reciprocity that the mutual services of friends reproduce in microcosm those which civic society at large requires of us. What is claimed for friendship (to repeat it once more) is that by suffusing the life of ordinary social duty with the glow of feeling, it imparts to it at once a new glory and a new quality of transparency.

CHAPTER XIII.

PLEASURE.

"Pleasure is the unbought and unbuyable grace of life: the electric spark, as it were, which flashes out at the point where the outgoing line of action returns upon itself and is just completing its redintegration with self: it is the consciousness that the object which is presented by natural causes, or which we have ourselves produced by an act of will, is in harmony and co-operation with the subjective conditions and forces of life which reveal themselves in our voluntary agency."

W. WALLACE.

§ 1. The Two Discussions of Pleasure in the Ethics.

[Bk. VII. cc. xi.-xiv. ; Bk. X. cc. i.-v.]

ARISTOTLE'S Ethics contain two separate discussions of Pleasure, one at the end of Book VII., the other at the beginning of Book X. Prima facie, the doctrine in these two passages is different. In the former, Aristotle seems to maintain that Pleasure is the supreme good; in the latter, to contest this opinion. The passage that causes the chief difficulty will be found in Book VII. c. xiii. § 2: "There is no reason why a certain kind of pleasure should not be the supreme good, even though some kinds be bad, just as there is no reason why a certain kind of knowledge should not be, though some kinds be bad. Nay, perhaps we

ought rather to say that since every formed faculty admits of unimpeded exercise, it follows that whether happiness be the exercise of all these faculties or of some one of them, that exercise must necessarily be more desirable when unimpeded; but unimpeded exercise of faculty is pleasure: a certain kind of pleasure, therefore, will be the supreme good, even though most pleasures should turn out to be bad in themselves." Comparing this with the statement in Book X. c. iii. § 13, we seem in the two books to have contradictory views. In Book VII. the good is saidto be "a kind of pleasure;" in Book X. "it seems to be established that pleasure is not the good." As a matter of fact the difference is much less than appears, and is resolvable into the different senses in which "pleasure" is taken. In Book VII. the word is taken in its popular sense of a concrete thing, or the actual exercise of a faculty; in Book X. the philosophical distinction is drawn between the activity itself and the pleasant feeling which is an attribute of it-"a superadded end like the grace of youth." In the former sense Aristotle would allow-as who but a fanatic would not?-that the end may be described as a form of pleasure. In the latter sense such an admission would be contrary to the whole teaching of the Ethics, and not merely to a casual statement in Book X.† The extracts given below

* I have given Peters' translation to enable the English reader the more easily to identify the passage.

† As Professor Stewart rightly says, the formula of VII. is "pleasure is unimpeded exercise of faculty," that of X." pleasure perfects the exercise

are taken from the tenth Book, which, in addition to being the clearer and more philosophical, is the earlier and more undoubtedly Aristotelian statement.

The discussion falls into three parts: (1) the statement and criticism of current views; (2) Aristotle's view of the conditions and the effect of pleasure ; (3) the application of his doctrine as a ground of explanation, (a) of the fact that every one desires pleasure; (b) that pleasures differ in kind. We may take these in their order.

§ 2. Theories as to the Relation of Pleasure to
the Good.

[X. cc. i. and iii.]

Two theories were current in Aristotle's time as to the relation of pleasure to human life. The first (represented by Eudoxus) was that pleasure is the good; the second (represented by Speusippus and the straiter sect of the Platonists) that pleasure no less than pain was an evil, and that the good consisted in freedom from both.* The latter theory Aristotle rejects (1) en the characteristic ground of the universality of the

of faculty" (op. cit. ii. p. 221). In what follows, however, he seems somewhat to obscure the point. The difference between the Aristotelian doctrine of Book VII. and that of the Hedonists is not that, according to the one, "the Good (meaning the strenuous performance of the highest duty) is Pleasure;" according to the other, "Pleasure (meaning the pleasure of sense) is the Good"-but that according to the former the good life is a pleasant thing, according to the latter it is good because it is pleasant.

Antisthenes the Cynic went further, and declared that he would rather be mad than feel pleased.

opposite opinion (c. ii. § 4); (2) because there are good pleasures as well as bad ones (c. iii. § 10). The former he rejects on the grounds (1) that there are things which we desire for their own sake quite apart from the pleasure that they bring to wit: sight, memory, knowledge, virtue (c. iii. § 12); (2) that there are some states that we should not choose however much pleasure they brought with them, thus showing that we have another standard of preference besides the amount of pleasure that an object brings (c. iii. § 12).

It is characteristic of Aristotle that he seems here to have the heresy of Speusippus chiefly in view. It was the more repugnant to Greek sobriety, and at the same time to the common sense of mankind. The modern student, on the other hand, naturally turns to the arguments which are here directed against the hedonistic view as the more important part of these criticisms. To the former of the two arguments that are urged against it he will not be inclined to attach much importance. Modern hedonism admits that we seem to desire other things besides pleasure, but explains this as the result of association. Desired originally “as a means to happiness," they have come to be desired "as a part of happiness."

The latter argument stands on a different footing, and has been constantly employed in our own time as a proof that pleasures differ in quality, and that the "quantity of pleasure" which actions bring independently of the source from which the pleasure is * Mill's Utilitarianisim, p. 55.