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Morris, however, had so many of the conditions essential to happiness in the Aristotelian sense that a comparatively slight adjustment of the Greek view of life is required to recognize him as the type of the "happy man." A more characteristic modern instance, appealing to us with perhaps greater force, is to be found in Robert Louis Stevenson, a creative artist, rejoicing in the life on which he physically had so slender a hold, resolutely triumphing by force of character over unfavourable circumstances. He also, like Morris, had a misgiving that "Odin was dead." But he also, like him, met it with the belief that all was not lost nor losable. "I would believe in the ultimate decency of things, even though I woke in Hell," is one among other brave sayings in which we realize, together with "the substantial identity" which Green notes between ancient and modern conceptions of courage, the immense advance in depth and spirituality which the latter has made.*

misery that all this time has brooded over life, and one by one, their work accomplished, they die; till at last the great destruction breaks out over all things, and the old heaven and earth are gone, and then a new heaven and earth. What goes on there? Who shall say of us who know only of rest and peace by toil and strife? And what shall be our share in it? Well, sometimes we must needs think that we shall live again; yet, if that were not, would it not be enough that we helped to make this unnameable glory, and lived not altogether deedless? Think of the joy we have in praising great men, and how we turn their stories over and over, and fashion their lives for our joy. And this also we ourselves may give to the world. This seems to me pretty much the religion of the Northmen. I think one would be a happy man if one could hold it, in spite of the wild dreams and dreadful imaginings that hung about it here and there."-Life of William Morris, by J. W. Mackail, vol. i. p. 333 (condensed).

* See, for example, the passage quoted, Note E.

CHAPTER VIII.

TEMPERANCE.

"Next consider Temperance; this, as far as I can see at present, has more of the nature of symphony and harmony than the preceding."

PLATO.

§ 1. Features in Aristotle's Conception of Temperance.

[III. cc. x. foll.]

IN the account here given of the virtue of Temperance there is much with which the modern student finds himself in sympathy. He will be struck, for instance, with the sobriety of the statement and the absence of any false note of asceticism. Of the particular pleasures, indeed, in respect to which temperance is said to be the mean, Aristotle seems, as we shall see, to be curiously suspicious, but with pleasure in general he has no quarrel. He tells us that it is part of his ideal of the temperate man not only to take the ordinary pleasures of life as they come, but to desire to have them (c. xi. § 8). The reader will further be struck with the disinterestedness of this virtue as conceived by Aristotle. There is no false attempt to "rationalize" it, as a modern utilitarian might do by emphasizing the consequences to

individual health and happiness of its neglect. As Plato had declared that the man who is temperate for such a reason overcomes only because he is overcome by pleasure, and is "temperate through intemperance," so Aristotle would have refused to recognize any such merely prudential temperance as a form of "excellence." He is quite aware of the effect of intemperance upon "health and good condition," but it is clearly the injury done through this loss to his efficiency as a citizen, and not to individual happiness, that is in his mind. So far is he from conceiving of temperance as a form of prudence that he lays no emphasis on its "consequences" at all, but treats it throughout simply as an element in the "ideal excellence" which it is the "aim" of the good man to realize as completely as possible. In these respects there is no difference between the Aristotelian and the modern philosophical conception of temperance. To Aristotle, as to us, the principle which underlies the exercise of self-restraint in the presence of the allurements of pleasure is the acceptance of a higher ideal of life than that of merely individual satisfaction.

§ 2. Limitations of Ancient Conceptions of Temperance.

It is when we come to the limits which Aristotle here sets to the field of the virtue that dissatisfaction begins. If the treatment of courage is felt to be inadequate, that of temperance falls still further short of modern requirements. Not only is the field of its * Phaedo, 68 E.

exercise limited to the pleasures of the body, but among them it is limited to taste and touch. Even the former of these senses is finally excluded, and the virtue apparently confined to a very moderate degree of self-restraint in the presence of the allurements of the grosser sense. "The first impression of any one who came to this account having his mind charged with the highest lessons of Christian self-denial would be of its great poverty-a poverty the more striking, as it will probably appear, in the case of 'temperance than in the case of 'courage.' He finds 'temperance' restricted by Aristotle to control over the mere animal appetites, or, more exactly, to control over desire for the pleasures incidental to the satisfaction of these appetites. The particular usage of a name, indeed, is of slight importance. If Aristotle had reasons for limiting temperance to a certain meaning, and made up elsewhere for what is lacking in his account of the virtue described under the name, no fault could be found. But temperance and courage between them have to do duty for the whole of what we understand by self-denial.” * It is true that there is a sense in which, according to Aristotle, all virtue is self-control or self-denial, inasmuch as it is the habit of aiming at a mean which unregulated impulse and passion tend to overpass. This points to a sense in which temperance might be said to be co-extensive with all virtue, but it does not make up for the deficiencies of the particular virtue. "However little," Green

* Green, Proleg. bk. iii. ch. v. p. 281 foll. The comparison in the succeeding sections follows closely Green's classical treatment.

concludes, "we may have cleared up the moral demand which we express to ourselves as the duty of selfdenial, we cannot get rid of the conviction that it is a demand, at any rate, of much wider significance in regard to indulgence in pleasures than that which Aristotle describes as actuating the temperate man; nor do we find the deficiency made good in any account which he gives of other forms of virtue."

In two respects especially does the ancient ideal seem to fall short of ours. In the first place, Aristotle expressly excludes the higher bodily pleasures of sight and sound, and the pleasures of the soul, or, as we might say, intellectual and æsthetic pleasure. Yet, as Green points out, "it is just such pleasures as these of which the renunciation is involved in that self-denial which in our impartial and unsophisticated judgment we most admire-that which in our consciences we set before ourselves as the highest ideal. It would seem no great thing to us that in the service of mankind one should confine himself to necessary food and drink, and should observe the strictest limitations of Christian morality in the matter of sexual indulgence--and it is such indulgence alone, we must remember, not the enjoyments of family life, that would fall within the class of pleasures in which, according to the Greek philosophers, temperance is exercised. We have examples of much severer sacrifice. There are men, we know, who, with the keenest sensibility to such pleasures as those of ' gratified ambition and love of learning,' yet deliberately forego them; who shut themselves out from

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