to passion, and follow the objects which passion suggests, he tells us "knowledge is of little avail." From which it follows that whatever the value of ethics, we ought not to expect it to change a man's life. So far from a man's habits of choice being the outcome of his ethical theory, his theory of life, as we shall see hereafter, is commonly the reflection of his habitual pursuits. Moral philosophy can only make explicit the principle which unconsciously controls his actions. It cannot give principle to them. The man without principle is thus without the "data" of ethics. He may get up the science as he might get up a subject for an examination, but he will have no fine understanding of it, and as a consequence it will have no effect upon his life.* (2) Under other circumstances, however, Aristotle claims for the study in c. ii. 2, an important function in relation to practice. "Surely to know what this Good is, is a matter of practical importance, for in that case we shall be as archers shooting at a definite mark, and shall be more likely to do what is right." Let us try to see clearly what is meant by this claim.

Current phrases are apt here to be misleading. We hear, for instance, of “applied" as distinguished from theoretic ethics, as if ethics, like mathematics or mechanics, laid down rules or formulæ which merely required to be applied to particular cases in which all the factors might be determined beforehand. We have already seen how fallacious any such analogy must necessarily be. Moral conduct is of course ruled

* Cf. c. iv. § 6, p. 216 below.

or regulated conduct, but the principle of regulation is adequacy to changing situations and not conformity to any system of rules and regulations. But because ethical knowledge is of no use for "application" in this sense, it does not follow that it has no practical bearing on life.

As theory it serves the same function with respect to its object as any other science does, and this, from the nature of the case, seeing that ethics is the science of conduct ("three-fourths of life"), is a practical one. This will be clear if we consider for a moment what this function is.

Theory is sometimes thought of as concerned with general laws, and therefore as the antithesis of fact and reality. But this, of course, is a misunderstanding. The function of theory is not to carry us away into a region of abstraction and comparative unreality, but to put us into closer touch with fact. It is the process by which we deepen our hold upon the world about us, and thus vivify the impressions we receive from it. To know, for example, the theory of the life of flowers is to know any particular flower more fully, more vividly, more really. Applying this to ethics, or the science of the right end of life, the result of determining the nature of this end, so far as we succeed in doing so, will be to strengthen our hold upon life and deepen our sense of its reality. Whether such theoretic understanding of the meaning of right conduct is necessary in order that our conduct may be really right; whether there is any sense in which in spite of the above admissions it may be said to be

sufficient of itself to secure right conduct, i.e. whether there is any sense in which, as Socrates held, virtue is knowledge; whether again philosophy in the strict sense is the only way in which such knowledge is acquired—are questions that will meet us hereafter. It is sufficient here to have pointed out that ethics, by dwelling upon the relation of action to end and of our different ends to one another, tends to vivify our apprehension of the meaning of conduct, and in doing so to alter its character.* It is thus that, by bringing into clear consciousness ends previously accepted without conscious understanding of their value, it helps to make apparent the incompatibility of some of those ends with others, and suggests the possibility of so organizing life as to avoid misdirection of activity and keep it to channels in which it may really contribute to the one end of supreme value.†

This relation between theory and practice is well illustrated by the order of treatment in the Ethics and Politics. As in Plato, so in Aristotle, the discussion which begins with more abstract questions concerning the Good as the supreme End of life naturally leads to suggestions for the reorganization of life with a view to making it more directly contributory to this end-ethical analysis to schemes of education and government.

* For a fuller statement see Philosophy in Relation to Life (Ethical World Publishing Co.).

See Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 268. The whole passage should be consulted on the subject of this and the next paragraph.

§ 4. Special Value of Greek Theory.

But the English student, with such brilliant illustrations before him as are afforded by the utilitarian school of reformers, is not so likely to doubt the practical value of ethical study as the value of approaching it for modern purposes through the speculations of an ancient philosopher; and a word seems required in conclusion to justify this method. There are two special advantages in approaching the study of ethics through the great Greek philosophers, one of which has been already touched upon.

1. We are here placed from the outset at the right point of view with regard to the nature of man whose ends we are investigating. It is the good of man as a citizen, or member of a community, not of man as an individual, which is the subject-matter in ethics. The good of the individual ought never to be separated from the good of the whole of which he is a partethics from politics. Some of the great English ethical writers have obscured this point, and more recent methods of study, by connecting ethics with biology, have not tended to correct this error. As the biologist finds the source and type of all life in the single cell, it is assumed that moral science begins with individuals as independent units who by their union form the "aggregate" we call society. In this way a presumption is established at the outset in favour of a separation of individual from social wellbeing, and the separation once made, the problem of their harmonious union becomes insoluble.* Aristotle

* See below, p. 184.

never wavers on this head. He lays it down, as we have seen from the outset, that man is primarily a member of a community. He is of course well aware that in the order of time (as we might say from the point of view of sociology), the individual, or at least the family, comes before the state. But this does not affect the question of the true nature and end of man, with which ethics is concerned. From this point of view Aristotle has no doubt that the state comes first. "In the order of nature the state is prior to the household and the individual, as the whole is prior to the part."* It is true, of course, that modern ethics does not confine itself to the consideration of man in his functions as citizen. In laying emphasis on the value of human personality we have passed beyond the limits of Greek nationalism. But this does not mean that we have substituted the idea of individuals to whose happiness social union merely stands at best as means to an end, for that of citizens the end and purpose of whose being is a highlyorganized form of social life. It merely means that we have enlarged our conception of the range of man's organic connections. It is as untrue now as it was in the time of Aristotle to claim that a man's life is his own. It belongs to him not as an individual but as a member of a community. The difference is that the community is no longer conceived of as bounded by a city wall or a neighbouring range of mountains, but as co-extensive with humanity. Once, however, the principle is grasped with respect to the smaller unity of the Greek city-state Politics, I. c. ii. § 12. See Note A, where the passage is quoted at length.

*