broken up into isolated activities standing in no relation to one another. This would be the negation of all conduct—all leading or guiding of action. Yet it is equally remote from ordinary ways of thinking to conceive of life as organized for the attainment of some supreme all-important end. Prima facie, life is the endeavour to satisfy a multitude of desires, which are endless in their recurrence and insatiable in their extent, and it is not a little curious that modern philosophy in England, so far from accepting it as self-evident that life is a rounded whole in the sense here assumed, starts from the opposite assumption by emphatically denying it. At the beginning of the chapters in his great treatise which are devoted to the principles of morals, or as he calls them "manners," Hobbes, the acknowledged father of English philosophy, lays it down that "the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. The cause whereof is that the object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time, but to assure for ever the way of his future desire.... So that in the first place I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has

already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power; but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more."* Nor does it appear that the view here taken is at all met by the statement put forward by Aristotle in support of his assumption (viz. that otherwise we should have to go into infinity and leave our desires without point or purpose), seeing that Hobbes would have been ready to accept this conclusion, and actually makes it, in the passage quoted, the ground of his denial of a supreme end of action.

Further reflection, however, especially if directed, as Aristotle suggests in chap. i., to the organized structure of society, will convince us that, however we may define the nature of the chief end of human desire (and this is not here the question), some such supreme end is presupposed in the very form of social life. Hobbes himself, when his doctrine is examined more closely, is found to admit that the activities of individuals and the organization of society find their motive and explanation in one ruling desire. His theory differs from Aristotle's not in dispensing with the notion of a finis ultimus or greatest good, but in the account which it gives of the nature of the end. According to Hobbes, it is the maximum satisfaction of the individual desire for "gain and glory;" according to Aristotle, it is the fullest development of man's nature as a social being.

§ 2. General Character of the Science.

[I. cc. ii., iii.]

The remainder of chap. ii. and the first part of chap. iii. give us two general features of the science.

I. It is the science of man as a citizen. It is significant that Aristotle nowhere describes it as "ethics." It is true that to him as to us it is the science of character (oc), but to describe it in this way would have been doubly misleading from Aristotle's point of view. In the first place, it would have failed to bring out the central fact that not only in its origin, but in its contents, good character is essentially social. And, secondly, it would have left no room for the distinction, so vital in Aristotle's view, between the virtue or excellence which consists in good character, and that higher kind of excellence which consists in intelligence and insight. We are here mainly concerned with the former point. Man, we have seen, is "a political being." It is impossible to consider his good or happiness apart from that of the community in which he lives.

Discussing the question whether the virtue of the good man and the good citizen is the same, in a passage which ought to be read as a comment upon this (Politics, iii. c. 4), Aristotle replies that it is so when the state-organization is really constitutional or "political," i.e. when it permits the individual to develop as nature intended him into the free citizen of a self-governing community.

It might indeed appear as though the words of

c. ii. § 8,* were incompatible with this interpretation. But in this section, as Professor Stewart has pointed out, Aristotle must not be supposed to be distinguishing between the good of the community at large"the greatest happiness of the greatest number and the private good of the single member of it. Rather, he is distinguishing between the life of the man who is surrounded by all that is best in civilized life-its opportunities for social service on the one side, and self-culture on the other-and that of the same man when accidentally separated, whether by exile (like Aristides), or imprisonment (like Socrates), from all that makes life attractive. In the former case, all that is best in him is called forth. He lives in the life of his country-his country lives in him. He is what nature intended him to be. In the latter, all that is best in him is suppressed. He lives in a mutilated, semi-animate way, and is only the shadow of his former self.

2. It is inexact. We may agree to accept the distinction that Aristotle draws between exact and inexact sciences. Some sciences, of which mathematics is a type, admit of exact reasoning from principles easily grasped and universally acknowledged. Others, like psychology, rest on principles reached by a somewhat precarious process of induction, in the application of which great caution has to be observed. Most people

*"And even though this [the good] is the same for individuals and communities, yet the good of the community is grander and more sufficing to lay hold of and to keep. For though we may often rest satisfied with merely individual good, yet the good of a nation or a state is nobler and more divine."

would also agree in assigning ethics or politics, as Aristotle does, to the latter class. But it is not so clear what they would mean by doing so. It may, therefore, be worth while dwelling a moment on the reason why we should agree with Aristotle in this classification. It clearly is not because it is not possible to know what is exactly right in matters of conduct as in mathematics. There are principles here, as in Euclid, which require that conduct shall be of a certain definite kind.

We shall see what really is meant if we consider for a moment the conditions that enter into a problem in exact science, e.g. mathematics, and compare them with those that set a problem in conduct. The difference is that the conditions in mathematics are abstract; in ethics they are concrete. It may seem paradoxical to claim for moral philosophy that it is a concrete science. We usually think of it as one of the most abstract. But from the point of view of its subject-matter this is clearly not the case. While the subject-matter of mathematics is number and figure, i.e. abstract properties or things, ethics has to do with concrete things or events themselves— the wholes, we might say, of which these properties are parts. Even this does not fully express what we mean in claiming for ethics that it is the science of the concrete. There is a point of view from which concrete things and events themselves may be regarded as abstractions, being merely points of interest in a context which gives them meaning. It is this context-the whole of which things or events

C