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that must be added to virtue in its narrower sense. We have seen that the virtues of the private citizen, or even of the citizen-soldier, fall short of a complete equipment for the citizen's functions. To these have to be added the capacities of the legislator and administrator, which, when we seek to analyze them, are all seen to centre in the one supreme capacity of insight into the true purpose of social life and the means by which it may be forwarded through the right conduct of the citizens.

Finally, we shall be prepared to understand an extension of the ideal of happiness which might at first first appear inconsistent with the civic ideal already described. In his enthusiasm for the life which is "selfsufficient, leisurely, inexhaustible," something, in truth, more than human, Aristotle may appear to have overshot the mark and drawn too deep a line between week-day and sabbath. Whatever explanation we may be able to give of this dualism in so great a thinker, what has been said above of the function of art and religion among the Greeks will enable us partly to understand what is meant by such a claim. As the Parthenon crowned the Acropolis, the Great Dionysia the Athenian year, so the life of leisure was the crown of the secular employments of the citizen's life. As, however, his art and his poetry were never thought of by the Greek as something apart from his common. life, but as palpable witnesses to its inward and spiritual meaning, so leisure and contemplation were not something superadded to the other ends of life, but a means of enabling the citizen to realize more

fully what these ends imply. Through them he thought he knew

"The hills where his life rose

And the sea where it goes."

Through them he thought he saw that in renouncing merely individual ends he was identifying himself with one that was greater and more permanent, and yet, in a deeper sense, his own.

CHAPTER I.

THE SCIENCE OF ETHICS.

"All indistinctly apprehend a bliss

On which the soul may rest, the hearts of all
Yearn after it, and to that wished bourn

All therefore strive."

DANTE.

§ 1. The Supreme End of Action as the Subject of

Ethics.

[Ethics, Bk. I. c. i.; c. ii. § 1.]

IN the opening sentence of the Ethics Aristotle states the fundamental assumption of his moral philosophy, viz. that all human conduct-"all action directed by choice "-implies some final end or purpose. By this, as the sequel shows, he means not only that all conduct involves a consciously conceived end or purposesuch a proposition would be merely verbal, seeing that "choice" necessarily implies conscious purposebut that underneath all our ordinary purposes there lies, whether clearly conceived or not, some supreme purpose which is both the source and explanation of them. That such a supreme end actually is presupposed in ordinary life is not immediately obvious. True, we do not ordinarily conceive of our lives as

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broken up into isolated activities standing in no relation to one another. This would be the negation of all conduct-all leading or guiding of action. Yet it is equally remote from ordinary ways of thinking to conceive of life as organized for the attainment of some supreme all-important end. Prima facie, life is the endeavour to satisfy a multitude of desires, which are endless in their recurrence and insatiable in their extent, and it is not a little curious that modern philosophy in England, so far from accepting it as self-evident that life is a rounded whole in the sense here assumed, starts from the opposite assumption by emphatically denying it. At the beginning of the chapters in his great treatise which are devoted to the principles of morals, or as he calls them "manners," Hobbes, the acknowledged father of English philosophy, lays it down that "the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is that the object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure for ever the way of his future desire.... So that in the first place I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has

already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power; but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more." * Nor does it appear that the view here taken is at all met by the statement put forward by Aristotle in support of his assumption (viz. that otherwise we should have to go into infinity and leave our desires without point or purpose), seeing that Hobbes would have been ready to accept this conclusion, and actually makes it, in the passage quoted, the ground of his denial of a supreme end of action.

Further reflection, however, especially if directed, as Aristotle suggests in chap. i., to the organized structure of society, will convince us that, however we may define the nature of the chief end of human desire (and this is not here the question), some such supreme end is presupposed in the very form of social life. Hobbes himself, when his doctrine is examined more closely, is found to admit that the activities of individuals and the organization of society find their motive and explanation in one ruling desire. His theory differs from Aristotle's not in dispensing with the notion of a finis ultimus or greatest good, but in the account which it gives of the nature of the end. According to Hobbes, it is the maximum satisfaction of the individual desire for "gain and glory;" according to Aristotle, it is the fullest development of man's nature as a social being.

*Leviathan, c. xi.

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