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connexion is much more intimate than Plato held, and is compared by Aristotle to the relation of a more complex geometrical figure to a simpler. Just as a quadrangle contains in itself two triangles, but cannot be said to be compacted of them, so the individual animal consists of the union of the vegetative and the appetitive soul. And just as there is no figure which is not some power of the triangle, so there is no soul, however exalted in the scale, which does not contain the lower. But Aristotle would have been the first to admit that no geometrical metaphor is adequate to express the real depth of the connexion. The higher not only contains the lower, but transforms it, so that it is only in the new setting which it receives as an element in the higher that the potentialities of the lower become apparent.* Thus in the life of sensation and desire we have the life of nutrition raised to a higher power, and showing us what it had in it to become. Similarly, in the life of thought and volition we see for the first time the true end and purpose of sense, feeling, and appetite.

Applying this to the division before us: when Aristotle tells us that the soul of man consists of three parts-a vegetative or purely irrational, a sensitive or appetitive, which is partly rational and partly irrational, and a purely rational—we are prepared to understand in what sense these expressions must be taken.

The most suggestive of Aristotle's formulæ for expressing the relation of form to matter is that by which he describes the form as "that which the matter was all along" (Tò Ti v elvai).

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I. In the first place there can here be nothing purely irrational in the sense that it is not adapted to the end of the whole. The physical and merely vegetative part of man already bears the stamp of his reason. There is even, as Professor Stewart points out, a sense in which it is the conscious product of reason. It is true that as conscious individuals we have little to do with the form and physical growth of our bodies. But it is not true that the body has reached its present stage of development independently of the action of conscious purpose. Apart altogether from sexual selection, where the purpose may be said to be unconscious, we have the conscious reason of the community, acting inter alia through prescribed forms of physical education, and sensibly modifying the inherited structure of the physical organism.

2. It is all the more important to try to define accurately what is implied in the general philosophy sketched above as to the relation between reason and desire, that Aristotle's own expressions in the passage before us are not carefully selected. Thus in §§ 15 and 18, he does not hesitate to class desire as "irrational," while his metaphor in §§ 15 and 16 of the paralytic limb does not mend matters, but, as Grant remarks, is apt to suggest the parallel passage in the Epistle to the Romans, where St. Paul describes the opposition between the "law of my mind," and "the law in my members." The reader who has followed the above account of Aristotle's guiding conception will have no difficulty in seeing how wholly contrary to the spirit of his doctrine any such

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interpretation would be. On the one hand, the “law in the members" is not something essentially different from "the law of the mind "-desire from reason. According to Aristotle there is a natural tendency in the desires and impulses to fall into an order or system which more or less reflects the order required by the social environment.* On the other hand, the life of * reason does not mean the uprooting of the animal desires, but the subordination of them to the human purposes which they themselves already foreshadow It is true, indeed, that in the man of imperfect selfcontrol there does appear to be such a division as is here suggested. But this is because he represents the stage of transition from the lower stage at which, as in the intelligent animal or docile child, the harmony between reason and passion is merely implicit, to the higher in which, as in the man of perfected self-control, it has become the conscious principle of life. When the transition has been made we find that the higher harmony has been obtained, not at the expense of the lower or animal nature by suppressing or maiming it, but by developing the rational principle it foreshadows and reproducing on the higher plane of conscious life the completeness which the unconscious possesses on a lower.

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$ 3. Moral and Intellectual Virtue.
[I. c. xiii. § 19.]

If we apply the same principle to the different forms of virtue or capacity with which these sections

* See p. 70.

end, we shall see how little support the ordinary dualism between morality and intelligence, practice and theory, receives from the Aristotelian division.

(a) On the broad distinction between the morally good life, manifesting itself in such "virtues" as selfmastery and liberality, and the life of intellectual insight as typified in the wise administration of one's own and other people's affairs, Aristotle, as we shall see, shows no tendency to suppose that a man can be good in the full sense without being intelligent and thoughtful. The life of prudence he consistently conceives of (as we should expect from his general view of the relation of higher forms of reality to lower) as the end to which the life of conformity to moral and social traditions points, and in which it finds its reality. According to this view, to be good is to be on the road to wisdom; to be wise is to know where goodness points and what it means.

(b) It is true that in his conception of the relation between the lower and the higher form of the "intellectual" life (prudence or practical wisdom, and thought or philosophy) Aristotle leaves us in some uncertainty, and that there are passages where he seems to have in view as the highest development of human capacity a life only negatively related to the active duties of citizenship. Whatever difficulties this uncertainty may cause in dealing with the text, from the side of Aristotle's philosophical principles there is no justification for any such dualism between the life of the practical man and of the thinker. According to these principles, the purpose of thought and reflection

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is not to remove us from practice, but to raise practice to a higher plane. To separate thought from action is as fatal to a true understanding, not only of the spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy, but of life, as to separate soul from body, form from content. Separated from the life of action, the life of reflection becomes unreal; separated from reflection, the life of action becomes unmeaning. As Professor Mackenzie puts it in his pointed treatment of this subject: "A life of pure reflection would never acquire any positive content. It would have principles, but no facts to apply them to; yet it is by contact with such facts that the principles themselves grow. It is experience that tests them and sends us back again to improve them." * On the other hand, the life of action without reflection, bringing our actual achievements face to face with the ideal of excellence which is their end, is necessarily stereotyped and unprogressive. It is not, therefore, merely a case of action and reaction: it is not merely that "in retirement we criticize the acts of life; in life we criticize the ideas of retirement," or that "action is the gymnastics, reflection the music, of moral culture." The life of action is the body and blood of the life of thought; the life of thought is the soul and reason of the life of action.

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* Manual of Ethics, 3rd edit. p. 364.
† Ibid. p. 366.

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