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§ 2. General Character of the Science.

[I. cc. ii., iii.]

The remainder of chap. ii. and the first part of chap. iii. give us two general features of the science.

I. It is the science of man as a citizen. It is significant that Aristotle nowhere describes it as "ethics." It is true that to him as to us it is the science of character (0os), but to describe it in this way would have been doubly misleading from Aristotle's point of view. In the first place, it would have failed to bring out the central fact that not only in its origin, but in its contents, good character is essentially social. And, secondly, it would have left no room for the distinction, so vital in Aristotle's view, between the virtue or excellence which consists in good character, and that higher kind of excellence which consists in intelligence and insight. We are here mainly concerned with the former point. Man, we have seen, is “a political being." It is impossible to consider his good or happiness apart from that of the community in which he lives.

Discussing the question whether the virtue of the good man and the good citizen is the same, in a passage which ought to be read as a comment upon this (Politics, iii. c. 4), Aristotle replies that it is so when the state-organization is really constitutional or "political," i.e. when it permits the individual to develop as nature intended him into the free citizen of a self-governing community.

It might indeed appear as though the words of

c. ii. § 8,* were incompatible with this interpretation. But in this section, as Professor Stewart has pointed out, Aristotle must not be supposed to be distinguishing between the good of the community at large"the greatest happiness of the greatest number". and the private good of the single member of it. Rather, he is distinguishing between the life of the man who is surrounded by all that is best in civilized life-its opportunities for social service on the one side, and self-culture on the other-and that of the same man when accidentally separated, whether by exile (like Aristides), or imprisonment (like Socrates), from all that makes life attractive. In the former case, all that is best in him is called forth. He lives in the life of his country-his country lives in him. He is what nature intended him to be. In the latter, all that is best in him is suppressed. in a mutilated, semi-animate way, and is shadow of his former self.

He lives only the

2. It is inexact. We may agree to accept the distinction that Aristotle draws between exact and inexact sciences. Some sciences, of which mathematics is a type, admit of exact reasoning from principles easily grasped and universally acknowledged. Others, like psychology, rest on principles reached by a somewhat precarious process of induction, in the application of which great caution has to be observed. Most people

* "And even though this [the good] is the same for individuals and communities, yet the good of the community is grander and more sufficing to lay hold of and to keep. For though we may often rest satisfied with merely individual good, yet the good of a nation or a state is nobler and more divine."

would also agree in assigning ethics or politics, as Aristotle does, to the latter class. But it is not so clear what they would mean by doing so. It may, therefore, be worth while dwelling a moment on the reason why we should agree with Aristotle in this classification. It clearly is not because it is not possible to know what is exactly right in matters of conduct as in mathematics. There are principles here, as in Euclid, which require that conduct shall be of a certain definite kind.

We shall see what really is meant if we consider for a moment the conditions that enter into a problem in exact science, e.g. mathematics, and compare them with those that set a problem in conduct. The difference is that the conditions in mathematics are abstract; in ethics they are concrete. It may seem paradoxical to claim for moral philosophy that it is a concrete science. We usually think of it as one of the most abstract. But from the point of view of its subject-matter this is clearly not the case. While the subject-matter of mathematics is number and figure, i.e. abstract properties or things, ethics has to do with concrete things or events themselves— the wholes, we might say, of which these properties are parts. Even this does not fully express what we mean in claiming for ethics that it is the science of the concrete. There is a point of view from which concrete things and events themselves may be regarded as abstractions, being merely points of interest in a context which gives them meaning. It is this context-the whole of which things or events

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are parts-that forms the subject-matter of the science of ethics. All conduct takes place in a context; it must have regard to a situation. The man who would act rightly must attend to the diverse elements or conditions-things, persons, events-which the situation contains. Success in conduct just consists in taking all of these elements or conditions into account. It follows from what has just been said that while the problems of a science like mathematics may repeat themselves, exactly the same. problem presenting itself to different individuals or to the same individual at different times, the conditions of a moral problem are such that they can never recur. Situations like one another of course do occur; if they did not, moral habits would be impossible, and the burden of responsibility in adapting our conduct to them would be intolerable. Yet they are never identical. Circumstances," we say, "alter cases;" to which we may add that cases alter circumstances. Two individuals are never in the same circumstances. We may go further and say that the same individual is never really in the same circumstances twice. Morality, as Professor Alexander says, never repeats itself. From which it follows that though ethics, like other sciences, has its principles and general rules, e.g. the ten commandments, the application of them is essentially a matter of individual judgment, and no conduct can be moral conduct which is simply an application of a rule of thumb.

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This difference explains the saying in chap, iii,

that young men are not, as a rule, good students of moral philosophy. If it is true that the solution of a moral problem depends on the power of adapting conduct to context or environment-of "hitting off" the situation-it clearly implies two things in the agent. In the first place, it implies the power of taking in a situation as a whole: the quality we call judgment, insight, wisdom., In the second place, it implies freedom from the bias of passion, by which judgment is apt to be warped. But both of these qualifications are apt to be absent in youth; the first because insight into a situation depends not so much on the training of any special faculty (as does, for example, mathematical ability) as upon experience of like situations in the past; the second because "young men, moreover, are apt to be swayed by passion." The characteristic addition that after all "the defect is not a matter of time, but consists in their living according to passion, and following the objects which passion suggests," reminding us that youth alone is not sufficient to disqualify or age to qualify for deriving benefit from the study, brings us to the last of the questions touched upon in these sections, viz. that of the practical value of the science of ethics.

§3. The Practical Value of Ethics.

[I. c. ii. § 2, and c. iii. § 7.]

Two remarks bear upon this question. (1) In c. iii. § 7, Aristotle notices the conditions under which it can be of any value at all. To those who live according

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