Part 15

“Again, it is obvious that the great-minded man, if he is worthy of the greatest consideration, must be not only a good man, but one of the very best; for always the better a man is the greater is his desert, and the best man alone may claim the most. The really great-minded man, therefore, must be good; or rather, let us say that to be entitled to the praise of great-mindedness a man must be great in all virtue. Least of all, certainly, is it consistent with the character of a great-minded man to droop his crest at the face of danger and run away, or to do any act of injustice; for why should a man do anything dishonourable, {175} to whom even the greatest things in the world are small measured by the estimate that he entertains of his own worth? And, indeed, it is quite ridiculous to imagine a man of genuine great-mindedness who is not at the same time a virtuous man. For, if he is bad he is certainly not worthy of honour, honour which is the reward of virtue, and is given only to the good. Let us say therefore that great-mindedness is a sort of crown and blossom of the virtues, for it elevates all the virtues, and without them it cannot exist. For which reason it is a hard thing to be truly great-minded; for this elevation of the soul is not possible without general goodness. We see therefore that it is with demonstrations of honour and dishonour that the great-minded man is principally concerned; and it is characteristic of him, that when great honour is done him by good persons, he is pleased, but always moderately, because on every occasion he only gets what he deserves, or perhaps less; because, in fact, virtue never can receive a proper equivalent for itself in the shape of anything external: he will not, however, reject any such offering, however inferior to his merits, because he will consider that people have given the best they had to give. But the honour that he receives for small services, and from persons of no excellence, he will hold very cheap; for it is not of such respect that he considers himself worthy. Exactly similar is his relation to dishonour; for disrespect in no kind can under any circumstances have reference to him. But honour, though the principal, is not the only external thing that belongs to the great-minded man; money, and power, and prosperity, and their opposites, affect him also in their proper place and degree, in such a {176} fashion always as that he shall neither be much elevated by their presence, nor much depressed by their absence. For not even the absence of that honour, which he justly claims, will he allow to affect his peace very deeply, much less the withholding of that wealth and that influence, which are desired by the good only for the sake of the honour which they bring with them. He therefore who can look calmly on the absence of that which is most desired, will not break his heart because he finds himself destitute of those things which are valued only as they contribute to the attainment of that desire. For this reason it is that men of a high self-esteem are apt to appear proud and contemptuous. It would appear also that the accidents of birth and fortune contribute in some degree towards great-mindedness; for persons of noble birth are considered worthy of honour, and persons of great influence, and wealthy persons; and there is a superiority belonging to all such persons, which brings a certain amount of honour along with it that is grateful to a good man. And it cannot be denied that such things have a tendency to engender a certain loftiness of soul, for they are never without honour from some quarter. Nevertheless the only thing really deserving of honour is virtue, though where virtue is conjoined with these external advantages it will always command a latter share of public respect. But those who possess such external advantages without virtue have neither any reason for thinking themselves deserving of great consideration, nor are they properly called great-minded; for it is only of those who possess virtue that such things can be predicated. On the contrary, those who possess such external goods are apt to {177} become insolent and haughty. For without virtue it is by no means easy to bear prosperity well; and, not bearing it well, such persons are apt to conceit themselves better than their neighbours, and to despise them, while themselves spend their lives at random, and do what chance throws in their way. For they imitate the manner of the great-minded man, not being like him in soul; and, while they do nothing on which a lofty estimate of themselves might justly be founded, they find it easy to usurp an apparent superiority by looking down upon their fellow-men. This superiority belongs of right to the great-minded man, for his opinion of himself is founded on reality; but these, as chance may have thrown some exceptional tag of distinction in their way, despise their neighbours. Again, the great-minded man is not fond of running petty risks, nor indeed is it by rash and hasty ventures in any shape that he would catch a small breath of honour; but when a great risk presents itself then he willingly confronts danger, and spares not his life, as deeming life secondary when higher interests are concerned. Moreover, in reference to benefits, he is more given to confer than to receive them; for he who confers a benefit always stands in a position of superiority, while he on whom it is conferred feels inferior. And when a benefit is conferred on him, he will repay it in larger measure; for thus the benefactor will seem to be put under a new obligation, having received more than he gave. He seems also to have a more wakeful memory for those on whom he has conferred benefits, than for those from whom he has received them; for the person benefited is always inferior to the person conferring the benefit, {178} and the great-minded man always wishes to feel superior. And he does not hear of benefits conferred on him with the same pleasure as benefits which he has conferred on others, for which reason in Homer Thetis does not commemorate her services to Jove; and in the same way the Spartans do not speak to the Athenians of the benefits they have conferred on Athens, but of those which they have received. It is also a mark of the great-minded man that he will either not ask a favour at all, or do it with difficulty; on the other hand, he is ready to do a service to all, but with this difference, that while he bears himself loftily to those high in position and worldly fortune, he is of easy access and condescending to the common man; for not to bow before the mighty is not easy, and is possible only to those who are inspired by a high sense of personal worth, whereas with common men any man may plant himself on an equality; and indeed even a little excess of pride in the presence of the proud is never ignoble, while to be haughty to those beneath us is always the sign of a vulgar mind, and a person of low ambition, as when one makes a vaunt of strength before the weak. Again, the great-minded man will not be the first to seize on honourable distinctions when offered, but he will gladly let others precede, being slow and backward, except, indeed, where a difficult thing is to be done, and a very rare honour achieved; generally he will meddle with few things, but what he does put his hand to must be something great and nameworthy. We may further note that he will be open and above ground, whether in his hatreds or his friendships, for to conceal a man’s feelings is usually a sign of fear. And in every case he will {179} be found more concerned for truth than for opinion, and he will shrink as little from an act as from a word that the occasion may demand; for his contempt of small men and small things makes him indifferent as to results, and inspires him with a lofty confidence. For which reason also he is much given to speak the truth, except indeed when he wishes to speak ironically; and it is his delight to use a little humorous self-concealment or self-misrepresentation when he speaks in mixed company. Neither is he able easily to adapt himself to another person, unless, indeed, that person be a special friend, for in this ready adaptability there is generally implied something slavish, as we see that flatterers have always something menial in their character, and low persons more readily condescend to flatter. Nor again is the great-minded man much given to wonder; for to him there is nothing great. As little is he apt to store up a grudge; for a great-minded man will not remember trifles, especially petty offences, but will rather overlook them. Nor will he indulge in personal remarks of any kind, speaking little either about himself or others; for neither is he careful to be praised, nor pleased that others should be blamed; as little is he given to laud other people, or, on the other hand, to speak evil of others, even when they are his enemies, except perhaps occasionally, when insolence requires to be chastised. Further, about necessary evils, or vexatious trifles, he is not the man to make many bewailings and beseechings, for to behave in this manner a man must take these things much to heart, which he never can. And oftentimes he will be found preferring what is noble and brings no profit, to what is useful and gainful, {180} for his self-dependence stands out the more thereby. Finally, as to his appearance and manner, it will be noted that the great-minded man is slow in his movements, that his voice is deep, and his discourse weighty, for it is not natural that one who is not anxious about small matters should be in a hurry, or that a person should be very much excited on common occasions, to whom common matters are unimportant. Such then is the great-minded man. The two extremes between which he represents the mean, are, as we have said, the man of low self-estimate and the man of large pretensions and conceit. Now these two are manifestly not bad men, for they are not evil-doers; they only miss the ideal of what is true and noble in character. For the man who thinks meanly of himself, depriving himself of what he might justly claim as his due, though not a vicious man, suffers under a great vice of character, the defect of not knowing himself; for had he known himself, he would certainly have desired to possess the good things to which he has a natural right. At the same time such a person is not to be called foolish; he is only backward. But such a misprision of one’s self, however removed from flagrant viciousness, has unquestionably a tendency to deteriorate the character; for the imagination of their own unworthiness, by which these persons are possessed, not only cheats them of valuable external good which might naturally have fallen to their lot, but it causes them also to retire from many noble and excellent spheres of usefulness, and to shrink from the performance of most excellent actions. A conceited man, on the other hand, is both foolish and self-ignorant, and exhibits himself in a more {181} ridiculous fashion to the general eye; for deeming himself fit for some honourable office, the moment he appears in public his inefficiency is exposed, and he parades himself in showy dress, and puts himself into attitudes, and wishes that the whole world should take notice of his good fortune, and claims honour as rightfully due to him for such display. There is, however, a greater opposition between the man who thinks meanly of himself and the great-minded man, than between this man and the conceited, person; for in truth the mean abnegation of self, the cheapening of a man’s capabilities, and despair of all lofty achievement, is of more common occurrence amongst the masses, and on account of its negative character leads in the practical warfare of life to more sad results.”[181.1]

For commenting on some of the remarkable characteristics of this chapter, hovering as they do so delicately on the slippery border that separates a justifiable pride from a salutary humility, more apt occasion may present itself in our next discourse; in the meantime it will serve more the purpose of the present inquiry to ask, whether there may not be grave objections to a system of ethics based on the mere prudential calculation of a mean? and whether, granting this calculation to be wise and salutary, so far as it goes, it may not require to be strengthened by some stronger force than any which the philosophy of the Stagirite supplies? Now, in the first place, here there is one very common class {182} of objections to the doctrine of the μέσον, to which we hope the whole tone of our previous remarks has already supplied the answer. “_Is it possible_,” some one has often asked, “_to possess too much love? Of what good emotion is envy the exaggeration? Can any modification of spite be virtuous? Can any mere deficiency of the quality of truth account for the viciousness of a positive lie?_” To some of these objections Aristotle has himself supplied the answer; but the best general answer to all is their impertinence as bearing upon a treatise which does not pretend to set forth a curious definition, proof against every subtle objection, but only to supply a useful practical rule. Whosoever accepts the _Nicomachean Ethics_ in the practical spirit in which it was written, will soon find, perhaps by no very pleasant experience, that there is nothing more common among good people than to have too much even of such a rare virtue as Christian love; for there is too much always when there is too much for the occasion, or too much for the use or the abuse that is likely to be made of it; and unchastened generosity, inconsiderate philanthropy, and indiscriminate kindness are certainly not among the rarest of social faults. Equally certain is it that some of our most odious vices are only the despotic usurpations of certain instincts, natural and healthy in themselves, and when acting under the habitual check of other instincts equally natural, so as to preserve the just balance of a harmonious whole. Thus envy is merely the natural fruit of a salutary rivalry, when a generous sympathy is wanting; it is an odious state of mind arising out of an excess of rivalry on the one hand, and a deficiency of sympathy on the other. Let this style {183} of objections therefore pass. But a more serious deficiency in the Aristotelian doctrine seems to reveal itself, when it is said, This morality is merely prudential and calculating; it regulates but it does not move: it supplies the pilot at the helm, and gives him a curiously marked compass to steer by, but it leaves the ship in a stagnant ocean without wind and without tides. Now there is something in this objection, but not nearly so much as appears on the surface. Aristotle certainly is not an emotional writer; he does not stir the affections; he will never be a favourite with women, or with poets, or with evangelists, or with any person--and this is by no means the worst sort of person--whose head requires to be reached through his heart. It is not true, however, that he commits the folly of attempting to construct a steam-engine without steam. He finds the steam there, and the engine too ready-made, and his only object is to supply a regulator, because a regulator is the chief thing wanted. Whatever an unprincipled or paradoxical Sophist here and there might assert, neither Aristotle nor any notable philosopher of antiquity ever thought it necessary, to commence his moral theory with a systematic controversion of the Hobbesian doctrine that man is naturally all selfish, a creature that if left without policemen and executioners would necessarily grow up into a mere intellectual tigerhood. Aristotle assumed, and expressly asserts, that man is naturally a social animal; the social instincts which form families and friendships, clanships and nationalities, being among the most marked peculiarities of his complex nature: these instincts, he knew well, constantly exist in sufficient and more {184} than sufficient strength; they bubble out like streams from the mountain side, which require only a calculated control to make them useful; they are the luxuriant overgrowth of a rich soil, which demands, not the stimulus of a strong manure, but the check of a wise pruning-hook. That this was Aristotle’s view is quite plain; for he not only believes in nature generally, as opposed to the institutions and conventions (νόμος) so much in favour with the Sophists, but he devotes two whole books to what he calls Φιλία, a word commonly translated “friendship,” but which in the Nicomachean Ethics is used in the widest sense to designate all the social sympathies and feelings implanted in man by Nature, with the relations springing therefrom; and this part of his work, as Grant well observes, is treated with a depth and moral earnestness that makes the reader feel the supreme importance attached to it by its illustrious author.[184.1] Aristotle therefore is not to be blamed for ignoring the great motive powers of moral life; he only does not directly address them; it was not his vocation; he was no poet, no apostle; and even without poets and apostles, Nature, he might well imagine, was always strong enough for that part of the business. But even without the fervid wheels of passion there lies in the Aristotelian philosophy, at least for a certain class of noble minds, a driving power of the most approved efficiency. That driving power is simply the love of perfection. “_Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect_.” To live in the most excellent way, according {185} to the true excellence of man, is the constant ideal of an Aristotelian philosopher. And so long as the lofty consciousness of this ideal bears him up, he requires neither whip nor spur to incite him to continue in a virtuous career. He acts in the true spirit of the poet when he says--

“I would do all that best beseems a man; Who would do less is none.”

Or, as Burns has it in the well-known lines,--

“The fear o’ hell’s the hangman’s whip To haud the wretch in order; But whaur you feel your honour grip, Let that aye be your border.”

This is not a bad driving power by any means in the world, as things go. True, it may not make a man a missionary, but it will keep him out of the mire, and teach him sooner to die than to do a base action. Certainly it will not confine him to the performance of virtues of mere prudential calculation.