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values the elements, parts or details of life, not for themselves-this, as we have seen in the case of wealth, would be to destroy all order and limit—but for the sake of the organized life to which they contribute. On the other hand, as Professor Stewart says, the man who lives by sense and imagination becomes immersed in these details. "Life or happiness is for him a mere succession of particular experiences—an indefinite sum of good things which never satisfies him. To the external view he may seem to be happy,' because the material conditions or elements of happiness are separately present, but the transforming spirit is inwardly wanting.

'Er hat die Theile in seiner Hand
Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.'

He is receptive of isolated impressions; he lives as passion directs; he does not assert personality in active functions." *

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CHAPTER III.

THE ELEMENTS OF HAPPINESS.

Happiness consists in doing the things we were made for."
MARCUS AURELIUS.

§ 1. Aristotle's Method. Is it Inductive or Deductive?

[I. c. vii. §§ 9 foll.]

AT the beginning of the last chapter it was pointed out that Aristotle proceeds from criticism of current opinions to an independent analysis, from which he returns to the ordinary judgments of mankind as to the nature of happiness and the things to be looked for in it, with the view at once of verifying his own theory and enabling us the better to understand the truth which popular judgments contain. The intermediate stage of this method is that at which we should expect to find an illustration of his reiterated statement that ethics is an inductive science, proceeding from facts to principles. But instead of the

marshalling of facts from which an inductive generalization as to the true grounds of happiness may be made, we seem to have a series of unsupported assertions as to the "function" of man, from which his definition is deductively arrived at. "Much as

Aristotle speaks," says Grant, "of the logic of the science, we find, when we come to examine his real procedure, how little he is influenced by his own abstract rules of method. It is plain that he has deserted his former view of the science as inductive; he now makes it depend on a general conception of the chief good, which is to be applied and developed."

We might answer this criticism by pointing out, as Professor Stewart does, that it is a mistake to draw a hard-and-fast line between deduction and induction. In the investigation of complex subjects the common method of procedure is by hypothesis and verification, i.e. by the statement of a general proposition "on evidence avowedly insufficient," with the view of afterwards testing it by comparison with the facts. Such a process, although involving deduction, is allowed by all logicians to be essentially inductive. Some, e.g. Jevons,* even maintain that it is the type of all induction. In this broad sense Aristotle's method

may be said to be inductive. Taking his "data" and the conclusion from them as merely provisional, he goes on, in chap. viii. § 1, to test them in the light of the facts—in this case "the opinions that are held upon the subject."

But it is also worth pointing out that Grant's criticism rests on a confusion between scientific investigation and scientific exposition. Because a philosopher chooses to expound his subject by a preliminary statement of the general results at which

*“All inductive investigation consists in the marriage of hypothesis and experiment" (Principles of Science, p. 504).

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by a previous process of observation and analysis he has arrived, using the "facts" rather by way of illustration, it shows rather a narrow conception of logical method to accuse him of deserting the narrow way of observation and experience for the high a priori road. His data are in reality careful inductions from the facts of mind on the one hand, and the actual moral judgments of mankind on the other. As a matter of convenience, Aristotle prefers here to start from them as though they were independent of a previous process of observation and analysis.

§ 2. The Parts of the Definition. Happiness as Performance of Function.

[I. c. vii. § 14.]

It will be convenient in this chapter to follow the order in which the various elements of Happiness are mentioned in the definition.

1. Happiness, we are told, is "the performance of function," "activity of the soul according to excellence," the manifestation of "the highest virtue in living energy." It may serve to bring out the meaning of this part of the definition if we compare it with a doctrine with which we have been made familiar in our own time, and with which it has sometimes been identified. "Blessed is he," says Carlyle, "who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it. Labour is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given Force, awakens him

to all knowledge-self-knowledge and much elseso soon as work fitly begins."*

Between this doctrine and Aristotle's there is much in common. They are both a protest against the attempt to identify happiness with any mere state of passive satisfaction, e.g. pleasure. To say with Carlyle that "Man's Unhappiness comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite" (in spite of what is sometimes said of the absence of the sense of the Infinite in ancient ethics), is only to express in modern terms what Aristotle means when he says that happiness consists in an activity of the soul. They are at one, too, in denying that it is anything external to a man. When Carlyle, in the same passage, pillories the idea of happiness as an "overplus" in wages that fortune can give us, and points us instead to the "God-like that is in man, in which only has he Strength and Freedom," he repeats what Aristotle says when he denies that happiness is something that is given by chance or by the gods. But with these negative points the agreement ends. Thus nothing could be further from Aristotle's meaning than the identification of happiness with "work." To Aristotle life is more than labour, the man than the workman. True, there are some cases-Aristotle would have quoted his own-in which a man's work may be identical with the highest happiness, for it may be of such a kind as to call forth the highest faculties of the soul,

* Past and Present, Bk. III. c. 11 (condensed).

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