an abundance of æsthetic enjoyments which would be open to them, as well as from those of family life." In the second place, and permitting ourselves to go beyond the text before us, we know that in respect to the pleasures which he does mention, the ancient standard is far less exacting than ours. Thus, in regard to "meats and drinks," it has often been noticed how strangely insensitive even the best of the Greeks were to excesses of which the average good citizen would now be ashamed. Among some of his followers not the least remarkable feature in the self-command of their saint and hero Socrates, was his power of keeping his head in a drinking bout. And in regard to the more serious forms of the corresponding vice which the modern "incontinence " specifically denotes, Green has observed that "the limit which the philosophers would have drawn between lawful and lawless love would not have been that which our consciences would call on us to observe." Fully to understand the ground of this difference between ancient and modern conceptions, we must ask in the first place what it is in the . pleasures of taste and touch which leads ancient philosophy to assign the duty of regulating them to a special virtue; and, secondly, what it is in modern times that has led to so great an extension of the field of self-denial.

*Green, Proleg. bk. iii. ch. v. p. 29.

§ 3. Greek Attitude to Pleasures of the Body.

In reference to the former question, it has to be observed that the reason assigned in c. x. §§ 7 and 8, can hardly be the true one. It is of course true that there is a deeper, or, as Aristotle would say, a more natural ground for condemning the glutton and the drunkard than any merely utilitarian estimate of the consequences to health and happiness. Our moral judgments here witness to the fundamental distinction between the lower and the higher life. Yet, as Green points out, it is a false philosophical gloss on these judgments to attribute them to the fact that indulgences of this kind "are shared by the lower animals," whereas the higher pleasures are distinctly human. We may very well ask whether it is so certain, as § 7 seems to assume, that the lower animals are incapable of deriving disinterested pleasure from sights and sounds, not to speak of pleasures still more obviously "of the soul," such as friendship or the performance of duty. Even their pleasures of smell are so obviously different, as Professor Stewart remarks, from any with which our less developed senses make us acquainted, that it would be rash to say that they are merely the result of association with the grosser senses. But, passing over this, it is further questionable whether the brutes ever do indulge in these lower pleasures in such a way as to incapacitate themselves for the performance of the functions appropriate to their nature. What makes it possible for man to go to excess in these pleasures seems rather

to be what distinguishes him from the lower animals than the appetites he has in common with them—the power of imaginatively clothing them with attractions other than those derived from the mere satisfaction of the appetite, and thus of making them an object of specific desire. As Green puts it, "It is probably never the pleasure of drinking, strictly so called, that leads a man to get drunk. The mere pleasure of eating, apart from the gratification of vanity and indefinable social enjoyments, have but a slight share in promoting the 'excesses of the table.' The temptations to sexual immorality would be far less formidable if the attractive pleasure consisted merely in the satisfaction of sexual appetite." The light that leads him astray is "Light from Heaven," and even his intemperance may be said to bear witness to his capacity for a higher life.

We must look for the true ground of the Greek sentiment with regard to these pleasures in what is said of them lower down in c. xii. § 7, where it is the danger of disturbance by them of the rational order or system of life which is the point emphasized. This danger is increased by the peculiar insidiousness of these pleasures, indulgence in them fostering "innate tendency," "until perhaps waxing powerful and violent, the desires cast out reason altogether." It is in the light of passages such as these that we must read the suggestions in II. c. ix. § 4 (p. 246) of the advisability of giving a wide berth to pleasures of this kind, and even of renouncing them altogether.

In marked contrast to the suspicion of "the

pleasures of the body," shown in these passages as in a peculiar degree threatening the equilibrium of human life as conceived by the Greeks, we have the large belief here manifested in the pleasures of the higher senses, especially those of sight and hearing, as a substantial addition to human happiness.* If it were pointed out that these also might be carried to excess, Aristotle was prepared to admit it in the abstract (see c. x. § 3); but he has no vivid sense of any social circumstances under which it might become a part of the rational life, and so a pressing obligation on the part of individuals to set vigilant limits to indulgence in them, or even renounce them altogether. If we ask what it is in our own time that has led to the extension of the duty of selfdenial to these pleasures and at the same time to the ideal of a still more complete control of the bodily appetites, we come to the second of the above questions.

§ 4. Deepening in Modern Conceptions of the
Scope of Temperance.

The answer is to be looked for in our extended conception of the noble object or "beautiful thing," which gives meaning to the virtue of temperance. In two closely related respects we may say that our modern conceptions are in advance of the Greek. (a) To the Greek, the "end" of temperance, as of

*This is connected with the distinction running through both Plato and Aristotle between things pleasant and desirable in themselves because they call forth harmonious activity of the soul independently of previous want, and things that are only accidentally pleasant as satisfying a want of the body. (See chapter xiii. p. 195, below.)

the other virtues, was the maintenance of a high level of civilization among a comparatively small group of cultured equals-supported by the labour and ministered to by the moral degradation of the great mass of the population. To us it is no less than the development in all who are capable of it -and all who bear the human shape are capable of it in some degree-of the elements of our common humanity. For the maxim: See that you treat free citizenship in your own person, and in the person of others, always as an end, and never as a means only, we have accepted, in principle at any rate, the maxim of Kant: See that you so treat Humanity. With this enlarged ideal of the end which is to be served goes an enlarged conception of the sacrifices which may be entailed by the service. From the Greek all that seemed to be required was such self-denial as was implied in abstaining from all excesses that would unfit a man for the performance of his civil or military duties. Under modern conditions individuals and classes may find themselves, in addition to this minimum, called upon, for the sake of objects which to the Greek would have seemed wholly impalpable and illusory, to accept a life in which the pleasures of the senses or even of the mind have little or no place. If it be said that, admitting all this, the Greek ideal of a society in which the higher pleasures will constitute an element in life which no one will be called upon to renounce, is nevertheless the higher of the two, the answer is twofold. In the first place, this ideal is not likely to be realized unless there are,