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

the Olympic games set before themselves, viz. "to see the country and fine works of art and every excellence of word and deed." That Aristotle himself does not suggest this extension of the idea seems the more surprising, as he has already shown (c. vii. 1, § 2) that popular language itself in the use of the word "wise" bears witness to the connexion between the insight of the painter and sculptor and that of the philosopher. We know, moreover, from the wellknown passage in the Poetics where he compares poetry with history, that he was prepared to claim for the former that it was "more serious and more philosophical" than the latter, on the express ground that it reveals to us not individual facts but universal principles of human action. If we ask the reason why, with so natural an extension of the word so close at hand, he here limits himself to the narrower meaning, the explanation is no doubt partly to be looked for, as Professor Stewart suggests, in the partiality of the thinker and philosopher for his own favourite pursuit, but partly also in the fact that at this point. in his argument the truth he is anxious to emphasize is that human life is incomplete unless it leads us to the conscious apprehension of principles that are universal and necessary. According to the view which he shared with Plato, it was in the study of philosophy, of which mathematics, physics, and theology, including astronomy, were parts, that these features of reality stood most clearly out and were most unmistakable. It was through it, therefore, that the human mind was led most directly to the point.

of view from which it could see all things sub specie aeternitatis and reach, for the moment at least, the supreme goal of life. To these explanations we ought, perhaps, to add the peculiar Greek view of the work of the poet and artist which Aristotle shared with his contemporaries. Both by Plato and Aristotle the poet and artist are apt to be regarded as, at best, the professional exponents of truths which they imperfectly realize. They are rather the unconscious instruments than the free exponents of the Divine Spirit in the world. The "contemplation," on the other hand, which both Plato and Aristotle have in view when they speak of Philosophy, requires a detachment of mind which. they conceived of as impossible to those who made art or literature a profession, and as only to be found in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Yet that Aristotle has no intention of excluding art and literature, but holds, on the contrary, that when used as sources of enjoyment and not as a profession, they minister directly to the higher life, we see clearly from the well-known passage in the Politics which treats of the place of the arts in education.* Aristotle there takes it for granted that art and literature minister to the higher form of happiness and are the proper occupations of the life of leisure, treating the ordinary school curriculum, in a few suggestive strokes, as a preparation, not so much for the business as for the enjoyment of life.

*Politics, VIII., especially c. iii. § 3 foll., which the student interested in education would do well to read in connexion with the sections before us. See Note G.

Applying this extension of the term to the present passage, we reach a point of view from which it can be seen that there is in Aristotle's mind a closer connexion between the theoretic and the practical life than that indicated by the text. If "philosophy" be taken to include art and literature, it is impossible to regard it as merely a new and higher occupation which practical life subserves by furnishing the necessary external conditions. For art and poetry are neither something wholly out of relation to life nor yet a mere imitation of it. They mirror life, but they mirror it—and this Aristotle was perhaps the first to teach at its best, and are thus, to use a modern phrase, in their essence a "criticism of life." Their function is to raise life to a higher power by teaching us what it really is-what it has in it to become.

It cannot, of course, be maintained that any extension of the Greek theoria which it is legitimate to suggest will suffice to bridge completely the gulf between Aristotelian and modern conceptions. Yet two things remain to be said. First, though there was a time-and not very long ago--when the life of leisure as above conceived seemed an impossible ideal for the great mass of mankind, in these latter days a great hope has sprung up that this will not always be so. Already, by the socialization of the means of enjoyment in science, art, and literature, this ideal may be said to have been brought within measurable distance. Secondly, having acknowledged that the deeper insight which, stripped of technicalities, consists in the recognition and acceptance of eternal laws underlying