2. The opinion that honour is the good (§§ 4 and 5) is treated more respectfully. One of the tests of the true end of life is that it should be something inherent in man, that it should in fact be nothing less than man's true nature or self. But honour is essentially something adventitious, belonging to a man not as a property of the soul, but as an accidental gift of his fellow-men. It is, therefore, too superficial, being, as Professor Stewart says, "not the nature and life of the person honoured, but a merely superficial and transitory reflection on him of the opinion of other people." This does not mean that honour, or the respect of others, has no important function to perform in relation to the true end. As we shall see hereafter, the highest happiness involves what is here called assurance of one's own worth," and one of the chief | factors in the development of this higher form of self-consciousness is the mutual respect and recognition of friends."

3. The definition of honour as the sign of the possession of high qualities of character suggests the view that virtue itself is the end (§§ 6 and 7). Aristotle's criticism of this view, paradoxical as it at first seems, carries us a step deeper, and brings out two closely allied elements in his conception of happiness. (a) Whatever else happiness is, it is a form of consciousness. As we shall see hereafter, it is the most vivid form of consciousness in which man can partake. It can never, therefore, consist in the mere possession of virtue, however complete. Just as a man may * See chapter xii.

possess all knowledge, and yet if he does not use it cannot be called truly wise, so the man whose virtue remains cloistered in his soul cannot be truly happy. (b) Since happiness consists in the active discharge of the soul's functions, mere potentiality, apart from actual realization, is not enough. Happiness, therefore, implies favourable circumstances. The opposite doctrine, viz. that the consciousness of possessing virtue is sufficient for happiness, was already taught in Aristotle's time. It became a commonplace with the Stoics in the next generation, and has found votaries in every succeeding age. So far from being a paradox, it is a mark of the sanity of Aristotle's philosophy that it avoids this exaggeration. Life with him is no abstraction from the circumstances of life. The good man who is overwhelmed by great misfortunes can indeed never be miserable. The essential nobility of his character can never be wholly obscured. Even at the crisis of his misfortunes it will "shine out."* Yet it would be a paradox to call him happy. To do so is, as Grant says, to take "the greatness of a man in misfortunes as though it were identical with his happiness," or, as Jowett still more subtly puts it, to confuse our own idea of happiness with the consciousness of it in another.

4. The force of Aristotle's criticism of the moneymaking life as "contrary to nature" may not at first strike the modern reader. It is common to oppose the "natural" to that which is distinctly human, as that which comes earlier and is more closely allied * I. c. x. § 12.

to our lower or animal nature. To Aristotle, however, the nature of man is not that out of which he has developed, but that into which he is developing ; not what he is at the lowest, but what he is at the highest; not what he is born as (to borrow a happy distinction), but what he is born for.* Now we already know what, according to Aristotle, man is born for. He is born for life in a city-state. And this implies two things which distinguish such a life from every other form. In the first place, it is social. The activities of which it consists are directed to common as distinguished from merely personal ends. In the second place, it has a definite form. It consists of activities directed to objects the limit of whose desirableness is fixed by their relation to the common purpose of the whole. In both these respects the money-making life is unnatural. (a) So far from

falling in with man's true end, it distorts and degrades life, turning social activities, eg. the arts of national defence, and the healing of the sick,t which should minister to fulness of social life, into mere means of private gain. (b) There is no limit to such a life. The money-maker goes on accumulating without limit; there is, as we say, no end to it. "Ask a great money-maker what he wants to do with his money - he never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he may get it. 'What will you

*Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State, p. 130.

† Politics, Bk. I. c. 9 (see Note C), which ought to be read in connexion with the present passage.

make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll get more,' he says. Just as at cricket you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other people is the game." "'* All this comes of making that which has meaning and purpose only in connexion with a wider end, into an end in itself. Aristotle, as we shall see, has no objection to great riches in itself. It is the necessary condition of one of his highest virtues, viz. magnificence. What he objects to is the indefinite pursuit of wealth irrespective of any social end which is served by it.

§ 5. Attributes of Happiness.

[I. c. vii. §§ 3 foll.]

Aristotle sums up the contents of the preceding chapters by claiming for happiness that it possesses the three attributes of finality, self-sufficiency, and supreme desirableness, warning us at the same time against misunderstanding the sense in which the two last are to be taken.

(a) The reader might hastily assume that by selfsufficiency was meant the power of rendering a man independent of society. But this would be a mistake. Whatever else the happy life is, it must be a whole or complete life, and this we have already seen is impossible unless it is a life which is lived in society. Man is a political animal, and you might as well

speak of making him independent of himself as of making him independent of his society or polis. The life which is truly good and happy is in need of nothing; not in the sense of having no conditionsthis would be equivalent to having no contents—but in the sense that it alone is the complete expression of the man. It alone leaves no element in his nature unaccounted for; and therefore it alone is completely satisfying.

(b) Similarly, in claiming for it that it is "the most desirable thing" in the world, Aristotle wishes the reader to understand that it is not one among other things with which it may be compared. It is, as George Eliot says, that which "we would choose before everything else because our souls see it to be good,' but in so choosing it we do not conceive of it as one among other goods which by being added to it might make it more desirable still. It is not one among others. It is that which includes all others. But even so we must be careful how we take it. It is not merely the sum of all other goods. It includes them, but at the same time it is more than all of them together. For happiness is a "natural" or organic thing, and the essence of things organic is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. As the tree or animal is the expression of the soul or moving principle of life organizing and transforming the parts, so happiness is the form in which reason-the soul of human life --expresses itself in its function of limiting and organizing the elements which go to make up life. The man, therefore, who takes reason as his guide