Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

complete allegiance of his mind and will. That they may become a part of the man himself, they must be transformed from mere opinion into true knowledge, "by the addition of rational explanation." In other words, to invest them with full efficiency, the judgments of good and bad involved in habitual morality must be made clearly explicit, and we must know not only what it is right to do, but why it is right to do it. In maintaining that, in order to be complete, virtue must be penetrated by conscious intelligence or "knowledge of the end," Aristotle merely reproduces this doctrine. How he works it out in detail we shall see more fully hereafter.

Meantime, it is sufficient to have realized the educational value of the theory common to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, that Virtue is Knowledge. Moral education aims at something more than conformity, however habitual and spontaneous, to moral requirements, viz. at investing the idea of a certain type of character, and the forms of social organization-family, school, city, business, etc.-which are its counterpart, with such power over the mind as shall make it proof against the inroad of other ideas which, however flattering to our sensuous nature, are incompatible with these wider objects.

CHAPTER X.

THE INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES: PRUDENCE.

"If you see well, you're king of what you see:

Eyesight is having."

"There's a truth of settled laws,

That down the past looms like a great watch-fire."

§ 1. The Intellectual Virtues.

Prima facie, Book VI. is an enumeration of intellectual virtues, wisdom and prudence being only two out of many. Closer inspection, however, shows that all the others in reality group themselves round these two, and more particularly that the qualities described in chaps. ix.-xii.-good counsel, intelligence, good sense, cleverness-are rather to be taken as elements in the supreme virtue of prudence than independent forms of excellence. Wisdom and prudence-the Greek oopía and ppóvnois—are not therefore two among other forms, but the two types, of intellectual virtue. The difficulty which besets the translator of these words is that of finding terms which will distinguish between them, and at the same time indicate the relation in which they stand to each other as only higher and lower forms of the same excellence. Assuming this ultimate relation, we may express their essential

unity by the English word "wisdom." Raised to its highest power, "wisdom" implies that attitude to life which results from the clear apprehension of those ultimate principles of reality which Plato called the Good. At a lower level it indicates practical sagacity in the conduct of affairs, whether those of the individual or the community. To mark, however, the distinction between these two levels, words are necessary which shall suggest respectively the intellectual and the practical side of wisdom, as so defined. No single English words are adequate to express the required shades of meaning. The nearest approach to the lower virtue is probably given by the traditional translation-" Prudence," in the sense of that practical control over the affairs of life which comes of moral insight. It is more difficult to find an equivalent for the higher. Perhaps the "Divine Wisdom" of the mediæval mystics would best give the sense. If we adopt the more usual translation, "Wisdom," we must understand that the emphasis falls upon the contemplative or philosophical attitude of mind which is the condition of the higher forms of intellectual insight, and with them of happiness.

In accordance with the above definitions we have now to ask-first, how are we to conceive of the distinction between these two "virtues"? secondly, confining ourselves meantime to opóvnois, or prudence, how is it related to what we have hitherto described as moral virtue? thirdly, what preliminary conclusions can we draw as to the relation of the higher virtue of wisdom to the lower?

§ 2. The Distinction between Prudence and Wisdom.

[VI. c. i. §§ 4 foll.; vii. §§ 1 foll.]

In the endeavour clearly to differentiate between prudence and wisdom, Aristotle appeals to a psychological distinction between the scientific and the calculative reason (c. i. §§ 4 and 5), which immediately merges in a philosophical distinction between the objects with which they respectively deal. Two features are emphasized as distinctive of the kind of reality which is the object of the calculative reason: (1) it is "contingent," whereas science and philosophy are concerned with "those elements of reality which depend upon unalterable principles " (c. i. § 5); (2) it is multiform (c. viii. § 4), while the objects of the scientific reason are "of the same kind wherever they are found." These distinctions, however, must not be taken too seriously. Pressed to their logical issue, they not only obscure the ultimate unity of the elements of happiness we are here discussing, but render any intelligible account of them impossible.

Taking the first of them, it is quite true that the function of prudence or calculation is to adapt means. to end, and that means are apt to present themselves to us under the form of alternative possibilities, i.e. contingencies. Yet the forces which we set in operation in seeking to realize an "end," whether they be physical causes or human wills, act according to laws as eternally fixed and unalterable as the stars in their courses, and, if we only knew enough, could be calculated as exactly. Similarly, from the side of the end.

or good, it is quite true that the phenomena of life are more complex than those of form or colour, and that, as the history of science has shown, it is more difficult to grasp the idea of the end or function of living beings expressed in such formulæ as survival, adaptation to environment, or the like, than a mathematical definition or a physical analysis. But modern biology leaves us in no doubt that such a definition is possible. Turning to the question of human good, the whole science of Ethics itself proceeds upon the assumption that whatever the apparent diversity of individual goods, they all find their unity in the conception of man as a being whose end consists in the fulfilment of his function as a member of a civilized community. Plato was here nearer the mark in insisting on the fundamental identity of the good in all its forms. Nor does Aristotle himself, when in closer touch with the inner spirit of his own philosophy, differ from him. In the present connexion we cannot help feeling that it would have saved him some embarrassment in the statement of the relation between wisdom and prudence if he had realized more clearly the illusoriness of the above distinctions, and thus left himself free to acknowledge that the practical good of man as itself one of "the elements of reality that depend upon unalterable principles," and indeed the highest of them, has no less a claim than the forms, colours, and motions of bodies to be made the object of philosophical thought (oopía).

We are left, therefore, with a distinction based not on any inherent difference between the degree of

« AnteriorContinuar »