from death? As Grant very well puts it: "Resolve the statue or the building into stone and the laws of proportion, and no worthy causes of the former beautiful result seem now left behind. So, also, resolve a virtuous act into the passions and some quantitative law, and it seems to be rather destroyed than analyzed. . . . An act of bravery seems beautiful and noble; when we reduce this to a balance between the instincts of fear and self-confidence, the glory of it is gone." The difficulty, he continues, seems still greater when we think of more distinctly Christian. virtues, such as humility, charity, forgiveness of injuries. It is quite true that just as there is a point where the beauty of the brave act would be destroyed by pushing it to folly, and, again, by controlling it into caution, so there is a point at which humility will become grovelling, charity weak, and forgiveness spiritless. "But there seems in them something which is also their chief characteristic, and which is beyond and different from this quality of the mean." Even the additional reference to the prudent man does not help us here, for, after all, prudence or wisdom is apt to be conceived of rather as a negative than a positive virtue-a fact which the Greeks themselves recognized in representing the "demon," or spirit of wisdom, in Socrates as a voice warning him against what was wrong rather than an inspiration as to what was right.

In reply to this it must be admitted that Aristotle's account of virtue as a mean between two extremes

* Op. cit. i. pp. 260, 261.

fails to give us the ultimate rationale of moral excellence. This is necessarily so. The definition is an analysis of the general conditions which must be observed if an act is to be good. But the goodness of an act just consists in its individuality, in its being what is precisely demanded of the individual by the particular circumstances of the case. And this is precisely what no definition-which, as the logician would tell us, is of the general-can give.

Something like this seems to be in Aristotle's mind. when he adds the important rider to the definition: When, therefore, we are seeking a logical definition of virtue, we must describe it as a mean. But we must remember that when we look at it from the point of view of what is best and 'well done,' it is itself an extreme." The remark, as Grant says, shows the admirable balance in Aristotle's mind between the abstract and the concrete. It recalls us from the logical analysis to the real thing that is being analyzed. Excellence, he had begun by saying, is that which makes a thing to be in reality what it had the potentiality of being. To be so-in other words, to be or realize itself is the good at which everything aims. To this, man is no exception. He, also, to use Spinoza's phrase, tries to persevere in his own essence. struggles to be what he truly is, and to realize himself. In a good action he succeeds for a moment, as it were, in doing so. He expresses his whole self, and stands forth as what he truly is. Here there can be no talk of virtue being a mean. Such a definition is good enough as telling us how this result

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looks from the side of the passions, through the medium of which it is achieved; or, again, how it looks from the point of view of times and seasons and human circumstances generally. It does not tell us how it looks from the side of the man himself, i.e. how it looks sub specie aeternitatis. From this side it is not a mean. Here it is an extreme, for it is the best that is in him-"the thing he was made for."

§ 5. Can there be a "Habit of choosing?"

Now

But we have hitherto avoided what the student of psychology will probably feel to be the main difficulty in Aristotle's doctrine of virtue. The basis of virtue in Aristotle's view is, as we have seen, habit. the aspect of habit which has received the most attention is its unconsciousness and uniformity. "Habit," says Professor Baldwin, "means loss of oversight, diffusion of attention, subsiding consciousness ;" and, again, "Habit means invariableness, repetition, reproduction." On the other hand, virtue is in essence choice: it is, as Aristotle says, a habit of choosing the mean, and therefore implies attributes apparently the precise opposite of those which Professor Baldwin mentions, viz. oversight, concentrated attention, rising consciousness. Moreover, as we have just seen, it involves adaptation. The mean is relative to the individual case. Morality, we might say, never repeats itself. So far, therefore, from virtue or perfection being a habit, we seem driven to say with Fichte that "to form a habit is to fail." This is the

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keynote of the view which was prominent in the educational writers of last century, and received most forcible expression in Rousseau's Émile, where the doctrine is boldly stated that the only habit a child should form is the habit of forming none.

The only way of meeting this difficulty, which arises from an imperfect analysis of the psychological conditions of habit, is to carry our analysis a step further. In the first place, every habit, whether of thought or action, certainly is, as Professor Baldwin implies, a tendency or propensity to act in a particular way in response to a stimulus. Habit is thus distinguished from instinct in being acquired by the individual himself through the repetition of certain kinds of action. This tendency has two sides or poles a positive and a negative. On the one hand. it is a tendency to turn the flow of nervous energy in a particular direction; on the other hand, to inhibit the flow in a contrary direction. Sometimes one of these is prominent in the habit, sometimes the other. We need not stop to illustrate so familiar a point. We can all recognize in ourselves the economy of nervous energy effected by habits of regularity in our daily life; from acting in a particular manner the mind acquires an ease and spontaneity of action comparable to the flow of a stream in the bed it has once formed. The value of this (the conservative element in habit), as the basis of progress, although, as we have seen, it was in danger of being overlooked by writers of last century, may now be said to be a commonplace of educational literature.

Without it, it would be impossible for the human organism either to live or learn; impossible to live because impossible to learn.

But a habit is not merely a tendency to repetition. There is a further element, which modern psychologists have tended to ignore, but which Aristotle, with his extraordinary concreteness of mind, has clearly grasped. To neglect this element is to misunderstand his whole doctrine. Habit also implies adaptation. The whole value of the tendency to act in a particular way consists in leaving the attention free for the particular adaptation that is required. Thus, to take a simple example, the value of the habit of setting to work at a particular time in the day is that our energies are no longer dissipated and our attention distracted with the necessity to resist counter attractions. The strong flow of nervous energy in that particular direction has its counterpart in the mind's imperviousness to contrary suggestions. But this is only one side of the student's habit. If this were all, his mental condition might be compared to a ship whose decks are cleared for action which never comes off. The other side is the active direction of the attention to the end to be attained, viz. the work of this particular day. To identify habit, therefore, with the mere repetition of actions already performed is wholly to fail to grasp its place in concrete human life.

Now, morality is only a highly developed case of what we have described as habit in general, though just on this account it is the better adapted to