This objection Aristotle would have admitted to a great extent. Mere length of days, with their prolonged enjoyments, was no essential element in his conception any more than it was in that of the educated Greek world generally. In this spirit he elsewhere recognizes that a right-minded man will prefer one great and glorious deed to many ordinary ones (IX. viii. 9).

To understand why, notwithstanding, he lays so much stress on a full term of years," we must take this part of the definition along with what is said in chap. ix. Aristotle is there protesting against the idea that happiness may be a gift of fortune-a protest not less necessary then in view of the suggestion of something supernatural, i.e. accidental, conveyed in the etymology of eudaemonia, than now in view of a similar suggestion of "hap" or chance. His argument is that to conceive of happiness in this way is at once to narrow its possession, and to detract from its dignity. Happiness is not a gift of the gods; if it were we should have to think of it as something uncovenanted and exceptional, not as something attainable by man as man, and in this sense universal. Moreover, such a view is inconsistent with the ordered completeness of the happy life, which can only be the result of some steady principle of causation, such as we find in the sustained endeavour of communities of men.†

* See the well-known story in Herodotus, i. 30, 31, where no emphasis is laid on the duration of happiness.

† See Professor Stewart's paraphrase of chap. ix., op. cit. i. p. 131.

Now the steady principle upon which our chief : reliance must be placed, is, of course, education, and this requires time. The difficulty, therefore, is solved by noting that when he insists that "as one swallow or one warm day does not make Spring, so a single day or a short time of happiness does not make a man blessed or happy," Aristotle is thinking of time as necessary, not for the full enjoyment of happiness, but for the full development of the powers and capacities in the exercise of which it consists.

§ 5. The Happiness of Children.

[I. c. ix. § 10.]

This explains what to the modern reader will appear perhaps the chief paradox of these sections -the statement in chap. ix. § 10, that happiness is not for children. "If children cannot be happy," we are apt to ask, "who can?" We are sometimes even inclined to go to the opposite extreme, and to attribute to them a happiness higher both in degree and kind than falls to ourselves; a view to which educational theory has not been slow to respond.

*

It is in this spirit that some modern writers have besought us to think less of the man and more of the child in what we call "preparation for life." "What * This was Shelley's view :

"Blest in death and life beyond man's guessing,
Little children live and die possessed

Still of grace that keeps them past expressing

Blest."

must we think," cries Rousseau, the representative here X as elsewhere of leading modern tendencies, "of that barbarous education which sacrifices the present for an uncertain future, which loads a child with chains of every sort, and begins by making him miserable, in order to prepare for him long in advance some pretended happiness which it is probable he will never enjoy? . . . Love childhood, encourage its sports, its pleasures, its amiable instincts. Humanity has its place in the order of things, and infancy has its place in the order of human life. We must consider the man in the man, and the child in the child."

To ask these questions and emphasize this opposition between the child and the man merely shows how far we have drifted from Aristotle's conception. It is to overlook the fundamental distinction between freedom from responsibility and the heightened power of animal enjoyment that goes along with it and the higher human happiness that comes of the harmonious exercise of developed faculties. However gay and light-hearted a child's life may be, it is a misnomer to call it happy, except and in so far as the activities of which it consists foreshadow the life of manly purposes for which it is a preparation. Rousseau's protest had, of course, its value at the time as a criticism of the artificial and ascetic ideals of education then in vogue. It is still more valid perhaps to-day against the system of education or no education which, in spite of recent improvements, permits so large a * Emile, Bk. II. See Payne's abridgment, p. 44.

sacrifice in field and factory of the life and happiness appropriate to children. But what it is important to notice is, that besides the wrong to the child, there is the deeper wrong to the man. The "barbarousness consists in losing hold, not so much of the ideal of the child, as of the ideal of the man. By our treatment of the child we leave so stunted a stalk that no healthy growth of happiness can be expected from it. For the rest, as the child is father of the man, the child's happiness, to be true, must be father of the man's. There is really no inconsistency here. The truest child-enjoyments are those which prepare for the enjoyments of manhood. What is wanted is not the vulgar conception of happiness as the gratification of the senses "made down" to children, but an enlarged conception of what we mean by the happiness of a man, and the preparation that is required for it.

§ 6. The Stability of Happiness.

[I. c. x. §§ 1-11.]

4. The sections in which Aristotle discusses the stability and permanence of happiness are apt to strike us as somewhat unreal and even trivial. It is difficult to recognize in the problem as here formulated, what Professor Stewart calls "the most pressing question the moralist has to do with." For, after all, we are not very likely, as we have seen, to confuse happiness with good fortune, or to found a general argument against the possibility of happiness upon the

proverbial fickleness of fortune. Yet there is a deeper form of pessimism, which has been made familiar to us in modern times, and of which we may take the present passage without unwarrantable straining as a criticism. This begins in admitting with Aristotle that happiness does not consist in external goods, but in an inward state which is the result of harmonious activities. It denies, however, that any such state is truly attained except momentarily. Happiness must satisfy desire is the satisfaction of desire-but desire is from its very nature insatiable. One appetite is no sooner satisfied than another makes itself felt. Consciousness, in fact, consists in the passage of the soul from one form of unrest to another. So long as consciousness lasts, the settled state of peace required by our conception of happiness is, from the nature of the case, unattainable. In the unconsciousness of death alone there is rest and completeness. For a deeper reason than Solon's the modern pessimist can repeat his maxim, "Call no man happy till his death." *

Now, if we admit the assumptions that underlie this argument, viz. that man is essentially a bundle of desires, and that happiness consists in the feeling of rest which accompanies their satisfaction, it will be difficult to avoid the conclusion that happiness is essentially unstable, and therefore unattainable. The student, however, who has followed with conviction the line of Aristotle's thought in these sections will be prepared to see the fallacy that is here involved. Man, we have agreed, is not definable as a bundle of

* Cp. Hobbes, quoted p. 13 above.