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desires, nor his happiness as the feeling of pleasure incident to their satisfaction. His life, we have seen, is a system of rational activities-a system which is foreshadowed in his inherited instincts, but developed into stable elements of character by the education he receives in a civilized community. His happiness consists in finding scope for his powers in the ordered life which such a society makes possible. The man, therefore, who, as the result of education in a wellgoverned community, has become master of himself and all his faculties, has an abiding source of peace within himself. To such a man the recurring motives and desires of everyday life represent no disturbance of the central equilibrium or invasion of his happiness, but the means through which the potentialities of his nature are called into active exercise. It is true that desire when it is present necessarily involves pain and unrest. But it is doubtful, in the first place, whether desire in the pessimist's sense plays any large part in the normal life of the good man at all. And in the second place, even although we grant that desire in the sense of a feeling of unrest still continues to play a part in the best ordered life, it no more constitutes a disturbance of its equilibrium than the outward bend of its stalk to the stimulation of the sunshine, the downward push of its roots to the stimulation of the earth, are a disturbance of the equilibrium of the plant. And the reason is that the lifelong habits of thinking and acting upon which this equilibrium rests are nothing less than the man himself. They are what we mean by his character or personality. The happiness,

therefore, that consists in its exercise is as abiding as this is. Nothing can unsettle it which does not unsettle him, and though we shall not call one who suffers the fate of a Priam or a Lear happy, yet if he still retains command of himself he can never be miserable. So far, therefore, from being the most unstable of a man's possessions, as the pessimist holds, happiness is the stablest. It is stabler even than knowledge and science. A man may forget what he once knew, but so long as life and personality hold together he cannot, except momentarily, forget himself; and to remember one's self in this sense is to be happy.*

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CHAPTER IV.

THE SOUL AND ITS PARTS.

"Let us not always say,

Spite of this flesh to-day

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.

As the bird wings and sings,

Let us say all good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more

Now than flesh helps soul."

BROWNING.

§1. Aristotle's Doctrine of the Relation between

Soul and Body.

[I. c. xiii.]

THE meaning of our definition of Happiness hinges upon the sense in which we take the term Virtue or Excellence. The sections before us establish three general positions: (a) it is excellence of the soul; (b) it is excellence of the rational part of the soul; (c) of this excellence there are two forms—a lower or moral, and a higher or intellectual. It is thus natural that the emphasis throughout should be laid upon the distinctions on which these positions depend, viz. that between (a) body and soul; (b) the irrational and the rational soul; (c) the moral and the intellectual in the human soul, rather than upon the

unity that underlies them. With other fuller statements of the sense in which these distinctions-and especially (a) and (b)-are to be taken, behind him (see § 9), Aristotle was the less concerned to dwell upon the latter question here. For the English reader to whom these distinctions are apt to suggest a deeper division than that between the " convex and concave of a circle" (§ 10), a more careful statement of the relation of the "parts" of man's nature to each other may not be out of place.

Beginning with the first, and inquiring how Aristotle defines the relation between soul and body, we find the most succinct statement of it in his treatise on Psychology. "Soul," he there says, "is the simplest actuality of a natural body which has the potentiality of life." But this explanation, to say the least of it, is not self-explanatory. What is meant by actuality and potentiality? These phrases introduce us to one of the central conceptions of Aristotle's philosophy, of which a word must be said.

Created beings are conceived of by Aristotle-in a form which the modern theory of evolution renders easily comprehensible-as a series in which each lower type is related to that which is above it, as matter to form or the potential to the actual. This relation manifests itself even in inorganic matter. We may say, for example, that marble exists potentially in the chemical materials of which it is composed. But the most striking examples are found in the field of

*De Anima, II. c. i. § 6. See Wallace's Aristotle's Psychology,

organic life, and in the productions of human art. In the former we have a hierarchy of forms which find their final reality in the life of man, who sums up while he transcends all that went before. In the latter the means, e.g. the marble, stands to the end -the statue or the temple column-as the matter to the form, the potential to the actual.

Returning to Aristotle's doctrine of the soul, we find in it merely an application of this general theory. At a certain point in this series, viz. that known as the organic, or, as Aristotle calls it, "natural" body, we find matter endowed with life. But it is a mistake to conceive of these two, which popular language distinguishes as body and soul, as essentially distinct from each other. The soul is not a mysterious substance lodged in another substance called body. It stands to body as the statue to the marble, or, better still, as the active function to the organ. If, says Aristotle, we were to conceive of the axe as the body, "then its axehood, or its being an axe, would constitute its essential nature or reality, and thus, so to speak, its soul; because, were this axehood taken away from it, it would be no longer an axe.

If the eye were possessed of life, vision would be its soul, because vision is the reality which expresses the idea of the eye. The eye itself, on the other hand, is merely the material substratum for vision, and when this power of vision fails, it no longer remains an eye, except in so far as it is still called by the same name, just in the same way as an eye carved in stone or delineated in painting is

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