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sometimes identified. In discussing the principle or standard of moral judgment, Bishop Butler, in a passage which is in reality a paraphase of Aristotle's definition, says: "Every man in his physical nature is one individual single agent. He has likewise properties and principles, each of which may be considered separately and without regard to the respects which they have to each other. Neither of these are the nature we are taking a view of. But it is the inward frame of man considered as a system or constitution: whose several parts are united, not by a physical principle of individuation, but by the respects they have to each other; the chief of which is the subjection which the appetites, passions, and particular affections have to the one supreme principle of reflection or conscience. . . . Whoever will consider his own nature will see that the several appetites, passions, and particular affections have different respects amongst themselves. They are restraints upon and are in proportion to each other. This proportion is just and perfect when all these under principles are perfectly coincident with conscience so far as their nature permits, and in all cases under its absolute and entire direction. The least excess or defect, the least alteration of the due proportions amongst themselves, or of their coincidence with conscience, though not proceeding into action, is some degree of disorder in the moral constitution." *

We have here an interesting attempt to reproduce the Aristotelian doctrine. But there is one point in Sermons, III. n.

*

which it requires correction if we would bring it into harmony with the original. In representing "conscience," which is the equivalent of Aristotle's "reason," as a separate principle in the soul, standing above the other elements and imposing upon them a law of its own, it just misses the central point of the Aristotelian conception. Such a way of taking it might, indeed, seem to harmonize with Aristotle's conception of life as a work of art. From this point of view there is nothing to hinder us from understanding the idea of the whole or system into which the material has to be moulded as something imported, like the artist's idea of the statue, from without. It is, however, precisely this mistake that we have guarded ourselves against by noticing the inadequacy of the artistic metaphor to express Aristotle's true view. In criticizing, therefore, any action or emotion, we are directed, not to the pronouncements of an authoritative principle which, while making itself felt within the soul, yet has no organic connexion with it, but simply to the inner form or constitution of the soul itself, of which the action is the partial manifestation. It is true, indeed (and this subjective side of the good act is what chiefly impresses writers of the school of Butler), that an action which succeeds in hitting the mean or being in true proportion, whether in imagination or in fact, is apt to be accompanied with a peculiar feeling of satisfaction; an action that fails to do so, with a feeling of dissatisfaction. And this, if we choose, we may call "conscience"-good or bad, as the case may be. But

this feeling is not the result of the harmony (or discordance) of the act with the requirements of any separate principle, but simply represents the sense of expansion the soul experiences in connexion with an action which expresses its proper nature, and is therefore "whole-hearted," or of contraction when it fails to do so. * The criterion or standard is not this feeling, but the form or constitution of the soul itself. That act is good which expresses the form and content of the whole as nature intended it to be; that is bad which by the excess of one impairs the free development of others.

§3. "The Prudent Man."

In the above discussion we have referred to the "whole" as the standard of the good act: the good act being that which takes account of and includes all the elements in a harmonious whole. The question then rises as to the content of this "whole," and the direction in which we are to look for its concrete embodiment. It is just from the point of view of this question that the full bearing of the last addition, viz. " as the prudent man would determine it," becomes apparent. It might at first appear as though this addition were merely a verbal one,† amounting to the substitution of the reasonable man for the abstract reason. But taken in connexion with the meaning of "prudence" and the "prudent man," hereafter to be defined, it forms a characteristic link between the

* Cp. what is said, p. 194 foll. below, on the conditions of pleasure and pain in general.

See Note D.

See chapter x. below.

abstract and the concrete. Reason is to Aristotle the organizing principle in life, subordinating and adapting the parts to the purpose of the whole. This principle finds its concrete expression in the "prudent man," who is the living embodiment of all that is best in the social order of his time and country. Just as the meaning of right action can only be understood through experience of the concrete act, so the full meaning of the reasonable life comes best home to us through living contact with the reasonable man. The reason which we see in ourselves as through a glass darkly, we meet with in him face to face; wisdom on our part is to seek for wisdom in him. As one of the wise men of our own time has put it: "All men are made or make themselves different in their approaches to different men, and the secret of goodness and greatness is in choosing whom you will approach and live with, through the crowding, obvious people who seem to live with you.' "In phrases like this we must, moreover, recollect that to the Greek observer it was probably much more evident than it is to us, that the men whom he recognized as wise and greatSolon, Pericles, Socrates-were the representatives of what was best in the social order he saw around him. It is true that in the case of Socrates we seem to have an example of the wise man at issue with the State and his time. But this was an exception which proved the rule, for the condemnation of Socrates was a rude shock to Greek sentiment, and

* R. B. Browning's Letters.

to set it in its true light Plato feels himself obliged to put into his mouth the celebrated passage in the Crito, in which, after showing that he owes to Athenian institutions all that is of any value in his life, he maintains that he departs for the other world the victim, not of the laws, but of man. Read in this sense, the standard to which the definition ultimately points is that of the good man as represented by the best types which history affords, types which themselves in turn represent in the fullest manner the unbroken continuity which exists between social and individual, civic and private life.

§ 4. The Mean is itself an Extreme.

[II. c. vi. § 17.]

In spite of these explanations it is difficult for the modern student to avoid the feeling (which is rather deepened than dissipated in reading the further attempt "to apply it to details" in chap. vii.) that somehow or other the definition is inadequate, and fails, after all, to express the true inwardness of virtue. For does it not seem to reduce virtue to the mere avoidance of vice-to tell us what it is not, rather than what it is? To return to the analogy of the arts, is it not as though, in trying to describe the merits of a work of art, we were to enumerate merely the mistakes which the artist had succeeded in avoiding? Or, again, to take the truer analogy of a natural organism, as though we were to describe the life of the plant or animal as a series of lucky escapes

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