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sacrifice in field and factory of the life and happiness appropriate to children. But what it is important to notice is, that besides the wrong to the child, there is the deeper wrong to the man. The "barbarousness" consists in losing hold, not so much of the ideal of the child, as of the ideal of the man. By our treatment of the child we leave so stunted a stalk that no healthy growth of happiness can be expected from it. For the rest, as the child is father of the man, the child's happiness, to be true, must be father of the man's. There is really no inconsistency here. The truest child-enjoyments are those which prepare for the enjoyments of manhood. What is wanted is not the vulgar conception of happiness as the gratification of the senses "made down" to children, but an enlarged conception of what we mean by the happiness of a man, and the preparation that is required for it.

§ 6. The Stability of Happiness.

[I. c. x. §§ 1-11.]

4. The sections in which Aristotle discusses the stability and permanence of happiness are apt to strike us as somewhat unreal and even trivial. It is difficult to recognize in the problem as here formulated, what Professor Stewart calls "the most pressing question the moralist has to do with." For, after all, we are not very likely, as we have seen, to confuse happiness with good fortune, or to found a general argument against the possibility of happiness upon the

proverbial fickleness of fortune. Yet there is a deeper form of pessimism, which has been made familiar to us in modern times, and of which we may take the present passage without unwarrantable straining as a criticism. This begins in admitting with Aristotle that happiness does not consist in external goods, but in an inward state which is the result of harmonious activities. It denies, however, that any such state is truly attained except momentarily. Happiness must satisfy desire-is the satisfaction of desire-but desire is from its very nature insatiable. One appetite is no sooner satisfied than another makes itself felt. Consciousness, in fact, consists in the passage of the soul from one form of unrest to another. So long as consciousness lasts, the settled state of peace required by our conception of happiness is, from the nature of the case, unattainable. In the unconsciousness of death alone there is rest and completeness. For a deeper reason than Solon's the modern pessimist can repeat his maxim, "Call no man happy till his death."

Now, if we admit the assumptions that underlie this argument, viz. that man is essentially a bundle of desires, and that happiness consists in the feeling of rest which accompanies their satisfaction, it will be difficult to avoid the conclusion that happiness is essentially unstable, and therefore unattainable. The student, however, who has followed with conviction. the line of Aristotle's thought in these sections will be prepared to see the fallacy that is here involved. Man, we have agreed, is not definable as a bundle of Cp. Hobbes, quoted p. 13 above.

*

desires, nor his happiness as the feeling of pleasure incident to their satisfaction. His life, we have seen,

is a system of rational activities-a system which is foreshadowed in his inherited instincts, but developed into stable elements of character by the education he receives in a civilized community. His happiness consists in finding scope for his powers in the ordered life which such a society makes possible. The man, therefore, who, as the result of education in a wellgoverned community, has become master of himself and all his faculties, has an abiding source of peace within himself. To such a man the recurring motives and desires of everyday life represent no disturbance of the central equilibrium or invasion of his happiness, but the means through which the potentialities of his nature are called into active exercise. It is true that desire when it is present necessarily involves pain and unrest. But it is doubtful, in the first place, whether desire in the pessimist's sense plays any large part in the normal life of the good man at all. And in the second place, even although we grant that desire in the sense of a feeling of unrest still continues to play a part in the best ordered life, it no more constitutes a disturbance of its equilibrium than the outward bend of its stalk to the stimulation of the sunshine, the downward push of its roots to the stimulation of the earth, are a disturbance of the equilibrium of the plant. And the reason is that the lifelong habits of thinking and acting upon which this equilibrium rests are nothing less than the man himself. They are what we mean by his character or personality. The happiness,

therefore, that consists in its exercise is as abiding as this is. Nothing can unsettle it which does not unsettle him, and though we shall not call one who suffers the fate of a Priam or a Lear happy, yet if he still retains command of himself he can never be miserable. So far, therefore, from being the most unstable of a man's possessions, as the pessimist holds, happiness is the stablest. It is stabler even than knowledge and science. A man may forget what he once knew, but so long as life and personality hold together he cannot, except momentarily, forget himself; and to remember one's self in this sense is to be happy.*

*See Note E.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SOUL AND ITS PARTS.

"Let us not always say,

Spite of this flesh to-day

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.

As the bird wings and sings,

Let us say all good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more

Now than flesh helps soul."

BROWNING.

§1. Aristotle's Doctrine of the Relation between

Soul and Body.

[I. c. xiii.]

THE meaning of our definition of Happiness hinges upon the sense in which we take the term Virtue or Excellence. The sections before us establish three general positions: (a) it is excellence of the soul; (b) it is excellence of the rational part of the soul; (c) of this excellence there are two forms-a lower or moral, and a higher or intellectual. It is thus natural that the emphasis throughout should be laid upon the distinctions on which these positions depend, viz. that between (a) body and soul; (b) the irrational and the rational soul; (c) the moral and the intellectual in the human soul, rather than upon the

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