these "organic filaments," and treating him as a mere individual, it is important to emphasize this side of his nature. He is this, at least. But he is also something more. He is a dweller in the world, and has affinities with all time and all reality, with the ages past and future, with the stars of heaven, and with the Spirit Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." These, too, as well as the mortal things of human fellowship, touch him. In knowing them he comes to know himself. But, further, in the practical life as known to the Greeks, there were defects which rendered it even more inadequate as a field for the higher sort of human effort. If, as we have come to see, it is impossible to confine human sympathies within any limits narrower than those of humanity itself, no loyalty to the mutual services required by a community of a few thousand privileged persons can compensate for the essential imperfections of such an ideal. May we not, therefore, be allowed to see, in the longing regard which the Greek philosophers turned to the contemplative life, evidence of a lurking discontent with current ideals, and to find in passages like the present a more or less conscious protest, not only against the spirit of worldliness or philistinism, contenting itself with a narrow practicality, but also against the spirit of Hellenism, limiting the scope of human sympathies within the bounds of a single nationality? Accepting this view for the present, we are able to do justice to the truth contained in the Aristotelian conception, and at the same time to recognize its limitations. § 4. The Sanity of Aristotle's Conception. We shall best realize the inherent sanity of Aristotle's conception of the higher blessedness if we compare it with other forms which the protest against the narrowness of popular ideals has taken. (i.) Plato and Aristotle were not alone in feeling the narrowness of the existing social order. Some of the contemporary and even the preceding schools of philosophy had recognized it even more explicitly than either of these two great teachers, and were already feeling their way towards something more universal. Probably the first actual protests against the exclusiveness of Hellenism came from the followers of Socrates who were known as the Cynics,* but it was in the teaching of the Stoics that the idea of a citizenship of the world gained fullest expression.† For the picture of the Good Citizen, as sketched in the great philsophers, these schools substituted definitely that of the Wise Man. It is true that the Stoics did not go so far as their Epicurean contemporaries, whose watchword, Λάθε βιώσας ("Court the shade"), sufficiently indicated their attitude towards the busy life of the public man; but there is a strong tendency even among the Stoics to represent the philosopher as one to whom the limitations of the actual state were *See Zeller's Socrates and the Socratic Schools, p. 231. M unendurable.* Some of them seem even to have held that adherence to the life of "philosophy" absolved from the obligation to observe the decencies and conventions of ordinary society; from which it was only a small step to the interpretation of "wisdom" itself as consisting in a merely negative attitude to all that is valuable in civilization, including science and philosophy themselves. In contrast to these exaggerations, Aristotle's picture, in endeavouring to hold the balance between the citizen and the philosopher, first, by representing the life of good citizenship as a means to the life of leisure or philosophy, and, second, by identifying the latter with that highest form of intellectual activity which is the end and soul of civilization-is common-sense itself. (ii.) How sane is Aristotle's plea regarded as a protest against the absorption of human energies in secular business, and the ever-present tendency to forget the end in the means of life, will appear if we compare it with other ideals which have been accepted at various times and places in the supposed interest of the spiritual part of man. Monasticism, both in the East and in the West, is such an ideal. Yet how great the difference! Seeking refuge from the imperfections and limitations of the worldly life, the human spirit here finds it in seclusion from the ordinary interests and activities of mankind. While recognizing that the higher life must be found in a state of heightened consciousness, Western monastics have held that preparation for it consisted, not in the * Ibid. p. 305, n. 4. effort more fully to realize the import of our present life, but partly in a destructive physical discipline, partly in the contemplation of the unknown and unknowable. The Eastern ideal, delicate and beautiful as it appears in the higher forms of Buddhism, has always tended to represent the end itself as a form of passivity, and even vacuity, of mind following upon the negation of desire. Contrasted with these ideas, Wisdom, as conceived by Aristotle, presents two features which are the marks of truth. In the first place, it is activity, and activity of the highest element in man. To possess this wisdom is thus to heighten, instead of to depress, the sense of living. Secondly, it is a deepening of the present, and not merely the preparation for a future life. It is true that Aristotle speaks of it as a putting off of our mortality, but the immortality which he has in view consists not in an otherworld life foreign to the present, but in the power of seeing the eternal principles or laws of which our own world is the expression. § 5. Theoria as the True Understanding of Life. The fact remains that Aristotle seems unduly to confine the scope of contemplation to what we should understand by science and philosophy, thus causing a twofold difficulty in the gap he leaves, on the one hand, between the practical and the theoretic life, and on the other, between the Greek and the Christian ideal. Even philosophy he seems to take in a limited sense, as in a former passage he has expressly told us that human life itself cannot be included among the highest objects of human thought. We have already had occasion to point out the effect of this limitation. Had Aristotle recognized more clearly that the good life is itself one of the "most precious things" of the world, he would have left at least one clear link of connexion between the practical and the contemplative life, for we could then have understood, from one side at least, how "theory" may react upon our every-day life by correcting its ideals and vindicating its ends. Even so, however, the difficulty would remain that, as contrasted with the Christian ideal, access to the highest happiness is through the strait and narrow gate of intellectual attainment and abundant leisure. This last difficulty is one which cannot, from the nature of the case, be wholly removed; yet we can go some distance in the direction of meeting it if we notice a further extension of the meaning of the Greek theoria, which, although clearly not explicitly present in the writer's mind, yet was never very far from the thoughts of the Greeks in this connexion. Besides the more technical sense in which it is used of more recondite studies, the word has the wider meaning of contemplation in general, and especially the contemplation that is directed to beauty in every form. It is in this sense that, in a passage already referred to, the biographer of Pythagoras uses the word. The highest kind of happiness, which consists in "the contemplation of the fairest things," is there compared to the object which the nobler class of spectators at |