incommensurability more patent. The intellect of Aristotle was a granite palace, that of Plato a garden of paradise; Aristotle’s wit was like a sharp knife and a weighty hammer, Plato’s like a rolling river and a shining ocean; the one bristled with all carious knowledge, the other blossomed with all lofty speculation; Aristotle analysed all things great and small; Plato harmonized all things beautiful and grand. Along with this inborn diversity of intellectual character, we have reason to suppose that there were certain habits of life and social peculiarities about the Stagirite, which were not without offence to the more strict and devoted Platonists. For that there was a certain tinge of Puritanism, and even a sort of lofty pedantry, occasionally manifested in the great architect of ideas, can, I think, scarcely be doubted by any one who has read his great work--the Republic--with an unbribed judgment. Now if Plato was somewhat of a philosophical Puritan, in Aristotle there was presented that combination of a philosopher and a man of the world, of the man of principle with the man of practice, which, because it is difficult to produce, is always rare, and because it is rare is always admired. A physician, and above all a court physician, must be a man who enjoys and who understands society: such was Aristotle’s father; and the son, while betaking himself to the quiet bowers of the Athenian Academy for the cultivation of thought, could not forget that there was a large busy world without {137} which imperiously asserted itself, and from which not even a philosopher could be allowed to withdraw with impunity. It was a characteristic tenet of the Peripatetic school that the external trappings and decorations of life are not to be looked down on with a lofty contempt, but rather cared for as serviceable, and in some cases necessary, aids to a perfect life; and so those Quaker-like affectations of plain garb, and those over-virtuous abstinences from “cakes and ale” and other delights of the merely sensuous part of our nature, which some Platonic and Stoic philosophers affected, could not but meet from Aristotle with a practical protest, of which some significant hint peeps out here and there among the scraps of ancient anecdote-mongers and memoir-writers. Plato, we are told, “was not pleased with Aristotle’s manner of life, nor with his dress. For indeed he was somewhat nice and curious in his apparel, and there was a particular tidiness about his shoes; and his hair also he had cut after a jaunty fashion, not approved of by men of Plato’s following; and he made a display of many rings on his finger. Moreover, there was a peculiar sarcastic play about his mouth, and, when he spoke, he could prattle away with a notable fluency; all which things seemed not to be quite in keeping with the character of a philosopher, and were the occasion that Plato preferred Speusippus and Xenocrates, who afterwards became his successors in the Academy.” This picture is, no doubt, in the main true; and it can only excite our admiration when we consider that the same man of whom this is told was also noted as the most severe and persistent reader in Athens; his house, indeed, was called by Plato “the house of the reader;” and the {138} learned geographer Strabo notes him as the first Greek who collected books on a large scale, and supplied to the Ptolemies of the succeeding age the model of those systematic stores of books with which they made Alexandria famous. Aristotle therefore may justly be regarded as the great prototype of those modern Germans who, like the mailed knights of the middle ages, stand up in our libraries, cased in the invulnerable panoply of polyhistoric and encyclopædic erudition; and he gave birth to that curious sort of intellectual laboriosity, which when divorced from his genius and his sagacity, produced those accumulations of written and printed record, under which the shelves of so many libraries groan, by which also, we may justly say, not a few strong intellects have been lost to the living world, smothered beneath heaps of cumbrous babblement, in extent infinite, in value infinitesimal.

After the death of Plato in the year 347, Aristotle retired for a few years to the court of his fellow-student and friend Hermias, then ruler of Atarnæ, on the coast of Asia Minor. This change of scene was necessary for him, while on the one hand his scheme of establishing a new school of philosophy was yet immature, and, on the other hand, the political relations between Macedonia and Athens were not such as that it would be pleasant for him to be identified with a city which might soon be forced into hostility with his natural sovereign. It was fruitful also, no doubt, in those shrewd observations on men and manners which stamp so many sagacious pages in his moral and political treatises. From this judicious retirement after a few years he was called to a field of more {139} honourable and influential activity. In the year 342 he received a letter from Philip of Macedon, requesting him to undertake the office of tutor to his young son Alexander. The duties of this position he performed with such results to his royal pupil as in such circumstances were to be expected; and with the great advantage to himself of adding the resources of an absolute monarch and a great conqueror to his own private instruments for the prosecution of scientific research. The unexpected death of Philip by the hands of an assassin, called Alexander prematurely to dash into that brilliant career of Asiatic victory which has made his name no less famous than that of his tutor, who by this event relieved at once from personal responsibility and political apprehension, found himself in a position to establish that independent school of wisdom at Athens, which now for more than two thousand years has propagated itself in the world as the natural and necessary complement to the Platonic style of thought. In the year 334 he pitched his intellectual camp at the Lyceum, in the eastern suburbs of Athens, under Mount Lycabettus, and here during the space of thirteen years he remained exercising towards his scholars the diverse functions of fatherhood and fraternity, which in the ancient philosophical associations, as in the early Christian Churches, were so happily combined. After the death of Alexander, in the year 322, he left Athens and retired to Chalcis, in Eubœa, where he had a small property; a migration to which political considerations must have been the main inducement, for so distinguished a dependant of the Macedonian court could scarcely look upon himself as safe in {140} the Attic capital the moment that the death of the great conqueror opened up to the most distinguished people whom his arms had subjugated the prospect of political liberation. The philosopher, accordingly, when leaving the city of his adoption, as it turned out for the last time, with an obvious allusion to the fate of Socrates, is reported to have said that he did so in order that the Athenians might not again have the opportunity of signalizing themselves by the murder of a philosopher; for, indeed, in unlimited democracy generally, and specially in the extreme democracy of that time, he had no faith, observing sarcastically that while the Athenians had discovered two useful things, wheat and freedom, they understood how to use the one, but the other they had possessed for a short time, only to abuse. And no doubt he acted wisely in retreating from a scene where no weight of character or reputation for grave wisdom could have shielded him from the combined assault of personal malignity and political rancour so ready in every democratic soil to rise with jealous spite against individual eminence and independence. The philosopher was threatened, we are told, with prosecution for atheism; a charge which, however unfounded to the eye of reason, might have been brought against the Stagirite from the orthodox Athenian point of view with much more justice than about eighty years before it had been brought against the great father of moral science. An atheist certainly, in the strict sense of the term, Aristotle was not, but a pious believer in the polytheistic theology of his country he was even less; piety indeed of any kind is not at all a pronounced feature in the composition of his character. Like many a {141} modern man of science, he had cultivated acuteness at the expense of wonder; and, while indulging in the omnivorous lust of knowledge, had starved veneration, and stunted the growth of some of the most delicate emotions of the soul. For devotion is of the very finest fragrance of the emotional life; and as there are some flowers without smell, so there are some souls without piety. In point of religious feeling, beyond all question, both Socrates and Plato were infinitely superior to Aristotle.

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

We now proceed to place before the reader a short statement of the most striking characteristics of the ethical philosophy of Aristotle as they are set forth in that compact little book, the Nicomachean Ethics. And the first observation proper to make here is the extreme practicality that appears not more in the general colour and tone than in the individual chapters and paragraphs of this remarkable volume. In criticising the sermons delivered in our Christian pulpits we are accustomed to distinguish between doctrinal and practical preaching, and to believe that while, in Scotland at least, the former is the more popular and the more easy, the latter is always the more difficult and the more efficient style of moral address. Now what we have to say of Aristotle, as he appears in the Ethics, is that he is not a mere {142} writer on ethics, an acute speculator or a subtle casuist, but he presents himself with all the seriousness of a preacher, and an eminently practical preacher. No doubt in this capacity he must be regarded both by natural genius and in the general tone of his ethical writings as second to his great master Plato; but his influence on the moral culture of the world has not for that reason been less. A large class of men, especially in this practical country, are apt to suspect Plato of nonsense; and these are unwilling to take advice in the affairs of common life from a man who, in his flights of ideal constructiveness, so far transcends the narrow range of their own hard-faced realism. But Aristotle is a man whom no man can suspect of nonsense. He takes what lies before him, and in the most cool practical way conceivable proceeds to analyse it, and to spell out its significance. He is not ambitious--at least not in the department of morals--of piling a grand system, or of tabulating an exhaustive scheme. He is a practical man, as much as you or I am, and sees with marked distinctness always what lies in his way. There is no fear that under his guidance you will lose yourself in a mist or be carried off your feet in a balloon. He is therefore peculiarly fitted for being put forward as a lay-preacher to a British public; and the Oxford scholars have done good service to the English youth by giving his famous work on Ethics such a prominent place among classical books of the first rank. He is as sensible as Dr. Paley, and a great deal more profound; while, on the other hand, it never occurs to him that it is necessary to prepare the way for a plain practical discourse on the conduct of life by abstract discussions {143} on the liberty of the will and the responsibility of free agents. This omission Principal Grant considers a weakness; I consider it a sign of good sense, or, at all events, a remarkable piece of good luck. He assumes morality in the moral world, just as he assumes light and air and water in the physical; he describes a moral man with strong lines and a firm hand, just as he would describe a healthy man as contrasted with a diseased man. If you have a single eye and an honest purpose, you will not fail to know what he means; if you have not, his book is not for you. There never was a more practical preacher. This word practical, therefore, I desire the reader to emphasize doubly when he applies himself to the thorough comprehension of the Nicomachean Ethics. There are, no doubt, in this treatise, as in almost every Greek book, some half-dozen curious questions raised, which, like the subtle casuistry of the Jesuit doctors, have little practical value; for Aristotle was a Greek, and as such a habitual dealer in ἀπορήματα, or knotty points, in the solution of which a hard practical Scot or a broad burly Englishman would think a single sentence wasted. These however belong to the soil, grow up like weeds among the best wheat, and, like bad puns in Shakespeare, must be taken with the lot. In the gross and scope of his handling, as we have said, the Stagirite systematically waives all unpractical questions; and in the very arrangement of his book an attentive reader will not fail to discern that there are certain scientific deficiencies which can be explained fully only from the consideration that the writer had vividly realized the difference between what we could call an academical lecture and a sermon, and was {144} determined to make it felt that a lecture on morals, through which the undertones of seriousness that belong to a sermon are not heard, is one of the most absurd and unmeaning of all human performances. No doubt this defect in respect of strictly scientific method may arise partly from the fact that the treatise seems to have been composed at different times, and packed up, so to speak, in bundles rather than reared up architecturally into a jointed structure; it is also plain enough to any one who can read with a discerning eye that the work was left incomplete by the great author, and that the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, as we now have then, are from a different hand, and of manifestly inferior workmanship; but I consider it not less certain that, had it not been for the dominance of the practical point of view, not a few chapters in this most valuable treatise would have been compacted more aptly into the firmness of a complete organism. Once and again in the first two books of his treatise does he repeat the solemn warning that our object in inquiring into the nature of virtue is, not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may be virtuous. Once and again does he enter a protest against the supersubtle tendencies of his countrymen, always ready to stand and debate, even where the solution of the problem was to be found only in motion and in action. Subtleties of any kind, indeed, are not suitable for a moral discourse; the entertainment of them shows that the inquirer has not yet conceived what the purport of the inquiry is; ethical philosophy refers as distinctly to a deed as a sword refers to a cut; and all questions about morals are idle, and even pernicious, that do not bear directly on some practical result. {145} We must therefore, so Aristotle argues, in our method of discussion here, not insist on having always those exact proofs and nice definitions which in the sciences of measurement and number may fairly be demanded. We should rather seek for an analogy to moral science in such arts as medicine, and say that propriety of conduct, like the health of the body, is liable to much indeterminateness and variation; that to seek for scientific rules which might apply with exactitude to all cases is absurd; that no wise man will attempt to cut logs with razors, and that in such matters of complex practice we must content ourselves with stating some such broad general principles as suit the great majority of cases, and which every man must be left to apply for himself in the experience of life. Of the deep tone of practical seriousness which underlies the whole of the Nicomachean Ethics, I know no more striking proof than an utterance of Maurice, in the preface to his exposition of the Epistles of John, which I shall here extract. “I owe unspeakable gratitude,” says that truly evangelical moralist, “to the University of Oxford for having put Aristotle’s Ethics into my hands, and induced me to read it, and to think of it. I doubt if I could have received a greater boon from any university or any teacher. I will tell you what this book did for me. First, it assured me that the principles of morals cannot belong to one time or another; that they must belong to all times. Here was an old heathen Greek making me aware of things that were passing within me, detecting my laziness and my insincerity, showing how little I was doing the things which I professed to do, forcing me to confess that with all the {146} advantages which I enjoyed he was better than I was. That was one great thing. Next, I could not but learn from him--for he took immense pains to tell me--that it is not by reading a book or learning a set of maxims by heart that one gets to know anything of morality, that it belongs to life, and must be learned in the daily practice of life. English and Christian writers no doubt might have told me the same thing. But I am not sure that their words would have gone as much home as Aristotle’s did. I might have thought that it was their business, part of their profession, to utter those stern maxims, and to hold up such lofty ideals of conduct.” And what adds immense force to Aristotle’s preaching, especially with young men, is the feeling that they have here to do not only with a non-professional preacher but with a thorough gentleman, and a shrewd man of the world, the friend of princes, and of great statesmen and mighty captains. It is seldom indeed that young men in the heat of their blood and the glow of their fancy will listen with much attention to sermons of any kind, even from the best preachers; but if they will not receive the word of warning from such a prophet as Aristotle they will at least have no excuse for sneering either at the doctor or the doctrine. In him they will find no sarcastic Cynic, content with the negative pleasure of snarling from his private kennel at the faults of men, instead of rising to help their infirmities; no sickly devotee whose principal occupation through the dreariness of the present life is to dream and maunder about the glories of the future; no curious registrar of morbid frames of mind or dainty nurse of unproductive sentiment. Such caricatures of the spiritual man, {147} justly odious to the vigorous, generous, and sanguineous temper of youth, may be found cropping out largely in the histories both of philosophical and religious sectaries; but not a hint of them appears in the thoroughly masculine, thoroughly manly, and thoroughly healthy Ethics of Aristotle.

The corner-stone of Aristotle’s moral doctrine, as in that of Socrates, lies in the single word λόγος, which, whether in its internal side as Reason, or with its outer face as Discourse, was so peculiarly the watchword of the Hellenic race. “The Greeks seek after wisdom;” and wisdom, or σοφία, is in all cases the result, and the only possible result, of the just exercise of λόγος or reason. We shall not therefore expect to find in the Stagirite any fundamental principle different from that on which the moral doctrine of Socrates rests--nay, just as some of the most characteristic maxims of the New Testament can be pointed out in, and no doubt were actually borrowed from, the Old Testament, even so, and in a much greater degree, was the ethical doctrine of Aristotle borrowed in its great leading points from Socrates and Plato. This borrowing, however, was not in the style of patchwork; it was an affair of natural growth. What we find in Aristotle is not a new ethical doctrine, but the emphasizing and systematizing of certain important aspects of an old doctrine. Now the aspect which Aristotle strongly emphasizes as the starting-point of his ethical teaching is the τέλος and the ἀγαθόν. All men profess to have some object after which they strive in their life and by their deeds; no man in this world, as Goethe says, can safely live at random: the ship that sails at random will be wrecked {148} even in a calm, and the man who lives at random will be ruined without the help of any positive vice. What then is it that men must propose to themselves as the τέλος, the end, object, or purpose of their existence? Generally, all men profess to be seeking for the ἀγαθόν, or the Good. The question, therefore, which ethical science has to answer is, in the words of the Westminster Catechism, What is the chief end of man? What is the ultimate aim and highest Good, the summum bonum, of which the creature called Man is capable? How are we to discover this? Plainly in the same way that we discover the chief good of any special kind of man,--a man exercising any special professional function. What is the summum bonum of a flute-player? Of course to play the flute, and to play the flute well; of a soldier, to fight well; of a shoemaker, to make good shoes; of a brewer, to brew good beer; of a fowler, to snare birds; and of an angler, to hook fish. The chief end, therefore, of any creature is found by discovering his natural work or business in the world,--for all things are full of labour, and a man’s duty is always some kind of work. As, then, there is a special work for the flute-player or the fowler, which determines his chief good, so, if we are to find the chief end of man, we must put our finger on some general work or business, which belongs to all men as men, and not as engaged in special occupations and practising particular arts. How is this work found? Of course by fixing our attention on the differentiating element in the human creature. The differentiating element in birds is wings, in fish fins, in worms rings. By this differentiation, stamped on every creature by the absolute dictatorship of {149} Nature, the destiny and the duty, the privilege and the glory, of each type of organized existence is inevitably determined. The creature has nothing to do in the matter but to recognise and to obey; unreasoning creatures unconsciously and blindly, choice. The proper work of man, therefore, can lie only in what in him is most distinctively human; not therefore of course in any function of the merely vegetative life which he has in common with the plant; nor again in any function of the merely sensuous life, which he enjoys in common with, oxen; but in the exercise of that faculty which he alone possesses, and which alone stamps him as distinctively human, viz., REASON. The work of a man, accordingly, and the chief end of all men, will be an energizing of the soul, according to reason, or not without reason; and a life according to reason will be good, and the chief good; and not only so, but it must also be the pleasure, and the highest pleasure, of the reasonable being who leads such a life; for the pleasure of every creature lies in acting freely and without hindrance according to its distinctive nature; and as horses are the pleasure of the rider, and views of the landscape painter, so good actions are the pleasure of good men, and reasonable actions the delight of all who live by the use of reason; so much so indeed, that he cannot even claim to be numbered amongst good men who, besides doing good deeds, does not likewise rejoice in doing such deeds. Charity given with an unwilling hand is not charity; it is a boon extorted.

This statement taken almost literally from the first eight chapters of the first book of the Ethics, will, it is hoped, make the moral attitude of Aristotle {150} sufficiently intelligible. He does not say, with Bentham and the modern utilitarians, “Look round about you for what is pleasurable; and that which affords pleasure to you, and to the greatest possible number of creatures with whom you are socially connected, is your duty;” but he looks about to find your distinctive excellence, your peculiar faculty among all creatures,--“Exercise that,” he says, “and you fulfil your destiny, and attain your chief good. As for pleasure, that you will have also, not as an amulet hung about your neck, but in the very necessity of your energy exercised according to your special nature. Cultivate what is noblest in you, and you cannot fail to find what is most agreeable. The doing of this, however, is by no means so simple a matter as in the mere abstract statement might appear. It is the business of a man, no doubt, to act reasonably, that is virtuously, just as much as it is the business of a bee to bag honey; but it is a much easier thing for the bee to suck honey from the flowers than for a man to force fragrant deeds from the stuff that daily life presents. How is this? The difficulty lies in the compound nature of man: a nature not compound only, but composed of parts of which one is found to be often strangely at variance with the others; so much so, indeed, that while reason is the distinctive faculty of man, and to act reasonably is at once his safety, his happiness, and his glory, he bears within himself likewise a principle of unreason, an ἄλογον opposed to his λόγος,--a principle in the normal state of man altogether dependent and servile, but which, as things are, has a strong tendency to rebel, assert an unruly independence, and even cast down from his throne {151} the lawful regent of the soul. This, the reader will remark, is exactly the doctrine of St. Paul, with regard to the contrariety of Flesh and Spirit, in the eighth chapter of the Romans, and expressed in almost the same terms. The exact words of Aristotle are: “There appear manifestly in human beings some strong natural tendencies different from reason, and not only different, but fighting with and resisting reason.” But this remarkable peculiarity in the complex creature Man does not in the least change the nature of human good; it only adds to it another element which makes it in the end more glorious--the element of resistance, struggle, victory, and triumph,--of course always with the necessary alternative of possible feebleness, cowardice, and defeat. And the same fact,--the same original sin, as our theologians term it,--nicely considered, raises a noticeable question about the origin of laws and moral obligation; that old question so often discussed by the Sophists, and argued, as we have seen, by Socrates, in his discourse with Hippias, whether right and wrong exist by nature or by institution, φύσει as they expressed it, or νόμῳ; and the answer given to this question by the Stagirite, characterized by his usual good sense, is that, while the determination of right and wrong is not a matter of arbitrary, compulsory imposition, according to the selfish theory of Hobbes, but lies deeply rooted in the innermost recesses of human nature, it is nevertheless true that it is the nature of man, more perhaps than of any other animal, to require training and discipline to bring out what is in him; and that virtue, in fact, is not virtue till the inborn impulses towards excellence have been fostered and strengthened by those social {152} appliances which lie in the very primary conditions of human life. We are made virtuous, therefore, neither by nature, nor contrary to nature, nor independently of nature, but we grow virtuous by repeated acts of living according to reason, as we learn to see by using our eyes. Virtue is, in fact, a habit;[152.1] and as one fit of drunkenness does not make a man a drunkard, so one act of generosity does not make a generous man, and the whole roll of the virtues practised only once or twice, however completely, does not make a virtuous man. Hence the immense importance of education, which other animals may dispense with, but not man, and on which, accordingly, both Plato and Aristotle insist, as the one thing needful for the well-being, whether of the individual or of society. The existence of innate tendencies towards the Good does not in the least imply that human nature in its early stages may be safely left to itself. These good tendencies may be counteracted by opposite tendencies; they may be overwhelmed by adverse circumstance; they may be extinguished; and experience proves that they not seldom are extinguished.

Having laid this sure foundation in the differentiating element of man, the philosopher might naturally have proceeded to prove that, assuming man to be naturally a social animal, and widowed with those instincts which make social organization necessary to his normal existence, any application of reason to social existence, that is, every assertion of practical reason in a creature so constituted, is what we call {153} right, and every omission to assert it, or direct assertion of the contrary, is what we call wrong. A right action is an action according to the real constitution of things, which reality it is the business of reason to discern; a wrong act is an act in contravention of the real constitution of things, and can be performed only when reason is undeveloped or asleep, or by some violent impulse or blind illusion led astray: it is an act insulated, contumacious, and rebellious, issuing necessarily in confusion and chaos and ruin; for no single unit in a complex whole can assert its mere capricious independent self in practical denial of the totality to which it belongs, without producing discomfort at first, and ultimately being crushed by the firm compactness of the mighty machinery which it has recklessly dared to disturb. How this might have been demonstrated in detail the reader of the preceding discourse on Socrates cannot be ignorant; but however much it lay in his way, the Stagirite in his Nicomachean treatise did not choose to enter upon this theme. For this procedure he may have had two sufficient reasons; for, in the first place, he may have thought that view of the matter lay too obviously in the whole scheme and handling both of Plato and Socrates, to be susceptible of much novelty at his hands; and in the second place, he may have considered such a demonstration, however cogent in a book, to be less practically useful than some test of right and wrong, which he might be able to formulate. And in the test which he hits upon, as we shall presently see, it is quite evident that practical utility rather than theoretic invulnerability was his main object; and this is precisely what, in consistency at once with the nature of the {154} subject, and his own introductory observations, he was directly led to do. His test was simply this, that virtue, or right conduct, is generally found in the mean between two extremes; for though there may be the same difficulty in pronouncing about the quality of particular actions, sometimes, as there is in pronouncing about the state of bodily health in any individual, yet, upon a broad view of both cases, nothing seems more obvious and more certain than that the unhealthy condition, whether of body or soul, is chiefly indicated by some deficiency or excess. In other words, virtue is a medium, a balance, a proportion, a symmetry, a harmony, a nice adjustment of the force of each part in reference to the calculated action of the whole. Now, it will at once be seen that this principle is not put forth as anything new; its truth rather consists in its antiquity, and in the deep-rooted experience of all human individuals and all human associations. It is a principle which forms part of the proverbial wisdom of all peoples; and the Greeks especially from the oldest times were strong on this point. Μηδὲν ἄγαν--μέτρον ἄριστον--παντὶ μέσω τὸ κράτος θεὸς ὤπασεν--were maxims familiar to every Greek ear long before Aristotle; and in the realm of speculation, the ἀριθμός, or number of Pythagoras, when applied to morals, really meant nothing else. So in the Proverbs of Solomon we find the well-known utterances--“Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it.” And again: “Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy {155} time?” And our Shakespeare, whose plays are a grand equestrian march of all wisdom, says to the same effect in his own admirable style--

“These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die: like fire and powder Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite: Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”

What Aristotle enunciated therefore was merely the most commonplace wisdom; and so much the better. Commonplace wisdom is the best kind of wisdom for common needs and every-day occasions. It is too late in the day now, and was too late in Aristotle’s time certainly, to be discovering altogether new rules for keeping the consciences and the stomachs of the human millions in good order. Things absolutely necessary to healthy existence were necessarily known from the earliest ages, unless indeed we imagine that the primeval man was created in a state of physical and moral disease, that he might grope and blunder his way into health, as some theorists assert that he groped and blundered his way from a tiger into a moral being, and from a monkey into a man. So far unquestionably, Henry Thomas Buckle was right: there are no discoveries to be made in morals. We do not discover the sun; we only recognise it when the clouds are blown and the rain has exhausted itself. So it is in morals--in the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. We do not discover moral principles by a fingering induction, or in any other way; we merely remove obstructions; we can apply the {156} bellows also and blow the small spark into a mighty flame. Our endeavours therefore as preachers, and as philosophers, like Aristotle, are not in vain. We have much to do, if not in the way of discovering absolutely new principles, certainly in a thousand and one ways of applying those principles. A burning-glass when first invented did not discover the sun; it utilized the sun. And in the same way the institution of every new church or the establishment of every new school is an invention in morals, though not a discovery of a new moral principle. Sabbath-schools were a discovery in morals; Voluntary Churches were a discovery in morals; Reform Bills were a discovery in morals. And in the world of books, we must say also that the principle of the mean asserted and systematically set forth in the Nicomachean Ethics was a great discovery in moral philosophy. The discovery consisted in the sagacity which seized, among a thousand others, a floating proverb, as alone fit, or mainly fit, for being made the corner-stone of a comprehensive canon of human conduct. To pick up a rough stone from the road, and polish it, and set it in a ring, and carve upon it the signature of the king’s imperial will, is no small achievement; and this simile precisely appraises the merit of the Stagirite, in reference to that old maxim μηδὲν ἄγαν, which we have just quoted. He has stamped it with the authority of his own regal intellect, in a manner appealing not less effectively to the analytic habits of the scientific man, than to the broad views so dear to the so-called practical man. And that he was grandly right in seizing upon this rule of conduct, no person who has ever seriously applied, himself to the wisdom of life, as to the one {157} thing needful, will hare any difficulty in admitting. For there is hardly a man of any self-knowledge who will not be willing to confess that the greatest blunders he has made in the difficult game of life have arisen from the neglect of this rule, as his most signal successes have sprung from the observance of it. The attainment of this golden mean, indeed, in one shape or another, is the constant problem of existence; and it will be difficult to point out any defects of moral character which do not arise either from a certain feebleness and deficiency of some necessary practical energy, or from the exaggeration and misapplication of virtues--a misapplication, be it observed, which almost always proceeds from an excess; for as a mother is apt to have her pet child, and an old maid her green parrot, her Skye terrier, or her tortoise-shell cat, on which she spends the overflow of her non-utilized sympathies, so every man is apt to have his pet virtue, his idol excellence, on which he prides himself, and of which he is fond of making a parade on all proper and improper occasions. It is the excessive sway of the favourite affection that makes a man blind to discern and weak to prevent its improper application. This is a great truth--and somewhat of a comfortable truth, too; for to sin by excess of good is always better than to offend from pure viciousness; and man is upon the whole (notwithstanding the floating lies of the hour, and the Devil’s Paradise in New York) a blundering rather than a diabolical creature. The importance of Aristotle’s rule arises from the fact that it is a regulative principle of universal application; and in this way it may well be taken in the left hand, along with the golden rule in the right {158} hand, “Do unto others as ye would that they would do unto you;” for this sacred sentence is founded on a just, delicate, and broad sympathy, and belongs rather to the emotional element--the moral steam, so to speak--of our nature, which, to avoid great perils, must always be associated with the regulative principle of the mean, or something to that effect. These two famous maxims indeed may, for practical purposes, be regarded as complementary of each other. For persons in whom the sympathetic emotions predominate are often deficient in the regulative faculty; while those whose power of regulation is great have sometimes little to regulate, and like a great commander with few soldiers, make a very poor appearance in the battle-field. In the struggle of life, the man whose sympathetic unselfish impulses are strong will perhaps find more benefit from the constant reference to Aristotle’s mean than even to the Scriptural golden rule; while the well-tempered Aristotelian will, on the other hand, find it for his advantage to inquire whether the even pace at which he goes is not as much owing to the dullness of the charger’s blood as to the skill with which the rider wields the rein. For there is no single maxim in morals that will conduct a man through all practical difficulties without the consideration of some other maxim qualifying it, and perhaps, for the nonce, giving it a flat contradiction; as I have known a gentleman who confessed to me that by nothing had he been led into so many serious blunders as by the indiscriminate application of this very text, “Do unto others,” etc.; for, being a man of a peculiar idiosyncrasy, and not having learned that the golden rule applies only to that which we {159} hold in common with our fellow-men, and not to those points on which we differ, he was constantly led into a course of behaviour towards certain persons, meant by him as a great kindness, but taken as a serious offence. While he wished not to be troublesome, he was considered to be neglectful; while he abstained from mentioning certain subjects for fear of rousing painful feelings he was accused of coldness and indifference; while he meant to be frank and confiding, he was met with a rebuff that he was rude and impertinent. All this shows how little mere preaching and parading of general maxims has to do with the difficult task of the formation of character; and no writer deserves greater praise for having gravely enunciated this truth than the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. In order fully to realize the value of the Aristotelian mean in the conduct of life, we may follow the method of the great moralist himself, and cull a few examples at random for its verification. We shall take three virtues--courage, truthfulness, self-esteem--and see how distinctly they stand out each as the middle-point of two vicious extremes. That courage is the mean between cowardice and rashness does not require to be told: but what a wide field of operation does this triad open to us, while we proceed to realize it in education, and in the conduct of public affairs, and in the events of life! What a nice judgment is required to know at what exact point the too much and the too little commences, where the right way swerves into an error of which the consequences may be incalculable! For the mean point is variable; and the hesitation which would be prudence in one person, or on one occasion, is cowardice in another. A sailor sailing without a {160} chart among blind reefs and strong currents--such as occur everywhere in the Shetland seas--can scarcely be too cautions; with a soldier, a bold dash into a difficulty with a fearlessness which can, scarcely be distinguished from rashness is sometimes the nearest road to a brilliant success. And as good amusements are a mimicry of life, there is a moment at bowls, or croquet, or backgammon, or even deliberate whist, when the fortune of a whole game may depend on a move which at other times would be either the most stupid ignorance or the most reckless folly. The wisdom of life, considered as a battle, depends at every moment on the skill to know when to advance and when to retreat, when to dash on with the spear, and when to crouch behind the shield; to know this moment is to know the just mean between rashness and cowardice, which the Greeks by a very significant name called manhood (ἀνδρειότης) or courage. Take another virtue. Of all commodities in the world, the most difficult to deal with is truth. If, indeed, all men went about the streets, like Socrates, in search of nothing but truth, and thanking everybody most fervidly for any contribution to his stock of it, even in the most disagreeable shape, truthfulness would be an easy virtue; as easy for a human being, one might imagine, as for a quick fountain to spout water, and for an eager fire to spit flame. But we all know it is not so--rather quite otherwise, for truth is an article to which, except in so far as particular truths may happen to prop up their prejudices, to flatter their vanity, and to inflate their conceit, many persons have serious objections. To fling it in their face is to insult them; to put it down their throats, {161} even with a silver spoon and sugar-candy, a difficult operation. Hence, in the conduct of life, the great importance of not speaking too much truth, lest we frighten people, and not speaking too little, lest we learn altogether to live upon lies. In mixed society, on account of the extreme sensitiveness of all sorts of vain and self-important persons, the rule is generally adopted of speaking as little truth as possible--that is, as little serious truth about important matters; for truth about trifles will discompose no one. But this conventional reticence is by no means the μεσότης which a reasonable compliance with the Aristotelian rule in this case would require; for though a surplus of truth is sure to make society uncomfortable, and a deluge of it makes it impossible, a great deficiency will certainly make it tame and stupid; and this is the extreme to which, in this country, we have lately been drifting with a gentle, but not the less a dangerous, current. Even in our pulpits we find a sort of cowardice sometimes formally enthroned, and a tame coldness set up as the standard in a place where, above all others, an indiscreet fervour might occasionally be allowed to pass for full cousin to the greatest excellence. Take again, self-esteem, which is partly an instinct, partly with wise men the result of that self-knowledge which long and varied experience ought always to produce. This is a moral mean perhaps even more difficult to strike than truthfulness; for in speaking, or rather not speaking, the truth, the principal difficulty a wise man has to deal with is the weakness of a brother; whereas, in estimating himself, the wisest man is constantly liable to be bribed by that love of self which, indeed, is the necessary root of {162} our vitality, but never can be the blooming crown of our glory. In reference to this quality, the general tendency of the world is towards overestimate; most persons are apt to measure too highly the value of their own particular strong point, and to under-estimate, or altogether misprize, that of their neighbours; as a gentleman in the month of August scouring the moors in triumph with a gun will be apt to think himself a much more sublime character than a poet lying lazily on a heather brae, and spinning out pretty fancies to the tune of a brown burn that eddies lazily round an old granite boulder; while the rhymer, on the other hand, thinks it a daintier occupation to sympathize quietly with feathered life than to take it away with powder and shot. So it is with us all, women as well as men--

“If a fair girl has but a pretty face, She has the wit to know it.”

And there is no reason why she should not know it. If a woman does not know her points, according to a high authority, she cannot even dress well; only, experience has proved that the less men and women think about their strong points, except, of course, when they are dressing, the better; for there is no more certain way of committing suicide on the higher moral nature than by falling in love with ourselves. In reference to this matter, therefore, it may be thought that the other and less common extreme is the more safe--it is better to think too lowly of ourselves than too highly. And it is a fact, capable of being proved from a hundred biographies, that the greatest men have been the least given to self-glorification; that modesty, as is commonly said, {163} is the invariable accompaniment of genuine power, while forward conceit, and empty inflation, and boastful exhibition of all kinds, are the natural characteristics of the young, the superficial, and the small. The under-estimate of self often found in connexion with the highest genius, especially in the early period of its experiments, arises naturally from the high ideal of perfection, by the contemplation of which excellence grows. No young man who puts a few well-adjusted and well-toned figures together on a piece of canvas can know, and certainly ought never to imagine, that he carries Raphael and Michael Angelo, and something better than both perhaps, in his bosom. But though this be true, I do not know whether I have not seen more sad mistakes made in life by persons who were rather depressed by too little than elevated by too much self-esteem. I have sometimes thought that the conceit so natural to young men is given to them by a gracious provision as a superfluity that is sure to be pruned off. The world is constantly employed in pulling down outrageous conceit; but when a poor fellow starts in the hot race of life, afflicted with that disease which the Greeks call δυσωπία, or difficult-facedness--that is, so modest as not to be able to look a fellow-being in the face--I must confess, though I have a kindly feeling towards a person so deficient which I never can have to the smart and pert self-conscious mannikin, I feel that the defect of the one is a much greater misfortune, and a malady much more difficult to cure, than the excess of the other. With some persons, and indeed whole families, the tendency to underrate their own capacity acts like a positive taint in the blood; it cuts the wing from hope, dulls the nerve {164} of aspiration, and palsies the arm of action. It makes an honest man useless where God has put him, and opens the door for a dishonest man with a little natural confidence to do badly what the honest man for sheer lack of confidence has not been able to do at all. The man of defective self-esteem thus commits two great wrongs--he wrongs himself, because he allows himself to be shunted out of his natural sphere, and becomes a hindrance where he might have been a help; and he wrongs the public, which lacks both the insight and the leisure to drag modest merit from its den and to look with an unwinking eye on the juggling glamoury of the bold pretender.