abstract and the concrete. Reason is to Aristotle the organizing principle in life, subordinating and adapting the parts to the purpose of the whole. This principle finds its concrete expression in the "prudent man," who is the living embodiment of all that is best in the social order of his time and country. Just as the meaning of right action can only be understood through experience of the concrete act, so the full meaning of the reasonable life comes best home to us through living contact with the reasonable man. The reason which we see in ourselves as through a glass darkly, we meet with in him face to face; wisdom on our part is to seek for wisdom in him. As one of the wise men of our own time has put it: “All men are made or make themselves different in their approaches to different men, and the secret of goodness and greatness is in choosing whom you will approach and live with, through the crowding, obvious people who seem to live with you." * In phrases like this we must, moreover, recollect that to the Greek observer it was probably much more evident than it is to us, that the men whom he recognized as wise and greatSolon, Pericles, Socrates-were the representatives of what was best in the social order he saw around him. It is true that in the case of Socrates we seem to have an example of the wise man at issue with the State and his time. But this was an exception which proved the rule, for the condemnation of Socrates was a rude shock to Greek sentiment, and

*R. B. Browning's Letters.

to set it in its true light Plato feels himself obliged to put into his mouth the celebrated passage in the Crito, in which, after showing that he owes to Athenian institutions all that is of any value in his life, he maintains that he departs for the other world the victim, not of the laws, but of man. Read in this sense, the standard to which the definition ultimately points is that of the good man as represented by the best types which history affords, types which themselves in turn represent in the fullest manner the unbroken continuity which exists between social and individual, civic and private life.

§ 4. The Mean is itself an Extreme.

[II. c. vi. § 17.]

In spite of these explanations it is difficult for the modern student to avoid the feeling (which is rather deepened than dissipated in reading the further attempt "to apply it to details" in chap. vii.) that somehow or other the definition is inadequate, and fails, after all, to express the true inwardness of virtue. For does it not seem to reduce virtue to the mere avoidance of vice-to tell us what it is not, rather than what it is? To return to the analogy of the arts, is it not as though, in trying to describe the merits of a work of art, we were to enumerate merely the mistakes which the artist had succeeded in avoiding? Or, again, to take the truer analogy of a natural organism, as though we were to describe the life of the plant or animal as a series of lucky escapes

from death? As Grant very well puts it: "Resolve the statue or the building into stone and the laws of proportion, and no worthy causes of the former beautiful result seem now left behind. So, also, resolve a virtuous act into the passions and some quantitative law, and it seems to be rather destroyed than analyzed. . . . An act of bravery seems beautiful and noble; when we reduce this to a balance between the instincts of fear and self-confidence, the glory of it is gone." The difficulty, he continues, seems still greater when we think of more distinctly Christian virtues, such as humility, charity, forgiveness of injuries. It is quite true that just as there is a point where the beauty of the brave act would be destroyed by pushing it to folly, and, again, by controlling it into caution, so there is a point at which humility will become grovelling, charity weak, and forgiveness spiritless. "But there seems in them something which is also their chief characteristic, and which is beyond and different from this quality of the mean." Even the additional reference to the prudent man does not help us here, for, after all, prudence or wisdom is apt to be conceived of rather as a negative than a positive virtue-a fact which the Greeks themselves recognized in representing the "demon," or spirit of wisdom, in Socrates as a voice warning him against what was wrong rather than an inspiration as to what was right.

In reply to this it must be admitted that Aristotle's account of virtue as a mean between two extremes Op. cit. i. pp. 260, 261.

*

fails to give us the ultimate rationale of moral excellence. This is necessarily so. The definition is an analysis of the general conditions which must be observed if an act is to be good. But the goodness of an act just consists in its individuality, in its being what is precisely demanded of the individual by the particular circumstances of the case. And this is precisely what no definition-which, as the logician would tell us, is of the general-can give.

Something like this seems to be in Aristotle's mind when he adds the important rider to the definition : "When, therefore, we are seeking a logical definition of virtue, we must describe it as a mean. But we must remember that when we look at it from the point of view of what is best and 'well done,' it is itself an extreme." The remark, as Grant says, shows the admirable balance in Aristotle's mind between the abstract and the concrete. It recalls us from the logical analysis to the real thing that is being analyzed. Excellence, he had begun by saying, is that which makes a thing to be in reality what it had the potentiality of being. To be so-in other words, to be or realize itself is the good at which everything aims. To this, man is no exception. He, also, to use Spinoza's phrase, tries to persevere in his own essence. struggles to be what he truly is, and to realize himself. In a good action he succeeds for a moment, as it were, in doing so. He expresses his whole self, and stands forth as what he truly is. Here there can be no talk of virtue being a mean. Such a definition is good enough as telling us how this result

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looks from the side of the passions, through the medium of which it is achieved; or, again, how it looks from the point of view of times and seasons and human circumstances generally. It does not tell us how it looks from the side of the man himself, i.e. how it looks sub specie aeternitatis. From this side it is not a mean. Here it is an extreme, for it is the best that is in him-" the thing he was made for."

§ 5. Can there be a "Habit of choosing?"

Now

But we have hitherto avoided what the student of psychology will probably feel to be the main difficulty in Aristotle's doctrine of virtue. The basis of virtue in Aristotle's view is, as we have seen, habit. the aspect of habit which has received the most attention is its unconsciousness and uniformity. "Habit," says Professor Baldwin, "means loss of oversight, diffusion of attention, subsiding consciousness ;" and, again, "Habit means invariableness, repetition, reproduction." On the other hand, virtue is in essence choice: it is, as Aristotle says, a habit of choosing the mean, and therefore implies attributes apparently the precise opposite of those which Professor Baldwin mentions, viz. oversight, concentrated attention, rising consciousness. Moreover, as we have just seen, it involves adaptation. The mean is relative to the individual case. Morality, we might say, never repeats itself. So far, therefore, from virtue or perfection being a habit, we seem driven to say with Fichte that "to form a habit is to fail." This is the

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