are parts that forms the subject-matter of the science of ethics. All conduct takes place in a context; it must have regard to a situation. The man who would act rightly must attend to the diverse elements or conditions-things, persons, events-which the situation contains. Success in conduct just consists in taking all of these elements or conditions into account. It follows from what has just been said that while the problems of a science like mathematics may repeat themselves, exactly the same problem presenting itself to different individuals or to the same individual at different times, the conditions of a moral problem are such that they can never recur. Situations like one another of course do occur; if they did not, moral habits would be impossible, and the burden of responsibility in adapting our conduct to them would be intolerable. Yet they are never identical. "Circumstances," we say, "alter cases;" to which we may add that cases alter circumstances. Two individuals are never in the same circumstances. We may go further and say that the same individual is never really in the same circumstances twice. Morality, as Professor Alexander says, never repeats itself. From which it follows that though ethics, like other sciences, has its principles and general rules, eg. the ten commandments, the application of them is essentially a matter of individual judgment, and no conduct can be moral conduct which is simply an application of a rule of thumb.

This difference explains the saying in chap. iii.

that young men are not, as a rule, good students of moral philosophy. If it is true that the solution of a moral problem depends on the power of adapting conduct to context or environment-of "hitting off" the situation-it clearly implies two things in the agent. In the first place, it implies the power of taking in a situation as a whole: the quality we call judgment, insight, wisdom. In the second place, it implies freedom from the bias of passion, by which judgment is apt to be warped. But both of these qualifications are apt to be absent in youth; the first because insight into a situation depends not so much on the training of any special faculty (as does, for example, mathematical ability) as upon experience of like situations in the past; the second because "young men, moreover, are apt to be swayed by passion." The characteristic addition that after all "the defect is not a matter of time, but consists in their living according to passion, and following the objects which passion suggests," reminding us that youth alone is not sufficient to disqualify or age to qualify for deriving benefit from the study, brings us to the last of the questions touched upon in these sections, viz. that of the practical value of the science of ethics.

§ 3. The Practical Value of Ethics.

[I. c. ii. § 2, and c. iii. § 7.]

Two remarks bear upon this question. (1) In c. iii. § 7, Aristotle notices the conditions under which it can be of any value at all. To those who live according

to passion, and follow the objects which passion suggests, he tells us "knowledge is of little avail." From which it follows that whatever the value of ethics, we ought not to expect it to change a man's life. So far from a man's habits of choice being the outcome of his ethical theory, his theory of life, as we shall see hereafter, is commonly the reflection of his habitual pursuits. Moral philosophy can only make explicit the principle which unconsciously controls his actions. It cannot give principle to them. The man without principle is thus without the "data" of ethics. He may get up the science as he might get up a subject for an examination, but he will have no fine understanding of it, and as a consequence it will have no effect upon his life.* (2) Under other circumstances, however, Aristotle claims for the study in c. ii. § 2, an important function in relation to practice. "Surely to know what this Good is, is a matter of practical importance, for in that case we shall be as archers shooting at a definite mark, and shall be more likely to do what is right." Let us try to see clearly what is meant by this claim.

Current phrases are apt here to be misleading. We hear, for instance, of "applied" as distinguished from theoretic ethics, as if ethics, like mathematics or mechanics, laid down rules or formulæ which merely required to be applied to particular cases in which all the factors might be determined beforehand. We have already seen how fallacious any such analogy must necessarily be. Moral conduct is of course ruled

* Cf. c. iv. § 6, p. 216 below.

or regulated conduct, but the principle of regulation is adequacy to changing situations and not conformity to any system of rules and regulations. But because ethical knowledge is of no use for "application" in this sense, it does not follow that it has no practical bearing on life.

As theory it serves the same function with respect to its object as any other science does, and this, from the nature of the case, seeing that ethics is the science of conduct (“three-fourths of life"), is a practical one. This will be clear if we consider for a moment what this function is.

Theory is sometimes thought of as concerned with general laws, and therefore as the antithesis of fact and reality. But this, of course, is a misunderstanding. The function of theory is not to carry us away into a region of abstraction and comparative unreality, but to put us into closer touch with fact. It is the process by which we deepen our hold upon the world. about us, and thus vivify the impressions we receive from it. To know, for example, the theory of the life of flowers is to know any particular flower more fully, more vividly, more really. Applying this to ethics, or the science of the right end of life, the result of determining the nature of this end, so far as we succeed in doing so, will be to strengthen our hold upon life and deepen our sense of its reality. Whether such theoretic understanding of the meaning of right conduct is necessary in order that our conduct may be really right; whether there is any sense in which in spite of the above admissions it may be said to be

sufficient of itself to secure right conduct, i.e. whether there is any sense in which, as Socrates held, virtue is knowledge; whether again philosophy in the strict sense is the only way in which such knowledge is acquired are questions that will meet us hereafter. It is sufficient here to have pointed out that ethics, by dwelling upon the relation of action to end and of our different ends to one another, tends to vivify our apprehension of the meaning of conduct, and in doing so to alter its character.* It is thus that, by bringing into clear consciousness ends previously accepted without conscious understanding of their value, it helps to make apparent the incompatibility of some of those ends with others, and suggests the possibility of so organizing life as to avoid misdirection of activity and keep it to channels in which it may really contribute to the one end of supreme value.†

This relation between theory and practice is well illustrated by the order of treatment in the Ethics and Politics. As in Plato, so in Aristotle, the discussion which begins with more abstract questions concerning the Good as the supreme End of life naturally leads to suggestions for the reorganization of life with a view to making it more directly contributory to this end-ethical analysis to schemes of education and government.

*For a fuller statement see Philosophy in Relation to Life (Ethical World Publishing Co.).

† See Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 268. The whole passage should be consulted on the subject of this and the next paragraph.