§ 4. Special Value of Greek Theory. But the English student, with such brilliant illustrations before him as are afforded by the utilitarian school of reformers, is not so likely to doubt the practical value of ethical study as the value of approaching it for modern purposes through the speculations of an ancient philosopher; and a word seems required in conclusion to justify this method. There are two special advantages in approaching the study of ethics through the great Greek philosophers, one of which has been already touched upon. 1. We are here placed from the outset at the right point of view with regard to the nature of man whose ends we are investigating. It is the good of man as a citizen, or member of a community, not of man as an individual, which is the subject-matter in ethics. The good of the individual ought never to be separated from the good of the whole of which he is a partethics from politics. Some of the great English ethical writers have obscured this point, and more recent methods of study, by connecting ethics with biology, have not tended to correct this error. As the biologist finds the source and type of all life in the single cell, it is assumed that moral science begins with individuals as independent units who by their union form the "aggregate" we call society. In this way a presumption is established at the outset in favour of a separation of individual from social wellbeing, and the separation once made, the problem of their harmonious union becomes insoluble.* Aristotle See below, p. 184. never wavers on this head. But He lays it down, as we have seen from the outset, that man is primarily a member of a community. He is of course well aware that in the order of time (as we might say from the point of view of sociology), the individual, or at least the family, comes before the state. But this does not affect the question of the true nature and end of man, with which ethics is concerned. From this point of view Aristotle has no doubt that the state comes first. "In the order of nature the state is prior to the household and the individual, as the whole is prior to the part." It is true, of course, that modern ethics does not confine itself to the consideration of man in his functions as citizen. In laying emphasis on the value of human personality we have passed beyond the limits of Greek nationalism. this does not mean that we have substituted the idea of individuals to whose happiness social union merely stands at best as means to an end, for that of citizens the end and purpose of whose being is a highlyorganized form of social life. It merely means that we have enlarged our conception of the range of man's organic connections. It is as untrue now as it was in the time of Aristotle to claim that a man's life is his own. It belongs to him not as an individual but as a member of a community. The difference is that the community is no longer conceived of as bounded by a city wall or a neighbouring range of mountains, but as co-extensive with humanity. Once, however, the principle is grasped with respect to the smaller unity of the Greek city-state * Politics, I. c. ii. § 12. See Note A, where the passage is quoted at length. -and it is Aristotle's merit to have stated this in the most unmistakable terms-it is easy to extend it to the altered circumstances of modern times.* 2. We are placed at the right point of view with regard to the true nature of goodness as an end in itself. Modern writers, by laying emphasis on the consequences of action in abstraction from the attitude of the will, or the state of the desires of which action is the expression, have often tended to represent virtue as a means. This confusion is perhaps most clearly marked in writers of the so-called Hedonist school, who represent an attendant circumstance of action, viz. the pleasure produced by it, as the source of its moral value. By his clear grasp of the truth that no action is truly good but that which is done for its own sake, or as he puts it, "because it is a fine thing," Aristotle frees ethics from the difficulty and confusion thus imported into it. Upon this head his teaching is, in fact, as Green says, final. His account of the nature of moral excellence itself was in a sense merely formal, and, as we have already seen, necessarily provisional. But that purity of heart in the sense of a conscious direction of the will to its attainment was the condition of all true virtue, and constituted the essential unity between one form of virtue and another this he taught with a consistency and directness that left nothing to be desired.† * Speaking of Aristotle's statement that man is born to be a citizen (see above, p. 8, n.), Sir Frederick Pollock says: "There is hardly a saying in Greek literature so well worn as this; nor is there any that has worn better" (History of the Science of Politics, p. 18). † See Note B. CHAPTER II. OPINIONS AS TO THE NATURE OF HAPPINESS. "Other good There is where man finds not his happiness; It is not true fruition, not that blest DANTE. § 1. Starting-point and Method of Discussion. [I. iv. §§ 1-4.] ARISTOTLE assumes that there will be no difference of opinion as to the general description of the end or good. All agree to call it Happiness. Among ourselves we should not find probably the same general agreement on this head, owing to the confusion of happiness in the wider sense with happiness in the narrower, the permanent state with the transient feeling, variously described as satisfaction, gratification, pleasure. The Greeks had two words, which were quite separate in their minds, the one indicating a quality of life as a whole (udaμovía), the other the feeling accompanying a momentary state (dový). It is itself a step in the right direction to note at the outset that we may admit that all seek after happiness, without committing ourselves to the view that the good is pleasure. In the discussion of the true nature of happiness thus defined, Aristotle has not far to seek for his starting-point. The conception of the chief good seems, as Grant points out,* to have been vaguely present before people's minds, and besides philosophical definitions, such as the "absolute good" of Plato (alluded to in c. i. § 3), Aristotle had before him several popular opinions which had already fixed upon one or other of the elements which required to be united in a complete definition. In what follows we have an excellent example of Aristotle's scientific method. Beginning with common opinions which, in contrast to Plato, he treats with the respect due to instinctive presentiments of the truth (cc. iv., v., vii.),† he works inward to the definition which he seeks (c. vii. § 9 foll.). From this he returns to current opinions (c. viii.), with the view of confirming his own account by showing that it differs from them only in stating fully and explicitly the truth of which they are a partial and confused expression. § 2. Digression on the True Foundation of [I. c. iv. §§ 5-7.] But before proceeding to the examination of current opinions we are brought back to the question of the general character of our study, and the important but * Ethics of Aristotle, vol. i. p. 102. † Cp. X. ii. 4 (p. 301). |