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(whom he identifies with "Socrates") who leaned to this heresy. Here again it is evidence of the sanity of the great thinkers, amongst them probably Socrates himself, that they clearly saw the place of moral habit as an essential condition of enlightened judgment.

Following them, we must endeavour to give their due weight to both these elements in the truth. Not only must both be held at the same time: both must be held in union. Education is a process of illumination. It is necessary to have one's eyes opened to see the meaning of social ends. Those who mean well, and endeavour to conform to tradition or follow authority without seeing clearly what the good is which they mean, make the bigots and obscurantists of an age, and may under particular circumstances be just as great a danger to social order as those who see well enough the meaning of their actions, but mean badly. On the other hand, in order that one may see clearly what social good requires, it is necessary to have appropriated the reason embodied in the tradition, and be familiar as a matter of practice with its operation. In this respect moral truth is not really different from scientific, and may be illustrated from it. People sometimes speak of the truths of science as though the apprehension of them were merely a matter of intellectual grasp. But every teacher knows that to understand and realize a scientific principle the student requires long training and practical familiarity with the scope and method of the particular science within which it falls. In the same manner, and all the more because the

end itself is ultimately a state of the will, it is true that what we call a moral principle can only be understood in the light of the systematic effort to realize it in practice.

§ 5. Prudence and Wisdom.

[VI. c. xiii. § 8.]

The question of the relation between Prudence and Wisdom can only be fully treated after the discussion of the latter. The answer to it is, however, to a certain extent anticipated in the last section of the passage before us, in which Aristotle meets the objection that the above account of Prudence, by assigning to it the supreme place in the state as the maker and administrator of law, places Wisdom and Philosophy in the position of subjects. This, he says, is wholly to misunderstand, indeed to reverse their true relation to each other. The legislator may be said to be master over the citizens, and to give directions how they are to conduct themselves as he gives directions for the conduct of a religious festival. But just as in the latter case the directions are issued, not for the guidance of the gods, but with the view of providing for their worship, so the laws are made, not with a view to regulating and defining the course of thought and philosophy, but with a view to providing for their exercise. In other words, the function of Prudence is to organize the resources of civilization so as to make them available for the life of Thought. Aristotle would not have denied that there was a sense in

which the opposite was true, and that thought and philosophy might be "useful" by contributing to man's control over nature and so strengthening and extending the material basis of happiness. What he here insists upon, and rightly insists upon, is that their "utility" does not end here, but that they constitute a substantive element in happiness itself—are, in fact, the soul of which all the other elements of happiness are the body. This twofold aspect is well brought out by Professor Stewart when he says: "To have this ideal" (the ideal of a complete life), “it is not, indeed, necessary to be one's self a 'philosopher' or 'thinker,' or actually to lead the separate contemplative life,' strictly so called; but it is necessary to live in a city which has thinkers and is regulated for the sake of them." From this point of view, thought and philosophy are a necessity in civilized communities, not primarily because they are of use in providing for its material needs, but because they represent an element without which the moral and intellectual qualities which are its most precious possession must fail to reach their full development.*

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* Cp. what Dr. Bosanquet says of art, philosophy, and religion: Art, philosophy, and religion, though in a sense the very life-blood of society, are not and could not be directly fashioned to meet the needs and uses of the multitude, and their aim is not in that sense 'social.' They should rather be regarded as a continuation within, and founded upon the commonwealth of the work which the commonwealth begins in realizing human nature; as fuller utterances of the same universal self which the 'general will 'reveals in more precarious forms; and as in the same sense implicit in the consciousness of all, being an inheritance which is theirs so far as they can take possession of it" (Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 333).

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CHAPTER XI.

WISDOM, OR PHILOSOPHY.

"When I say that the government is best under which men lead a peaceable life, I mean that life of man which consists not only in the circulation of the blood and other properties common to all animals, but whose chief part is reason, and the true life and excellence of the mind.” SPINOZA.

§ 1. Definition of Philosophy.
[VI. c. i. § 5.]

WE have already seen that Wisdom, or Philosophy, is
concerned with those elements of reality which depend
upon unalterable principles, and is defined as "scientific
knowledge of the most precious things, with the crown
of perfection upon it." Before going on further to
discuss the peculiar place that is claimed for it in
human life and happiness, it is necessary to try to
define more precisely what we are to understand by
the term.

Assuming that the scientific as opposed to the calculative reason has for its object the unalterable principles of reality,* how can we distinguish Philosophy from other kinds of scientific knowledge? Or, to * In what sense this is true has been seen p. 139 above.

put it otherwise, what are we to understand by "the most precious things" of which we are told Philosophy is the knowledge? The very form of the question seems to suggest that Science and Philosophy have different objects, and when he is dealing with the precise difference between them Aristotle tends to dwell upon this distinction. In this spirit he differentiates, in a well-known passage in the Metaphysics,* two kinds of knowledge, one of which busies itself with the investigation of what is changeable and incomplete, i.e. contained as an attribute in something else, the other with what is eternal and self-contained. The former kind is what we should understand by science, falling, according to Aristotle, into two main divisions, viz. mathematics and physics. There is, however, in Aristotle a wider sense of the term philosophy, according to which it is taken as a description of knowledge, or theory in general, falling into the three great groups of mathematical, physical, and theological or first philosophy. According to this view, these sciences represent rather stages in the deepening of the knowledge of reality which reaches its furthest point in that which is par excellence philosophy, than fields distinct from one another or from philosophy itself. It is in accordance with this view of the scope of philosophy that Aristotle at the beginning of the Metaphysics, in enumerating the marks that distinguish philosophical from other kinds of knowledge, notes that it is concerned with every

*

Metaphysics K 7; cf. Stewart, ii. p. 55. Wallace's Outlines of the Philosophy of Aristotle, p. 23.

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