make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll get more,' he says. Just as at cricket you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game. And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other people is the game." All this comes of making that which has meaning and purpose only in connexion with a wider end, into an end in itself. Aristotle, as we shall see, has no objection to great riches in itself. It is the necessary condition of one of his highest virtues, viz. magnificence. What he objects to is the indefinite pursuit of wealth irrespective of any social end which is served by it.

§ 5. Attributes of Happiness.

[I. c. vii. §§ 3 foll.]

Aristotle sums up the contents of the preceding chapters by claiming for happiness that it possesses the three attributes of finality, self-sufficiency, and supreme desirableness, warning us at the same time against misunderstanding the sense in which the two last are to be taken.

(a) The reader might hastily assume that by selfsufficiency was meant the power of rendering a man independent of society. But this would be a mistake. Whatever else the happy life is, it must be a whole or complete life, and this we have already seen is impossible unless it is a life which is lived in society. Man is a political animal, and you might as well

* Ruskin's Crown of Wild Olive.

speak of making him independent of himself as of making him independent of his society or polis. The life which is truly good and happy is in need of nothing; not in the sense of having no conditions— this would be equivalent to having no contents--but in the sense that it alone is the complete expression of the man. It alone leaves no element in his nature unaccounted for; and therefore it alone is completely satisfying.

(b) Similarly, in claiming for it that it is "the most desirable thing" in the world, Aristotle wishes the reader to understand that it is not one among other things with which it may be compared. It is, as George Eliot says, that which "we would choose before everything else because our souls see it to be good," but in so choosing it we do not conceive of it as one among other goods which by being added to it might make it more desirable still. It is not one among others. It is that which includes all others. But even so we must be careful how we take it. It is not merely the sum of all other goods. It includes them, but at the same time it is more than all of them together. For happiness is a “natural” or organic thing, and the essence of things organic is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. As the tree or animal is the expression of the soul or moving principle of life organizing and transforming the parts, so happiness is the form in which reason-the soul of human life -expresses itself in its function of limiting and organizing the elements which go to make up life. The man, therefore, who takes reason as his guide

values the elements, parts or details of life, not for themselves-this, as we have seen in the case of wealth, would be to destroy all order and limit—but for the sake of the organized life to which they contribute. On the other hand, as Professor Stewart says, the man who lives by sense and imagination becomes immersed in these details. "Life or happiness is for him a mere succession of particular experiences-an indefinite sum of good things which never satisfies him. To the external view he may seem to be happy,' because the material conditions or elements of happiness are separately present, but the transforming spirit is inwardly wanting.

'Er hat die Theile in seiner Hand
Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.'

He is receptive of isolated impressions; he lives as passion directs; he does not assert personality in active functions." *

* Op. cit. i. p. 97.

66

CHAPTER III.

THE ELEMENTS OF HAPPINESS.

'Happiness consists in doing the things we were made for.” MARCUS AURELIUS.

§ 1. Aristotle's Method. Is it Inductive or Deductive?

[I. c. vii. §§ 9 foll.]

AT the beginning of the last chapter it was pointed out that Aristotle proceeds from criticism of current opinions to an independent analysis, from which he returns to the ordinary judgments of mankind as to the nature of happiness and the things to be looked for in it, with the view at once of verifying his own theory and enabling us the better to understand the truth which popular judgments contain. The intermediate stage of this method is that at which we should expect to find an illustration of his reiterated statement that ethics is an inductive science, proceeding from facts to principles. But instead of the marshalling of facts from which an inductive generalization as to the true grounds of happiness may be made, we seem to have a series of unsupported assertions as to the "function" of man, from which his definition is deductively arrived at. "Much as

Aristotle speaks," says Grant, "of the logic of the science, we find, when we come to examine his real procedure, how little he is influenced by his own. abstract rules of method. It is plain that he has deserted his former view of the science as inductive; he now makes it depend on a general conception of the chief good, which is to be applied and developed."

We might answer this criticism by pointing out, as Professor Stewart does, that it is a mistake to draw a hard-and-fast line between deduction and induction. In the investigation of complex subjects the common method of procedure is by hypothesis and verification, i.e. by the statement of a general proposition "on evidence avowedly insufficient," with the view of afterwards testing it by comparison with the facts. Such a process, although involving deduction, is allowed by all logicians to be essentially inductive. Some, e.g. Jevons,* even maintain that it is the type of all induction. In this broad sense Aristotle's method may be said to be inductive. Taking his "data" and the conclusion from them as merely provisional, he goes on, in chap. viii. § 1, to test them in the light of the facts-in this case "the opinions that are held upon the subject."

But it is also worth pointing out that Grant's criticism rests on a confusion between scientific investigation and scientific exposition. Because a philosopher chooses to expound his subject by a preliminary statement of the general results at which

*“All inductive investigation consists in the marriage of hypothesis and experiment" (Principles of Science, p. 504).