Part 12

We now proceed to place before the reader a short statement of the most striking characteristics of the ethical philosophy of Aristotle as they are set forth in that compact little book, the _Nicomachean Ethics_. And the first observation proper to make here is the extreme practicality that appears not more in the general colour and tone than in the individual chapters and paragraphs of this remarkable volume. In criticising the sermons delivered in our Christian pulpits we are accustomed to distinguish between doctrinal and practical preaching, and to believe that while, in Scotland at least, the former is the more popular and the more easy, the latter is always the more difficult and the more efficient style of moral address. Now what we have to say of Aristotle, as he appears in the _Ethics_, is that he is not a mere {142} writer on ethics, an acute speculator or a subtle casuist, but he presents himself with all the seriousness of a preacher, and an eminently practical preacher. No doubt in this capacity he must be regarded both by natural genius and in the general tone of his ethical writings as second to his great master Plato; but his influence on the moral culture of the world has not for that reason been less. A large class of men, especially in this practical country, are apt to suspect Plato of nonsense; and these are unwilling to take advice in the affairs of common life from a man who, in his flights of ideal constructiveness, so far transcends the narrow range of their own hard-faced realism. But Aristotle is a man whom no man can suspect of nonsense. He takes what lies before him, and in the most cool practical way conceivable proceeds to analyse it, and to spell out its significance. He is not ambitious--at least not in the department of morals--of piling a grand system, or of tabulating an exhaustive scheme. He is a practical man, as much as you or I am, and sees with marked distinctness always what lies in his way. There is no fear that under his guidance you will lose yourself in a mist or be carried off your feet in a balloon. He is therefore peculiarly fitted for being put forward as a lay-preacher to a British public; and the Oxford scholars have done good service to the English youth by giving his famous work on Ethics such a prominent place among classical books of the first rank. He is as sensible as Dr. Paley, and a great deal more profound; while, on the other hand, it never occurs to him that it is necessary to prepare the way for a plain practical discourse on the conduct of life by abstract discussions {143} on the liberty of the will and the responsibility of free agents. This omission Principal Grant considers a weakness; I consider it a sign of good sense, or, at all events, a remarkable piece of good luck. He assumes morality in the moral world, just as he assumes light and air and water in the physical; he describes a moral man with strong lines and a firm hand, just as he would describe a healthy man as contrasted with a diseased man. If you have a single eye and an honest purpose, you will not fail to know what he means; if you have not, his book is not for you. There never was a more practical preacher. This word _practical_, therefore, I desire the reader to emphasize doubly when he applies himself to the thorough comprehension of the _Nicomachean Ethics_. There are, no doubt, in this treatise, as in almost every Greek book, some half-dozen curious questions raised, which, like the subtle casuistry of the Jesuit doctors, have little practical value; for Aristotle was a Greek, and as such a habitual dealer in ἀπορήματα, or knotty points, in the solution of which a hard practical Scot or a broad burly Englishman would think a single sentence wasted. These however belong to the soil, grow up like weeds among the best wheat, and, like bad puns in Shakespeare, must be taken with the lot. In the gross and scope of his handling, as we have said, the Stagirite systematically waives all unpractical questions; and in the very arrangement of his book an attentive reader will not fail to discern that there are certain scientific deficiencies which can be explained fully only from the consideration that the writer had vividly realized the difference between what we could call an academical lecture and a sermon, and was {144} determined to make it felt that a lecture on morals, through which the undertones of seriousness that belong to a sermon are not heard, is one of the most absurd and unmeaning of all human performances. No doubt this defect in respect of strictly scientific method may arise partly from the fact that the treatise seems to have been composed at different times, and packed up, so to speak, in bundles rather than reared up architecturally into a jointed structure; it is also plain enough to any one who can read with a discerning eye that the work was left incomplete by the great author, and that the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, as we now have then, are from a different hand, and of manifestly inferior workmanship; but I consider it not less certain that, had it not been for the dominance of the practical point of view, not a few chapters in this most valuable treatise would have been compacted more aptly into the firmness of a complete organism. Once and again in the first two books of his treatise does he repeat the solemn warning that our object in inquiring into the nature of virtue is, not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may be virtuous. Once and again does he enter a protest against the supersubtle tendencies of his countrymen, always ready to stand and debate, even where the solution of the problem was to be found only in motion and in action. Subtleties of any kind, indeed, are not suitable for a moral discourse; the entertainment of them shows that the inquirer has not yet conceived what the purport of the inquiry is; ethical philosophy refers as distinctly to a deed as a sword refers to a cut; and all questions about morals are idle, and even pernicious, that do not bear directly on some practical result. {145} We must therefore, so Aristotle argues, in our method of discussion here, not insist on having always those exact proofs and nice definitions which in the sciences of measurement and number may fairly be demanded. We should rather seek for an analogy to moral science in such arts as medicine, and say that propriety of conduct, like the health of the body, is liable to much indeterminateness and variation; that to seek for scientific rules which might apply with exactitude to all cases is absurd; that no wise man will attempt to cut logs with razors, and that in such matters of complex practice we must content ourselves with stating some such broad general principles as suit the great majority of cases, and which every man must be left to apply for himself in the experience of life. Of the deep tone of practical seriousness which underlies the whole of the _Nicomachean Ethics_, I know no more striking proof than an utterance of Maurice, in the preface to his exposition of the Epistles of John, which I shall here extract. “I owe unspeakable gratitude,” says that truly evangelical moralist, “to the University of Oxford for having put Aristotle’s _Ethics_ into my hands, and induced me to read it, and to think of it. I doubt if I could have received a greater boon from any university or any teacher. I will tell you what this book did for me. First, it assured me that the principles of morals cannot belong to one time or another; that they must belong to all times. Here was an old heathen Greek making me aware of things that were passing within me, detecting my laziness and my insincerity, showing how little I was doing the things which I professed to do, forcing me to confess that with all the {146} advantages which I enjoyed he was better than I was. That was one great thing. Next, I could not but learn from him--for he took immense pains to tell me--that it is not by reading a book or learning a set of maxims by heart that one gets to know anything of morality, that it belongs to life, and must be learned in the daily practice of life. English and Christian writers no doubt might have told me the same thing. But I am not sure that their words would have gone as much home as Aristotle’s did. I might have thought that it was their business, part of their profession, to utter those stern maxims, and to hold up such lofty ideals of conduct.” And what adds immense force to Aristotle’s preaching, especially with young men, is the feeling that they have here to do not only with a non-professional preacher but with a thorough gentleman, and a shrewd man of the world, the friend of princes, and of great statesmen and mighty captains. It is seldom indeed that young men in the heat of their blood and the glow of their fancy will listen with much attention to sermons of any kind, even from the best preachers; but if they will not receive the word of warning from such a prophet as Aristotle they will at least have no excuse for sneering either at the doctor or the doctrine. In him they will find no sarcastic Cynic, content with the negative pleasure of snarling from his private kennel at the faults of men, instead of rising to help their infirmities; no sickly devotee whose principal occupation through the dreariness of the present life is to dream and maunder about the glories of the future; no curious registrar of morbid frames of mind or dainty nurse of unproductive sentiment. Such caricatures of the spiritual man, {147} justly odious to the vigorous, generous, and sanguineous temper of youth, may be found cropping out largely in the histories both of philosophical and religious sectaries; but not a hint of them appears in the thoroughly masculine, thoroughly manly, and thoroughly healthy Ethics of Aristotle.

The corner-stone of Aristotle’s moral doctrine, as in that of Socrates, lies in the single word λόγος, which, whether in its internal side as Reason, or with its outer face as Discourse, was so peculiarly the watchword of the Hellenic race. “The Greeks seek after wisdom;” and wisdom, or σοφία, is in all cases the result, and the only possible result, of the just exercise of λόγος or reason. We shall not therefore expect to find in the Stagirite any fundamental principle different from that on which the moral doctrine of Socrates rests--nay, just as some of the most characteristic maxims of the New Testament can be pointed out in, and no doubt were actually borrowed from, the Old Testament, even so, and in a much greater degree, was the ethical doctrine of Aristotle borrowed in its great leading points from Socrates and Plato. This borrowing, however, was not in the style of patchwork; it was an affair of natural growth. What we find in Aristotle is not a new ethical doctrine, but the emphasizing and systematizing of certain important aspects of an old doctrine. Now the aspect which Aristotle strongly emphasizes as the starting-point of his ethical teaching is the τέλος and the ἀγαθόν. All men profess to have some object after which they strive in their life and by their deeds; no man in this world, as Goethe says, can safely live at random: the ship that sails at random will be wrecked {148} even in a calm, and the man who lives at random will be ruined without the help of any positive vice. What then is it that men must propose to themselves as the τέλος, the end, object, or purpose of their existence? Generally, all men profess to be seeking for the ἀγαθόν, or the Good. The question, therefore, which ethical science has to answer is, in the words of the Westminster Catechism, _What is the chief end of man?_ What is the ultimate aim and highest Good, the _summum bonum_, of which the creature called Man is capable? How are we to discover this? Plainly in the same way that we discover the chief good of any special kind of man,--a man exercising any special professional function. What is the _summum bonum_ of a flute-player? Of course to play the flute, and to play the flute well; of a soldier, to fight well; of a shoemaker, to make good shoes; of a brewer, to brew good beer; of a fowler, to snare birds; and of an angler, to hook fish. The chief end, therefore, of any creature is found by discovering his natural work or business in the world,--for all things are full of labour, and a man’s duty is always some kind of work. As, then, there is a special work for the flute-player or the fowler, which determines his chief good, so, if we are to find the chief end of man, we must put our finger on some general work or business, which belongs to all men as men, and not as engaged in special occupations and practising particular arts. How is this work found? Of course by fixing our attention on the differentiating element in the human creature. The differentiating element in birds is wings, in fish fins, in worms rings. By this differentiation, stamped on every creature by the absolute dictatorship of {149} Nature, the destiny and the duty, the privilege and the glory, of each type of organized existence is inevitably determined. The creature has nothing to do in the matter but to recognise and to obey; unreasoning creatures unconsciously and blindly, choice. The proper work of man, therefore, can lie only in what in him is most distinctively human; not therefore of course in any function of the merely vegetative life which he has in common with the plant; nor again in any function of the merely sensuous life, which he enjoys in common with, oxen; but in the exercise of that faculty which he alone possesses, and which alone stamps him as distinctively human, viz., REASON. The work of a man, accordingly, and the chief end of all men, will be an energizing of the soul, according to reason, or not without reason; and a life according to reason will be good, and the chief good; and not only so, but it must also be the pleasure, and the highest pleasure, of the reasonable being who leads such a life; for the pleasure of every creature lies in acting freely and without hindrance according to its distinctive nature; and as horses are the pleasure of the rider, and views of the landscape painter, so good actions are the pleasure of good men, and reasonable actions the delight of all who live by the use of reason; so much so indeed, that he cannot even claim to be numbered amongst good men who, besides doing good deeds, does not likewise rejoice in doing such deeds. Charity given with an unwilling hand is not charity; it is a boon extorted.

This statement taken almost literally from the first eight chapters of the first book of the _Ethics_, will, it is hoped, make the moral attitude of Aristotle {150} sufficiently intelligible. He does not say, with Bentham and the modern utilitarians, “Look round about you for what is pleasurable; and that which affords pleasure to you, and to the greatest possible number of creatures with whom you are socially connected, is your duty;” but he looks about to find your distinctive excellence, your peculiar faculty among all creatures,--“Exercise that,” he says, “and you fulfil your destiny, and attain your chief good. As for pleasure, that you will have also, not as an amulet hung about your neck, but in the very necessity of your energy exercised according to your special nature. Cultivate what is noblest in you, and you cannot fail to find what is most agreeable. The doing of this, however, is by no means so simple a matter as in the mere abstract statement might appear. It is the business of a man, no doubt, to act reasonably, that is virtuously, just as much as it is the business of a bee to bag honey; but it is a much easier thing for the bee to suck honey from the flowers than for a man to force fragrant deeds from the stuff that daily life presents. How is this? The difficulty lies in the compound nature of man: a nature not compound only, but composed of parts of which one is found to be often strangely at variance with the others; so much so, indeed, that while reason is the distinctive faculty of man, and to act reasonably is at once his safety, his happiness, and his glory, he bears within himself likewise a principle of unreason, an ἄλογον opposed to his λόγος,--a principle in the normal state of man altogether dependent and servile, but which, as things are, has a strong tendency to rebel, assert an unruly independence, and even cast down from his throne {151} the lawful regent of the soul. This, the reader will remark, is exactly the doctrine of St. Paul, with regard to the contrariety of Flesh and Spirit, in the eighth chapter of the Romans, and expressed in almost the same terms. The exact words of Aristotle are: “_There appear manifestly in human beings some strong natural tendencies different from reason, and not only different, but fighting with and resisting reason_.” But this remarkable peculiarity in the complex creature Man does not in the least change the nature of human good; it only adds to it another element which makes it in the end more glorious--the element of resistance, struggle, victory, and triumph,--of course always with the necessary alternative of possible feebleness, cowardice, and defeat. And the same fact,--the same original sin, as our theologians term it,--nicely considered, raises a noticeable question about the origin of laws and moral obligation; that old question so often discussed by the Sophists, and argued, as we have seen, by Socrates, in his discourse with Hippias, whether right and wrong exist by nature or by institution, φύσει as they expressed it, or νόμῳ; and the answer given to this question by the Stagirite, characterized by his usual good sense, is that, while the determination of right and wrong is not a matter of arbitrary, compulsory imposition, according to the selfish theory of Hobbes, but lies deeply rooted in the innermost recesses of human nature, it is nevertheless true that it is the nature of man, more perhaps than of any other animal, to require training and discipline to bring out what is in him; and that virtue, in fact, is not virtue till the inborn impulses towards excellence have been fostered and strengthened by those social {152} appliances which lie in the very primary conditions of human life. We are made virtuous, therefore, neither by nature, nor contrary to nature, nor independently of nature, but we _grow_ virtuous by repeated acts of living according to reason, as we learn to see by using our eyes. Virtue is, in fact, a habit;[152.1] and as one fit of drunkenness does not make a man a drunkard, so one act of generosity does not make a generous man, and the whole roll of the virtues practised only once or twice, however completely, does not make a virtuous man. Hence the immense importance of education, which other animals may dispense with, but not man, and on which, accordingly, both Plato and Aristotle insist, as the one thing needful for the well-being, whether of the individual or of society. The existence of innate tendencies towards the Good does not in the least imply that human nature in its early stages may be safely left to itself. These good tendencies may be counteracted by opposite tendencies; they may be overwhelmed by adverse circumstance; they may be extinguished; and experience proves that they not seldom are extinguished.

Having laid this sure foundation in the differentiating element of man, the philosopher might naturally have proceeded to prove that, assuming man to be naturally a social animal, and widowed with those instincts which make social organization necessary to his normal existence, any application of reason to social existence, that is, every assertion of practical reason in a creature so constituted, is what we call {153} right, and every omission to assert it, or direct assertion of the contrary, is what we call wrong. A right action is an action according to the real constitution of things, which reality it is the business of reason to discern; a wrong act is an act in contravention of the real constitution of things, and can be performed only when reason is undeveloped or asleep, or by some violent impulse or blind illusion led astray: it is an act insulated, contumacious, and rebellious, issuing necessarily in confusion and chaos and ruin; for no single unit in a complex whole can assert its mere capricious independent self in practical denial of the totality to which it belongs, without producing discomfort at first, and ultimately being crushed by the firm compactness of the mighty machinery which it has recklessly dared to disturb. How this might have been demonstrated in detail the reader of the preceding discourse on Socrates cannot be ignorant; but however much it lay in his way, the Stagirite in his Nicomachean treatise did not choose to enter upon this theme. For this procedure he may have had two sufficient reasons; for, in the first place, he may have thought that view of the matter lay too obviously in the whole scheme and handling both of Plato and Socrates, to be susceptible of much novelty at his hands; and in the second place, he may have considered such a demonstration, however cogent in a book, to be less practically useful than some test of right and wrong, which he might be able to formulate. And in the test which he hits upon, as we shall presently see, it is quite evident that practical utility rather than theoretic invulnerability was his main object; and this is precisely what, in consistency at once with the nature of the {154} subject, and his own introductory observations, he was directly led to do. His test was simply this, that virtue, or right conduct, is generally found in the mean between two extremes; for though there may be the same difficulty in pronouncing about the quality of particular actions, sometimes, as there is in pronouncing about the state of bodily health in any individual, yet, upon a broad view of both cases, nothing seems more obvious and more certain than that the unhealthy condition, whether of body or soul, is chiefly indicated by some deficiency or excess. In other words, virtue is a medium, a balance, a proportion, a symmetry, a harmony, a nice adjustment of the force of each part in reference to the calculated action of the whole. Now, it will at once be seen that this principle is not put forth as anything new; its truth rather consists in its antiquity, and in the deep-rooted experience of all human individuals and all human associations. It is a principle which forms part of the proverbial wisdom of all peoples; and the Greeks especially from the oldest times were strong on this point. Μηδὲν ἄγαν--μέτρον ἄριστον--παντὶ μέσω τὸ κράτος θεὸς ὤπασεν--were maxims familiar to every Greek ear long before Aristotle; and in the realm of speculation, the ἀριθμός, or _number_ of Pythagoras, when applied to morals, really meant nothing else. So in the Proverbs of Solomon we find the well-known utterances--“_Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith and vomit it_.” And again: “_Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself overwise; why shouldst thou destroy thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldst thou die before thy {155} time?_” And our Shakespeare, whose plays are a grand equestrian march of all wisdom, says to the same effect in his own admirable style--

“These violent delights have violent ends, And in their triumph die: like fire and powder Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey Is loathsome in his own deliciousness, And in the taste confounds the appetite: Therefore love moderately; long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”