opening new sources of social and intellectual enjoyment, is working a rapid change. What, for instance, could be more in the spirit of Aristotle than the following passage, taken almost at random from the current teaching of Christianity upon the place of wealth and leisure as contributing to happiness? “A genius here and there may rise above these depressing conditions (ie. poverty and drudgery); and though he may be a stronger man because he has risen, he may also be a harder man because he has had to go through so much. The hero is the man who rises despite his surroundings, and there will always be scope for heroic virtue; but the good man is called to make the most of his opportunities, and the greater his opportunities the fuller and richer may his personal life become. The man with many opportunities who makes the most of them is not more meritorious than the man with few opportunities who makes the most of them; but though not a more meritorious man, he is in many respects a better man—more richly endowed and more highly cultivated.” *

The change here indicated contains the implicit recognition of the truth that underlies Aristotle's teaching on this head, viz. that the current distinction between internal and external, character and circumstances, is a fallacious one. "Circumstances" are the medium in which will and character (in the exercise of which happiness consists) realize themselves, and are no more capable of being separated from them than space and matter are from the laws The Rev. Dr. Cunningham, Use and Abuse of Money, p. 41.

of nature which express themselves through them, or than the non-ego or object is from the subject or ego, which manifests itself in it. The question is not whether external circumstances are necessary to happiness or not, but in what degree of connexion any particular class of circumstances stands to happiness. This, as Aristotle's classification suggests, depends upon the degree in which they can be made to respond to the action of will and character; in other words, to the degree of their adaptability to moral ends.

§ 4. Time as an Element in Happiness.

[I. c. vii. § 16; ix. § 10; x. § 15.]

3. What Aristotle says about length of days as a condition of happiness is apt to cause a difficulty, as it might seem to be in contradiction to the general spirit of the definition. If happiness consists in performance of function, it would seem as though it depended on the quality rather than the quantity of our days.

"How long we live, not years but actions tell."*

* Cf. Ben Jonson's

"It is not growing like a tree

In bulk, doth make man better be,

Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall at last dry, bald, and sere.

A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,

Although it fall and die that night-
It was the plant and flower of Light.

In small proportions we just beauties see,
And in short measures life may perfect be.”

E

This objection Aristotle would have admitted to a great extent. Mere length of days, with their prolonged enjoyments, was no essential element in his conception any more than it was in that of the educated Greek world generally.* In this spirit he elsewhere recognizes that a right-minded man will prefer one great and glorious deed to many ordinary ones (IX. viii. 9).

To understand why, notwithstanding, he lays so much stress on "a full term of years," we must take this part of the definition along with what is said in chap. ix. Aristotle is there protesting against the idea that happiness may be a gift of fortune-a protest not less necessary then in view of the suggestion of something supernatural, i.e. accidental, conveyed in the etymology of eudaemonia, than now in view of a similar suggestion of "hap" or chance. His argument is that to conceive of happiness in this way is at once to narrow its possession, and to detract from its dignity. Happiness is not a gift of the gods; if it were we should have to think of it as something uncovenanted and exceptional, not as something attainable by man as man, and in this sense universal. Moreover, such a view is inconsistent with the ordered completeness of the happy life, which can only be the result of some steady principle of causation, such as we find in the sustained endeavour of communities of men.†

* See the well-known story in Herodotus, i. 30, 31, where no emphasis is laid on the duration of happiness.

† See Professor Stewart's paraphrase of chap. ix., op. cit. i. p. 131.

Now the steady principle upon which our chief reliance must be placed, is, of course, education, and this requires time. The difficulty, therefore, is solved by noting that when he insists that "as one swallow or one warm day does not make Spring, so a single day or a short time of happiness does not make a man blessed or happy," Aristotle is thinking of time as necessary, not for the full enjoyment of happiness, but for the full development of the powers and capacities in the exercise of which it consists.

§ 5. The Happiness of Children.

[I. c. ix. § 10.]

This explains what to the modern reader will appear perhaps the chief paradox of these sections -the statement in chap. ix. § 10, that happiness is not for children. "If children cannot be happy," we are apt to ask, "who can?" We are sometimes even inclined to go to the opposite extreme, and to attribute to them a happiness higher both in degree and kind than falls to ourselves;* a view to which educational theory has not been slow to respond.

It is in this spirit that some modern writers have besought us to think less of the man and more of the child in what we call "preparation for life." "What

* This was Shelley's view :

"Blest in death and life beyond man's guessing,
Little children live and die possessed

Still of grace that keeps them past expressing

Blest."

must we think," cries Rousseau, the representative here as elsewhere of leading modern tendencies, "of that barbarous education which sacrifices the present for an uncertain future, which loads a child with chains of every sort, and begins by making him miserable, in order to prepare for him long in advance some pretended happiness which it is probable he will never enjoy? . . . Love childhood, encourage its sports, its pleasures, its amiable instincts. Humanity has its place in the order of things, and infancy has its place in the order of human life. We must consider the man in the man, and the child in the child."

To ask these questions and emphasize this opposition between the child and the man merely shows how far we have drifted from Aristotle's conception. It is to overlook the fundamental distinction between freedom from responsibility and the heightened power of animal enjoyment that goes along with it and the higher human happiness that comes of the harmonious exercise of developed faculties. However gay and light-hearted a child's life may be, it is a misnomer to call it happy, except and in so far as the activities of which it consists foreshadow the life of manly purposes for which it is a preparation. Rousseau's protest had, of course, its value at the time as a criticism of the artificial and ascetic ideals of education then in vogue. It is still more valid perhaps to-day against the system of education or no education which, in spite of recent improvements, permits so large a * Émile, Bk. II. See Payne's abridgment, p. 44.