The avaricious man is like the state which is governed by rich men. "Is not this man likely to seat the concupiscent and covetous elements on the vacant throne? And when he has made the reasoning and passionate faculties sit on the ground obediently on either side, and taught them to know their place, he compels the one to think only of the method by which lesser sums may be converted into larger ones, and schools the other into the worship and admiration of riches and rich men. Of all conversions there is none so speedy or so sure as when the ambitious youth changes into the avaricious one."

Nowhere is Plato more keen or more fair than in his judgment of the money-maker. He says that he will generally do the right thing; he will be eminently respectable; he will not sink to very low or disreputable courses. All his goodness, however, will be of a forced, constrained, artificial, and at bottom unreal character. He will be good because he has to, in order to maintain that standing in the community on which his wealth depends. In Plato's own words: "He coerces his bad passions by an effort of virtue; not that he convinces them of evil, or exerts over them the gentle influence of reason, but he acts upon them by necessity and fear, and because he trembles for his possessions. This sort of man will be at war with himself: he will be two men, not one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his inferior ones. For these reasons such an one will be more decent than many are; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will be far out of his reach."

The next step down for the state is what Plato calls democracy. Of the democracy of intelligence and self-control diffused throughout the body of self-respecting citizens Plato had formed and could form no conception. By democracy he meant the state of things where each man does that which is right in his own eyes. "In the first place the citizens are free. The city is full of freedom and frankness—there a man may do as he likes. They have a complete assortment of constitutions; and if a man has a mind to establish a state, he must go to a democracy as he would go to a bazaar, where they sell them, and pick out one that suits him. Democracy is a most accommodating and charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and (this, perhaps, is the keenest of all Plato's keen thrusts) dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike."

The man corresponding to democracy in the state, is the man whose life is given over to the undiscriminating enjoyment of all sorts of pleasures. "In this way the young man passes out of his original nature which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures, putting the government of himself into the hands of the one of his pleasures that offers and wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another, and is very impartial in his encouragement of them all. Neither does he receive or admit into the fortress any true word of advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and curtail and reduce others—whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as honourable as another. He lives through the day, indulging the appetite of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he is for total abstinence, and tries to get thin; then again, he is at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he is at politics, and starts to his feet and says and does anything that may turn up; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither order nor law; and this is the way of him,—this he terms joy and freedom and happiness. There is liberty, equality, and fraternity enough in him."

The life of chance desire, unregulated by any subordinating principle, then, is the third stage of the descent and degradation of the soul.

In the state democracy speedily and inevitably passes over into tyranny. All appetite is insatiable. In a state where each citizen does what he pleases "all things are just ready to burst with liberty; excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. Then tyranny naturally arises out of democracy." He then proceeds, with prophetic pen, to trace the evolution of the modern political boss. First there develops a class of drones who get their living as professional politicians. Second, "there is the richest class, which, in a nation of traders, is generally the most orderly; they are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones; this is called the wealthy class, and the drones feed upon them. There is also a third class, consisting of working-men who are not politicians and have little to live upon; these, when assembled, are the largest and most powerful class in a democracy; but then, the multitude is seldom willing to meet unless they get a little honey. Their leaders take the estates of the rich and give to the people as much of them as they can consistently with keeping the greater part themselves. The people have always some one as a champion whom they raise into greatness. This is the very root from which a tyrant (that is, as we should say, a boss) comes. When he first appears above ground, he is a protector. At first, in the early days of his power, he smiles upon every one and salutes every one; he, to be called a tyrant who is making promises in public and also in private, and wanting to be kind and good to every one! Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, passes into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery." The worst form of government, according to Plato, is that which we know too well to-day in our great cities: the government of the professional politician who maintains himself by buying the votes of the poor with the money he has squeezed out of the rich. All pretence of administering the government in the interest of the community is frankly abandoned. The boss, or tyrant, as Plato calls him, frankly and unblushingly avows that he is in politics for what he can get out of it.

The true statesman, the philosopher king, in Plato's phrase, sees and serves the public good. Such a government Plato calls an aristocracy, or the government of the best for the good of all. First below that comes timocracy, or the government of those who are ambitious for power and place. Next comes oligarchy, the government of the rich for the protection of the interests of the moneyed class. Next below that, and as a logical consequence, comes populism, which is our word for what Plato calls democracy; a government which aims to satisfy the immediate wants of everybody, regardless of moral, legal, or constitutional restraints. Last, and lowest of all, comes the rule of the professional politician who has thrown all pretence of regard for the public good, all consideration of honour, all loyalty to the rich and genuine sympathy for the poor to the winds, and is simply manipulating the forms of government, getting and distributing offices, collecting assessments and distributing bribes, all in the interests of his own private pocket. Between disinterested service of the public good and such unblushing pursuit of private gain, Plato says that there is no stopping place. Logically Plato is right; historically, too, he was right at the time when he was writing. Modern democracy, however, is a very different thing from the populistic democracy with which Plato was familiar and which our large cities know too well. A democracy, resting on intelligence and public spirit, diffused through rich and poor alike, was beyond Plato's profoundest dreams. That great experiment the American people, with their public-school system, and their principle of the equality of all before the law, are now trying on a gigantic scale.

Corresponding to the tyrannical state comes the tyrannical man. "The wild beast in our nature gets the upper hand and the man becomes drunken, lustful, passionate, the best elements in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part which is also the worst and the maddest. He has the soul of the slave, and the tyrannical soul must always be poor and insatiable. He is by far the most miserable of all men." "He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real servant and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility and be the flatterer of mankind; he has desires which he is truly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor if you know how to inspect the soul of him. All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions. Even as the state which he resembles, he grows worse from having power; he becomes of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more impious; he entertains and nurtures every evil sentiment, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable and thus he makes everybody else equally miserable."

VII
THE INTRINSIC SUPERIORITY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Plato first constructs the ideal character and shows that it consists in the righteous rule of the intelligent principle in man over the spirit and the appetites. A soul thus in harmony with itself, under the rule of reason, is at once healthy, happy, beautiful, and good. Later, reversing the process, he shows how the good, beautiful, true, healthy condition of the soul may be destroyed through the successive steps of pride, avarice, lawless liberty, ending at last in the tyrannous rule of some single appetite or passion which has dethroned reason and set itself up as supreme. The consequence of it all is that "the most righteous man is also the happiest, and this is he who is the most royal master of himself; the worst and most unrighteous man is also the most miserable; this is he who is also the greatest tyrant of himself and the most complete slave."

The reason why the life of a righteous man is happier than the life of an unrighteous man is that it has "a greater share in pure existence as a more real being." "If there be a pleasure in being filled with that which agrees with nature; that which is more really filled with more real being will have more real and true joy and pleasure; whereas, that which participates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied and will participate in a less true and real pleasure. Those, then, who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, never pass into the true upper world; neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they taste of true and abiding pleasure. Like brute animals, with their eyes down and bodies bent to the earth, or leaning on the dining table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their excessive love of these delights, they kick and butt at one another with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; they kill one another by reason of their insatiable lust; for they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent." "Thus when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there is no division, the several parts, each of them, do their own business and are righteous, and each of them enjoy their own best and truest pleasures. But when either of the other principles prevails, it fails in attaining its own pleasure and compels the others to pursue after a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs."

Having reached this point Plato introduces a figure, which carries the whole point of his argument. "Do you now model the form of a multitudinous, polycephalous beast, having a head of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, making a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man; the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second; then join them and let the three grow into one. Now fashion the outside into a single image as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within may believe the beast to be a single human creature. Now unrighteousness consists in feasting the monster and strengthening the lion in one in such wise as to weaken and starve the man; while righteousness consists in so strengthening the man within him that he may govern the many-headed monster." "Righteousness subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man, and unrighteousness is that which subjects the man to the beast."

Finally Plato sums up the discussion by anticipating the question which Jesus asked four centuries later. "How would a man profit if he receive gold and silver on the condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst? Who can imagine that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery for money, especially if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil men, would be the gainer, however much might be the sum which he received? And will any one say that he is not a miserable caitiff who sells his own divine being to that which is most godless and detestable and has no pity? Eriphyle took the necklace as the price of her husband's life, but he is taking a bribe in order to compass a worse ruin." He even pushes the question a step further and asks, "What shall a man be profited by unrighteousness even if his unrighteousness be undetected? For he who is undetected only gets worse; whereas he who is detected and punished has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanised; the gentler element in him is liberated and his whole soul is perfected and ennobled by the acquirement of righteousness and temperance and wisdom. The man of understanding will concentrate himself on this as the work of life. In the first place he will honour studies which impress these qualities on his soul and will disregard others. In the next place he will keep under his body and will be far from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures, and he will be always desirous of preserving the harmony of the body for the sake of the concord of the soul. He will not allow himself to be dazzled by the opinion of the world and heap up riches to his own infinite harm. He will look at the city which is within him, and he will duly regulate his acquisition and expense, in so far as he is able, and for the same reason he will accept such honours as he deems likely to make him a better man. He will look at the nature of the soul, and, from the consideration of this, he will determine which is the better and which is the worst life and make his choice, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his soul more unrighteous, and good to the life which will make his soul more righteous; for this is the best choice,—best for this life and after death. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast to the heavenly way and follow after righteousness and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil; then shall we live dear to one another and the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward."

With this magnificent tribute to the intrinsic superiority of righteousness over unrighteousness Plato concludes his greatest work. The question why a man should do right, even if he wore the ring of Gyges which would exempt him from all external consequences of his misdeeds, has been answered by a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of the soul, and the demonstration that righteousness is that organisation of the elements of the soul into an active and harmonious unity, wherein its health and beauty and life and happiness consist. In conclusion let us borrow from another of Plato's dialogues the prayer which he ascribes to Socrates,—a brief and simple prayer, yet one which, in the light of our study of the Republic, I trust we shall recognise as summing up the spirit of his teaching as a whole. "Beloved Pan, and all ye gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy; and may I have such a quantity of gold as none but the temperate can carry. Anything more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me."

VIII
TRUTH AND ERROR IN PLATONISM

Obviously this Platonic principle is vastly deeper and truer than anything we have had before. The personality at which both Stoic and Epicurean aimed was highly abstract,—something to be gained by getting away from the tangle and complexity of life rather than by conquering and transforming the conditions of existence into expressions of ourselves. Epicurus makes a few sallies from his cosey comfortable camp, to forage for provender. The Stoic draws into the citadel of his own self-sufficiency; and from this fortified position defies attack. Plato comes out into the open field, and squarely gives battle to the hosts of appetite, passion, temptation, and corruption, of which the world outside, and our hearts inside are full. In this he is true to the moral experience of the race: and his trumpet-call to the higher departments of our nature to enter the "great combat of righteousness"; his demand of instantaneous and absolute surrender which he presents to everything low and sensual within us, are clear, strong notes which it is good for every one of us to hear and heed. To him as to Carlyle, "Life is not a May-game, but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces waited on by the choral muses and the rosy hours; it is a stern pilgrimage through the rough, burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men, loves men with inexpressible soft pity, as they cannot love him; but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of creation. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars, keen glancing, from the immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the eternities. Deep calls for him unto deep.

"Thou, O World, how wilt thou secure thyself against this man? None of thy promotions is necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven; to thee it may be momentous, to thee it may be life or death; to him it is indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth. He wants none of thy rewards; behold also he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas; nor by thy gibbets and law-penalties restrain him. Thou canst not forward him; thou canst not hinder him. Thy penalties, thy poverties, neglects, contumelies,—behold all these are good for him. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible as death."

This is a note which appeals forcibly to every noble youth. It has been struck by the Hebrew Prophets and the Christian Apostles: by Savonarola and Fichte, and a host of heroic souls; but by no one more clearly and constrainingly than by Plato. It is the note of earnest and aggressive righteousness; without which no personality can be either sound or strong. The man who has never heard this summons to go forth and conquer the evils of the world without and of his own heart within him, in the name of a righteousness high above both his own attainment and the attainment of the world about him as the heavens are higher than the earth, is still in the nursery stage of personal development.

On the other hand, there is danger in the very sharpness of the antithesis which Platonism makes between the higher and the lower. For the most part this danger is latent in Plato himself; though even in him it came out in his tendency to regard family life and private property as detrimental rather than serviceable to that development of character on which the larger devotion to the state, and the ideal order, must ultimately rest.

In Neoplatonism, in the many forms of mysticism, in certain aspects of Christian asceticism, and notably in the numerous phases of what calls itself "New Thought" to-day, what was for the most part latent in Plato, becomes frankly explicit. In general it is a loosening of the ties that hold us to drudgery and homely duty; a weakening of the bonds that bind us to the men and women by our side, in order to gaze more serenely on the ineffable beyond the clouds. This developed Platonism admits that we must live after a fashion in this very imperfect world; but says our real conversation all the time must be in heaven. Individual people are but faulty, imperfect copies of the pattern of the perfect good laid up on high. We must buy and sell, work and play, laugh and cry, love and hate down here among the shadows; but we must all the time feed our souls on the good, the true, the beautiful, which these distorted human shadows only serve to hide. These Platonic lovers of something better than their husbands or wives, or associates or friends, go through the world with a serene smile, and an air of other-worldliness which, if we do not inquire too closely into their domestic life and business efficiency, we cannot but admire. They undoubtedly exert a tranquillising influence in their way, especially on those who are so fortunate as to behold them from a little distance. But they are not the most comfortable people to live with, as husband or wife, colleague or business partner. Louisa Alcott had this Platonic type in mind when she defined a philosopher as a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends having hold of the ropes, trying to pull him down to earth.

A good deal that passes for religion is this Neoplatonism masquerading in Christian dress. All such hymns as "The Sweet By and By," "Oh, Paradise, Oh, Paradise," and the like, which set heaven and eternity in sharp antithesis against earth and time, are simply Neoplatonism baptized into Christian phraseology; and the baptism is by sprinkling rather than immersion.

Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," and indeed all the mystical books of devotion—Tauler, Fénelon, "The Theologia Germanica"—are saturated with this Platonic or Neoplatonic spirit. "Thou shalt lamentably fall away, if thou set a value upon any worldly thing." "Let therefore nothing which thou doest seem to thee great; let nothing be grand, nothing of value or beauty, nothing worthy of honour save what is eternal." "Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God, the farther he departeth from all earthly comfort." These words from the "Imitation of Christ" sound orthodox enough in our ears. But we ought to understand once for all that it is Neoplatonic mysticism, not essential Christianity, that breathes through them.

This type of personality reduces the world to two mutually exclusive elements, God and self; and permits no reconciliation or mediation between them. Fénelon puts this dualism in the form of a dilemma. "There is no middle course; we must refer everything either to God or to self; if to self, we have no other God than self; if to God, we are then without selfish interests, and we enter into self-abandonment." Undoubtedly for evangelistic purposes the sharp antithesis has great practical advantages. It is an easy way to reach heaven—this of scorning earth; an easy definition of the infinite to pronounce it the negation of the finite.

As Carlyle has represented for us the stronger side of Platonism, his friend Emerson shall serve to illustrate the weakness that lurks half hidden in all this way of thinking. It is so concealed that we shall hardly detect it unless we are sharply on the watch for this tendency to exalt the Infinite at the expense of the finite; the Universal at the expense of the particular; God at the expense of our neighbour.

"Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality. We are made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness depend on a person or persons. But the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character, and blend with God, to attain their own perfection." "Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. Pressed on our attention, the saints and demigods whom history worships fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who on that condition gladly inhabits it." "The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, daring, which can love us and which we can love."

"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods." "True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer."

Here you have Plato and Thomas à Kempis in the elegant garb of a heretical transcendentalist. But you get the same dualism of finite and infinite, perfect and imperfect; unworthy, crumbling earth-mask to be gotten rid of here on earth, and the stars to be sought out and gazed at up in heaven.

The combat of the higher against the lower is one in which we must all engage; and no doubt in order to win we must at times keep the lower solicitations at arm's-length. If, however, what appeals to us in the name of the highest counsels any relaxing of definite obligation, any alienation from the man or woman whom social institutions have placed closest by our side; any disloyalty to the plain companions and humble associates whom society or business places in our way; any breaking of social bonds which generations of self-sacrifice and self-control have laboriously woven, and centuries of experience have approved as beneficent; then it is time to abandon Plato, or rather those who have assumed to wear his mantle, and look for personal guidance to those greater masters who have transcended the antithesis of higher and lower, which it was Plato's great mission to make so sharp and clear. The principle of such a reconciliation we shall find in Aristotle; its complete accomplishment we shall find in Jesus.

CHAPTER IV

In opposition to Epicurus Aristotle says, "Pleasure is not the good and all pleasures are not desirable. No one would choose to live on condition of having no more intellect than a child all his life, even though he were to enjoy to the full the pleasures of a child. With regard to the pleasures which all admit to be base, we must deny that they are pleasures at all, except to those whose nature is corrupt. What the good man thinks is pleasure will be pleasure; what he delights in will be truly pleasant. Those pleasures which perfect the activity of the perfect and truly happy man may be called in the truest sense the pleasures of a man. The pleasure which is proper to a good activity is therefore good; that attached to a bad one is bad. As, then, activities differ, so do the pleasures which accompany them."

In our discussion of Epicureanism we saw that the principle of pleasure consistently carried out produced bad results, and, as in the case of Tito Melema, developed the most contemptible character. Aristotle shows conclusively why this must be so. Pleasure is the sign and seal of healthful exercise of function. A life which has all its powers in effective and well-proportioned exercise will, indeed, be a life crowned with pleasure. You cannot, however, reverse this proposition, as the Epicurean attempts to do, and say that a life which seeks the maximum of pleasure will inevitably have the healthy and proportionate exercise of function as its consequent. According to Aristotle healthy exercise of function in a well-proportioned life in devotion to wide social ends and permanent personal interests, is the cause of which happiness is the appropriate and inevitable effect. Seek the cause and you will get the effect. Seek directly the effect, and you will miss both the cause you neglect and the effect which only the cause can bring. The criticism which we quoted from George Eliot on the career of Melema is the quintessence of the Aristotelian doctrine. To put it in a figure: Build a good fire and warm your room, and the mercury in the thermometer will rise. The cause produces the effect. But it does not follow that because you raise the mercury in the thermometer by breathing on the bulb, or holding it in your hand, that the fire will burn, or the room will be warmed. The Epicureans and hedonists are people who go about with the clinical thermometer of pleasure under their tongues all the time, and expect to see the world lighted with benevolence and warmed with love in consequence. Aristotle bids them take their clinical thermometers out of their mouths; stop fingering their emotional pulse; go to work about some useful business; pursue some large and generous end; and then, not otherwise, in case from time to time they have occasion to feel their pulse and take their temperature, they will as a matter of fact find that they are normal. But it isn't taking the temperature and feeling the pulse that makes them morally sound; it is doing their proper work and keeping in vigorous exercise that gives them the healthy pulse and normal temperature.

There are, however, two apparently contradictory teachings about pleasure in Aristotle, and it is a good test of our grasp of his doctrine to see whether we can reconcile them. First he says, "In all cases we must be especially on our guard against pleasant things, and against pleasure; for we can scarce judge her impartially. And so, in our behaviour toward her, we should imitate the behaviour of the old counsellors toward Helen, and in all cases repeat their saying: If we dismiss her, we shall be less likely to go wrong." "It is pleasure that moves us to do what is base, and pain that moves us to refrain from what is noble."

On the other hand he says: "The pleasure or pain that accompanies the acts must be taken as a test of character. He who faces danger with pleasure, or, at any rate, without pain, is courageous, but he to whom this is painful is a coward. Indeed we all more or less make pleasure our test in judging actions."

Can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements? Perfectly. On the one hand if we do an act simply for the pleasure it will give, without first asking how the proposed act will fit into our permanent plan of life, we are pretty sure to go astray. For pleasure registers the goodness of the isolated act; not the goodness of the act as related to the whole plan of life. Thus if I drink strong coffee at eleven o'clock at night, the taste is pleasant and the immediate effect is stimulating. But if it keeps me awake half the night and unfits me for the duties of the next day, in spite of the pleasure gained, the act is wrong. And it is wrong, not fundamentally because of the pains of wakefulness it brings; it is wrong because it takes out of my life as a whole, and my contribution to the life of the world, something for which the petty transient pleasure I gained at the moment of indulgence is no compensation whatsoever. Is not Aristotle right? Do we not pity as a miserable weakling, hardly fit to have been graduated from the nursery, any man or woman who will let the mere physical sensation of a few moments at the end of an evening count so much as the dust in the balance against the efficiency of the coming forenoon's life and work?

If we see this half of Aristotle's truth, we see that the other is not its contradiction but its complement. If we are sorely and grievously tempted by the coffee, if we give it up with pain, if saying "No, I thank you," comes fearfully hard, if we cannot forego it cheerfully without so much as seriously considering the drinking of it as possible for us, why then it reveals how little we care for the life and work of the morrow; and since life and work are but a succession of to-morrows, how little we care for our life and work anyway. If we had great aims burning in our minds and hearts, wide interests to which body and soul were devoted, it would not be a pain, it would be a pleasure, to give up for the sake of them ten thousand times as big a thing as a cup of coffee, if it stood in the way of their accomplishment. Yes; Aristotle is right on both points. Pleasure isolated from our plan of life and followed as an end will lead us into weakness and wickedness every time we yield to its insidious solicitation. On the other hand, the resolute and consistent prosecution of large ends and generous interests will make a positive pleasure of everything we either endure or do to promote those ends and interests. Pleasure directly pursued is the utter demoralisation of life. Ends and interests, pursued for their own sakes, inevitably carry with them a host of noble pleasures, and the power to conquer and transform what to the aimless life would be intolerable pains.

Aristotle rejects the Epicurean principle of pleasure; because, though a proof that isolated tendencies are satisfied, it is no adequate criterion of the satisfaction of the self as a whole. He rejects the Stoic principle of conformity to law; because it fails to recognise the supreme worth of individuality. He rejects the Platonic principle of subordination of appetites and passions to a supreme good which is above them; because he dreads above all things the blight of asceticism, and strives for a good which is concrete and practical.

What, then, is this good, which is neither a sum of pleasures, nor conformity to law; nor yet superiority to appetite and passion? What is this principle which can at once enjoy pleasure to the full, and at the same time forego it gladly; which can make laws for itself more severe than any lawgiver ever dared to lay down; and yet is not afraid to break any law which its own conception of good requires it to break; which honours all our elemental appetites and passions, uses money and honour and power as the servants of its own ends, without ever being enslaved by them? Evidently we are now on the track of a principle infinitely more subtle and complex than anything the pleasure-loving Epicurean, or the formal Stoic, or the transcendental Platonist has ever dreamed of. We are entering the presence of the world's master moralist; and if we have ever for a moment supposed that either of these previous systems was satisfactory or final, it behooves us now to take the shoes from off our feet, and reverently listen to a voice as much profounder and more reasonable than them all, as they are superior to the senseless appetites and blind passions of the mob. For if we have a little patience with his subtlety, and can endure the temporary shock of his apparent laxity, he will admit us to the very holy of holies of personality.

II
THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN

Before coming to Aristotle's positive doctrine we must consider one fundamental axiom. Man is by nature a social being. Whatever a man seeks has a necessary and inevitable reference to the judgment of other men, and the interest of society as a whole. Strip a man of his relations and you have no man left. The man who is neither son, brother, husband, father, citizen, neighbour or workman, is inconceivable. The good which a man seeks, therefore, will express itself consciously or unconsciously in terms of other men's approval, and the furtherance of interests which he inevitably shares with them. The Greek word for private, peculiar to myself, unrelated to the thought or interest of anybody else, is our word for idiot. The New Testament uses this word to describe the place to which Judas went; a place which just suited such a man as he, and was fit for nobody else. Now a man who tries to be his own scientist, or his own lawgiver, or his own statesman, or his own business manager, or his own poet, or his own architect, without reference to the standards and expectations of his fellow-men, is just an idiot; or, as we say, a "crank." A wise man may defy these standards. The reformer often must do so. But if he is really wise, if he is a true reformer, he must reckon with them; he must understand them; he must appeal to the actual or possible judgment and interest of his fellows for the confirmation of what he says and the justification of what he does. This social reference of all our thoughts and actions, which Aristotle grasped by intuition, psychology in our day is laboriously and analytically seeking to confirm. Aristotle lays it down as an axiom, that a man who does not devote himself to some section of the social and spiritual world, if such a being were conceivable, would be no man at all. Family, or friends, or reputation, or country, or God are there in the background, secretly summoned to justify our every thought and word and deed.

Because man's nature is social, his end must be social also. It will prevent misunderstanding later, if we put the question squarely here, Does the end justify the means? As popularly understood, most emphatically No. The support of a school is a good end. Does it justify the raising of money by a lottery? Certainly not. The support of one's family is a good end. Does it justify drawing a salary for which no adequate services are rendered? Certainly not.

Yet if we push the question farther, and ask why these particular ends do not justify these particular means, we discover that it is because these means employed are destructive of an end vastly higher and greater than the particular ends they are employed to serve. They break down the structure and undermine the foundations of the industrial and social order; an end infinitely more important than the maintenance of any particular school, or the support of any individual family. Hence these means are not to be judged by their promotion of certain specific ends, but by their failure to promote the greatest and best end of all; the comprehensive welfare of society as a whole, of which all institutions and families and individuals are but subordinate members.

Throughout our discussion of Aristotle we must understand that the word "end" always has this large social reference, and includes the highest social service of which the man is capable. If we attempt to apply to particular private ends of our own what Aristotle applies to the universal end at which all men ought to aim, we shall make his teaching a pretext for the grossest crimes, and reduce it to little more than sophisticated selfishness. With this understanding of his terms, we may venture to plunge boldly into his system and state it in its most paradoxical and startling form.

III
RIGHT AND WRONG DETERMINED BY THE END

We are not either good or bad at the start. Pleasure in itself is neither good nor bad. Laws in themselves are neither good nor bad. It is impossible to say with Plato that some faculties are so high that they always ought to be exercised, and others are so low that as a rule they ought to be suppressed. The right and wrong of eating and drinking, of work and play, of sex and society, of property and politics, lie not in the elemental acts involved. All of these things are right for one man in one set of circumstances, wrong for another man in another set of circumstances. We cannot say that a man who takes a vow of poverty is either a better or a worse man than a multi-millionnaire. We cannot say that the monk who takes a vow of celibacy is a purer man than one who does not. For the very fact that one is compelled to take a vow of poverty or celibacy is a sign that these elemental impulses are not effectively and satisfactorily related to the normal ends they are naturally intended to subserve. All attempts to put virginity above motherhood, to put poverty above riches, to put obscurity above fame are, from the Aristotelian point of view, essentially immoral. For they all assume that there can be badness in external things, wrong in isolated actions, vice in elemental appetites, and sin in natural passions; whereas Aristotle lays down the fundamental principle that the only place where either badness or wrong or vice or sin can reside is in the relation in which these external things and particular actions stand to the clearly conceived and deliberately cherished end which the man is seeking to promote. A simpler way of saying the same thing, but a way so simple and familiar as to be in danger of missing the whole point, is to say that virtue and vice reside exclusively in the wills of free agents. That, every one will admit. But will is the pursuit of ends. A will that seeks no ends is a will that wills nothing; in other words, no will at all. Whether an act is wrong or right, then, depends on the whole plan of life of which it is a part; on the relation in which it stands to one's permanent interests. For these many years I have defied class after class of college students to bring in a single example of any elemental appetite or passion which is intrinsically bad; which in all circumstances and relations is evil. And never yet has any student brought me one such case. If brandy will tide the weak heart over the crisis that follows a surgical operation, then that glass of brandy is just as good and precious as the dear life it saves. The proposition that sexual love is intrinsically evil, and those who take vows of celibacy are intrinsically superior, is true only on condition that racial suicide is the greatest good, and all the sweet ties of home and family and parenthood and brotherly love are evils which it is our duty to combat. To deny that wealth is good is only possible to him who is prepared to go farther and denounce civilisation as a calamity. He who brands ambition as intrinsically evil must be prepared to herd with swine, and share contentedly their fare of husks.

The foundation of personality, therefore, is the power to clearly grasp an imaginary condition of ourselves which is preferable to any practical alternative; and then translate that potential picture into an accomplished fact. Whoever lives at a lower level than this constant translation of pictured potency into energetic reality: whoever, seeing the picture of the self he wants to be, suffers aught less noble and less imperative than that to determine his action misses the mark of personality. Whoever sees the picture, and holds it before his mind so clearly that all external things which favour it are chosen for its sake, and all proposed actions which would hinder it are remorselessly rejected in its holy name and by its mighty power;—he rises to the level of personality, and his personality is of that clear, strong, joyous, compelling, conquering, triumphant sort which alone is worthy of the name.

How much deeper this goes than anything we have had before! A man comes up for judgment. If Epicurus chances to be seated on the throne, he asks the candidate, "Have you had a good time?" If he has, he opens the gates of Paradise; if he has not, he bids him be off to the place of torment where people who don't know how to enjoy themselves ought to go.

The Stoic asks him whether he has kept all the commandments. If he has, then he may be promoted to serve the great Commander in other departments of the cosmic order. If he has broken the least of them, no matter on what pretext, or under what temptation, he is irrevocably doomed. Plato asks him how well he has managed to keep under his appetites and passions. If the man has risen above them, Plato will promote him to seats nearer the perfect goodness of the gods. If he has slipped or failed, then he must return for longer probation in the prison-house of sense.

Aristotle's judgment seat is a very different place. A man comes to him who has had a very sorry time: who has broken many commandments; who has yielded time and again to sensuous desires; yet who is a good husband, a kind father, an honest workman, a loyal citizen, a disinterested scientist or artist, a lover of his fellows, a worshipper of God's beauty and beneficence; and in spite of the sad time he has had, in spite of the laws he has broken, in spite of the appetites which have proved too strong for him, Aristotle gives him his hand, and bids him go up higher. For that man stands in genuine relations to some aspects of the great social end to which he devotes himself. And because some portion of the real world has been made better by the conception of it he has cherished, and the fidelity with which he has translated his conception into fact, therefore a share in the great glory of the splendid whole belongs of right to him. Good honest work, after an ideal plan, to the full measure of his powers, with wise selection of appropriate means, gives each individual his place and rank in the vast workshop wherein the eternal thoughts of God, revealed to men as their several ideals, are wrought out into the actuality of the social, economic, political, æsthetic and spiritual order of the world.

On the other hand, the man of scattered and unfruitful pleasures, the man of merely clear conscience, pure life, unstained reputation, with his boast of rites observed, and ceremonies performed, and laws unbroken, "faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null," is the man above all others whom Aristotle cannot endure.

Do you wish, then, to know precisely where you stand in the scale of personality? Here is the test. How large a section of this world do you care for, in such a vital, responsible way, that you are thinking about its welfare, forming schemes for its improvement, bending your energies toward its advancement? Do you care for your profession in that way? Do you care for your family like that? Do you love your country with such jealous solicitude for its honour and prosperity? Can you honestly say that your neighbour gets represented in your mind in this imaginative, sympathetic, helpful way? Do you think of God's great universe as something in the goodness of which you rejoice, and for the welfare of which you are earnestly enlisted? Begin down at the bottom, with your stomach, your pocket-book, your calling list, and go up the scale until you come to these wider interests, and mark the point where you cease to think how these things might be better than they are and to work to make them so, and that point where your imagination and your service stops, and your indifference and irresponsibility begins, will show you precisely how you stand on the rank-book of God. The magnitude of the ends you see and serve is the measure of your personality. Personality is not an entity we carry around in our spiritual pockets. It is an energy, which is no whit larger or smaller than the ends it aims at and the work it does. If you are not doing anything or caring for anybody, or devoted to any end, you will not be called up at some future time and formally punished for your negligence. Plato might flatter your self-importance with that notion, but not Aristotle. Aristotle tells you, not that your soul will be punished hereafter, but that it is lost already.

Goodness does not consist in doing or refraining from doing this or that particular thing. It depends on the whole aim and purpose of the man who does it, or refrains from doing it. Anything which a good man does as part of the best plan of life is made thereby a good act. And anything that a bad man does, as part of a bad plan of life, becomes thereby an evil act. Precisely the same external act is good for one man and bad for another. An example or two will make this clear.

Two men seek political office. For one man it is the gate of heaven; to the other it is the door to hell. One man has established himself in a business or profession in which he can earn an honest living and support his family. He has acquired sufficient standing in his business so that he can turn it over temporarily to his partners or subordinates. He has solved his own problem; and he has strength, time, energy, capacity, money, which he can give to solving the problems of the public. Were he to shirk public office, or evade it, or fail to take all legitimate means to secure it, he would be a coward, a traitor, a parasite on the body politic. For there is good work to be done, which he is able to do, and can afford to do, without unreasonable sacrifice of himself or his family. Hence public office is for this man the gateway of heaven.

The other man has not mastered any business or profession; he has not made himself indispensable to any employer or firm; he has no permanent means of supporting himself and his family. He sees a political office in which he can get a little more salary for doing a good deal less work than is possible in his present position. He seeks the office, as a means of getting his living out of the public. From that day forth he joins the horde of mere office-seekers, aiming to get out of the public a living he is too lazy, or too incompetent, or too proud to earn in private employment. Thus the very same external act, which was the other man's strait, narrow gateway to heaven, is for this man the broad, easy descent into hell.

Two women join the same woman's club, and take part in the same programme. One of them has her heart in her home; has fulfilled all the sweet charities of daughter, sister, wife, or mother; and in order to bring back to these loved ones at home wider interests, larger friendships, and a richer and more varied interest in life, has gone out into the work and life of the club. No angel in heaven is better employed than she in the preparation and delivery of her papers and her attendance on committee meetings and afternoon teas.

The other woman finds home life dull and monotonous. She likes to get away from her children. She craves excitement, flattery, fame, social importance. She is restless, irritable, out of sorts, censorious, complaining at home; animated, gracious, affable, complaisant abroad. For drudgery and duty she has no strength, taste, or talent; and the thought of these things are enough to give her dyspepsia, insomnia, and nervous prostration. But for all sorts of public functions, for the preparation of reports, and the organisation of new charitable and philanthropic and social schemes, she has all the energy of a steam-engine, the power of a dynamo. When this woman joins a new club, or writes a new paper, or gets a new office, though she does not a single thing more than her angel sister who sits by her side, she is playing the part of a devil.

It is not what one does; it is the whole purpose of life consciously or unconsciously expressed in the doing that measures the worth of the man or woman who does it. At the family table, at the bench in the shop, at the desk in the office, in the seats at the theatre, in the ranks of the army, in the pews of the church, saint and sinner sit side by side; and often the keenest outward observer cannot detect the slightest difference in the particular things that they do. The good man is he who, in each act he does or refrains from doing, is seeking the good of all the persons who are affected by his action. The bad man is the man who, whatever he does or refrains from doing, leaves out of account the interests of some of the people whom his action is sure to affect. Is there any sphere of human welfare to which you are indifferent? Are there any people in the world whose interests you deliberately disregard? Then, no matter how many acts of charity and philanthropy, and industry and public spirit you perform—acts which would be good if a good man did them—in spite of them all, you are to that extent an evil man.

We have, then, clearly in mind Aristotle's first great concept. The end of life, which he calls happiness, he defines as the identification of one's self with some large social or intellectual object, and the devotion of all one's powers to its disinterested service. So far forth it is Carlyle's gospel of the blessedness of work in a worthy cause. "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose; he has found it, and will follow it. The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was happiness enough to get his work done. Whatsoever of morality and of intelligence; what of patience, perseverance, faithfulness of method, insight, ingenuity, energy; in a word, whatsoever of strength the man had in him will lie written in the work he does. To work: why, it is to try himself against Nature and her everlasting unerring laws; these will tell a true verdict as to the man."

When we read Carlyle, we are apt to think such words merely exaggerated rhetoric. Now Aristotle says the same thing in the cold, calculated terms of precise philosophy. A man is what he does. He can do nothing except what he first sees as an unaccomplished idea, and then bends all his energies to accomplish. In working out his ideas and making them real, he at the same time works out his own powers, and becomes a living force, a working will in the world. And since the soul is just this working will, the man has so much soul, no more, no less, than he registers in manual or mental work performed. To be able to point to some sphere of external reality, a bushel of corn, a web of cloth, a printed page, a healthful tenement, an educated youth, a moral community, and say that these things would not have been there in the outward world, if they had not first been in your mind as an idea controlling your thought and action;—this is to point to the external and visible counterpart and measure of the invisible and internal energy which is your life, your soul, your self, your personality.

IV
THE NEED OF INSTRUMENTS

Aristotle's first doctrine, then, is that we must work for worthy ends. The second follows directly from it. We must have tools to work with; means by which to gain our ends. General Gordon, who was something of a Platonist, remarked to Cecil Rhodes, who was a good deal of an Aristotelian, that he once had a whole room full of gold offered him, and declined to take it. "I should have taken it," replied Mr. Rhodes. "What is the use of having great schemes if you haven't the means to carry them out?" As Aristotle says: "Happiness plainly requires external goods; for it is impossible, or at least not easy, to act nobly without some furniture of fortune. There are many things that can be done only through instruments, so to speak, such as friends and wealth and political influence; and there are some things whose absence takes the bloom off our happiness, as good birth, the blessing of children, personal beauty. Happiness, then, seems to stand in need of this kind of prosperity."

How different this from all our previous teachings! The Epicurean wants little wealth, no family, no official station; because all these things involve so much care and bother. The Stoic barely tolerates them as indifferent. Plato took especial pains to deprive his guardians of most of these very things. Aristotle on this point is perfectly sane. He says you want them; because, to the fullest life and the largest work, they are well-nigh indispensable. The editor of a metropolitan newspaper, the president of a railroad, the corporation attorney cannot live their lives and do their work effectively without comfortable homes, enjoyable vacations, social connections, educational opportunities, which cost a great deal of money. For them to despise money would be to despise the conditions of their own effective living, to pour contempt on their own souls.

Is Aristotle, then, a gross materialist, a mere money-getter, pleasure-lover, office-seeker? Far from it. These things are not the end of a noble life, but means by which to serve ends far worthier than themselves. To make these things the ends of life, he explicitly says is shameful and unnatural. The good, the true end, is "something which is a man's own, and cannot be taken away from him."

Now we have two fundamental Aristotelian doctrines. We must have an end, some section of the world which we undertake to mould according to a pattern clearly seen and firmly grasped in our own minds.

Second, we must have instruments, tools, furniture of fortune in the shape of health, wealth, influence, power, friends, business and social and political connections with which to carry out our ends. And the larger and nobler our ends, the more of these instruments shall we require. If, like Cecil Rhodes, we undertake for instance to paint the map of Africa British red, we shall want a monopoly of the product of the Kimberley and adjacent diamond mines.

V
THE HAPPY MEAN

The third great Aristotelian principle follows directly from these two. If we are to use instruments for some great end, then the amount of the instruments we want, and the extent to which we shall use them, will obviously be determined by the end at which we aim. We must take just so much of them as will best promote that end. This is Aristotle's much misunderstood but most characteristic doctrine of the mean. Approached from the point of view which we have already gained, this doctrine of the mean is perfectly intelligible, and altogether reasonable. For instance, if you are an athlete, and the winning of a foot-ball game is your end, and you have an invitation to a ball the evening before the game, what is the right and reasonable thing to do? Dancing in itself is good. You enjoy it. You would like to go. You need recreation after the long period of training. But if you are wise, you will decline. Why? Because the excitement of the ball, the late hours, the physical effort, the nervous expenditure will use up more energy than can be recovered before the game comes off upon the morrow. You decline, not because the ball is an intrinsic evil, or dancing is intrinsically bad, or recreation is inherently injurious, but because too much of these things, in the precise circumstances in which you are placed, with the specific end you have in view, would be disastrous. On the other hand, will you have no recreation the evening before the game; but simply sit in your room and mope? That would be even worse than going to the ball. For nature abhors a vacuum in the mind no less than in the world of matter. If you sit alone in your room, you will begin to worry about the game, and very likely lose your night's sleep, and be utterly unfitted when the time arrives. Too little recreation in these circumstances is as fatal as too much. What you want is just enough to keep your mind pleasantly diverted, without effort or exertion on your part. If the glee club can be brought around to sing some jolly songs, if a funny man can be found to tell amusing stories, you have the happy mean; that is, just enough recreation to put you in condition for a night's sound sleep, and bring you to the contest on the morrow in prime physical and mental condition.

Aristotle, in his doctrine of the mean, is simply telling us that this problem of the athlete on the night before the contest is the personal problem of us all every day of our lives.

How late shall the student study at night? Shall he keep on until past midnight year after year? If he does, he will undermine his health, lose contact with society, and defeat those ends of social usefulness which ought to be part of every worthy scholar's cherished end. On the other hand, shall he fritter away all his evenings with convivial fellows, and the society butterflies? Too much of that sort of thing would soon put an end to scholarship altogether. His problem is to find that amount of study which will keep him sensitively alive to the latest problems of his chosen subject; and yet not make all his acquisitions comparatively worthless either through broken health, or social estrangement from his fellow-men. How rare and precious that mean is, those of us who have to find college professors are well aware. It is easy to find scores of men who know their subject so well that they know nothing and nobody else aright. It is easy to find jolly, easy-going fellows who would not object to positions as college professors. But the man who has enough good fellowship and physical vigour to make his scholarship attractive and effective, and enough scholarship to make his vigour and good fellowship intellectually powerful and personally stimulating,—he is the man who has hit the Aristotelian mean; he is the man we are all after; he is the man whom we would any of us give a year's salary to find.

The mean is not midway between zero and the maximum attainable. As Aristotle says, "By the mean relatively to us I understand that which is neither too much nor too little for us; and that is not one and the same for all. For instance, if ten be too large and two be too small, if we take six, we take the mean relatively to the thing itself, or the arithmetical mean. But the mean relatively to us cannot be found in this way. If ten pounds of food is too much for a given man to eat, and two pounds too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order him six pounds; for that also may perhaps be too much for the man in question, or too little; too little for Milo, too much for the beginner. And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it—not the absolute but the relative mean. So that people are wont to say of a good work, that nothing could be taken from it or added to it, implying that excellence is destroyed by excess or deficiency, but secured by observing the mean."

The Aristotelian principle, of judging a situation on its merits, and subordinating means to the supreme end, was never more clearly stated than in Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley: "I would save the Union. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when I shall believe doing more will help the cause."

VI
THE ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUES AND THEIR ACQUISITION

The special forms that the one great virtue of seeking the relative mean takes in actual life bear a close correspondence to the cardinal virtues of Plato; yet with a difference which marks a positive advance in insight. Aristotle, to begin with, distinguishes wisdom from prudence. Wisdom is the theoretic knowledge of things as they are, irrespective of their serviceableness to our practical interests. In modern terms it is devotion to pure science. This corresponds to Plato's contemplation of the Good. According to Aristotle this devotion to knowledge for its own sake underlies all virtue; for only he who knows how things stand related to each other in the actual world, will be able to grasp aright that relation of means to ends on which the success of the practical life depends. Just as the engineer cannot build a bridge across the Mississippi unless he knows those laws of pure mathematics and physics which underlie the stability of all structures, so the man who is ignorant of economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and ethics is sure to make a botch of any attempts he may make to build bridges across the gulf which separates one man from another man; one group of citizens from another group. Pure science is at the basis of all art, consciously or unconsciously; and therefore wisdom is the fundamental form of virtue.

Prudence comes next; the power to see, not the theoretical relations of men and things to each other, but the practical relationships of men and things to our self-chosen ends. Wisdom knows the laws which govern the strength of materials. Prudence knows how strong a structure is necessary to support the particular strain we wish to place upon it. Wisdom knows sociology. Prudence tells us whether in a given case it is better to give a beggar a quarter of a dollar, an order on a central bureau, a scolding, or a kick. The most essential, and yet the rarest kind of prudence is that considerateness which sensitively appreciates the point of view of the people with whom we deal, and takes proper account of those subtle and complex sentiments, prejudices, traditions, and ways of thinking, which taken together constitute the social situation.

Temperance, again, is not the repression of lower impulses in the interest of those abstractly higher, as it came to be in the popular interpretations of Platonism, and as it was in Stoicism. With Aristotle it is the stern and remorseless exclusion of whatever cannot be brought into subjection to my chosen ends, whatever they may be. As Stevenson says in true Aristotelian spirit, "We are not damned for doing wrong: we are damned for not doing right." For temperance lies not in the external thing done or left undone; but in that relation of means to worthy ends which either the doing or the not doing of certain things may most effectively express. We shall never get any common basis of understanding on what we call the temperance question of to-day until we learn to recognise this internal and moral, as distinct from the external and physical, definition of what true temperance is. Temperance isn't abstinence. Temperance isn't indulgence. Neither is it moderation in the ordinary sense of that term. True temperance is the using of just so much of a thing,—no more, no less, but just so much,—as best promotes the ends one has at heart. To discover whether a man is temperate or not in anything, you must first know the ends at which he aims; and then the strictness with which he uses the means that best further those ends, and foregoes the things that would hinder them.

Temperance of this kind looks at first sight like license. So it is if one's aims be not broad and high. In the matter of sexual morality, Aristotle's doctrine as applied in his day was notoriously loose. Whatever did not interfere with one's duties as citizen and soldier was held to be permissible. Yet as Green and Muirhead, and all the commentators on Aristotle have pointed out, it is a deeper grasp of this very principle of Aristotle, a widening of the conception of the true social end, which is destined to put chastity on its eternal rock foundation, and make of sexual immorality the transparently weak and wanton, cruel and unpardonable vice it is. To do this, to be sure, there must be grafted on to it the Christian principle of democracy,—a regard for the rights and interests of persons as persons. The beauty of the Aristotelian principle is that it furnishes so stout and sturdy a stock to graft this principle on to. When Christianity is unsupported by some such solid trunk of rationality, it easily drops into a sentimental asceticism. Take, for example, this very matter of sexual morality. Divorced from some such great social end as Aristotelianism requires, the only defence you have against the floods of sensuality is the vague, sentimental, ascetic notion that in some way or other these things are naughty, and good people ought not to do them. How utterly ineffective such a barrier is, everybody who has had much dealing with young men knows perfectly well. And yet that is pretty much all the opposition current and conventional morality is offering at the present time. The Aristotelian doctrine, with the Christian principle grafted on, puts two plain questions to every man. Do you include the sanctity of the home, the peace and purity of family life, the dignity and welfare of every man and woman, the honest birthright of every child, as part of the social end at which you aim? If you do, you are a noble and honourable man. If you do not, then you are a disgrace to the mother who bore you, and the home where you were reared. So much for the question of the end. The second question is concerned with the means. Do you honestly believe that loose and promiscuous sexual relations conduce to that sanctity of the home, that peace and purity of family life, that dignity and welfare of every man and woman, that honest birthright of every child, which as an honourable man you must admit to be the proper end at which to aim? If you think these means are conducive to these ends, then you are certainly an egregious fool. Temperance in these matters, then, or to use its specific name, chastity, is simply the refusal to ignore the great social end which every decent man must recognise as reasonable and right; and the resolute determination not to admit into his own life, or inflict on the lives of others, anything that is destructive of that social end. Chastity is neither celibacy nor licentiousness. It is far deeper than either, and far nobler than them both. It is devotion to the great ends of family integrity, personal dignity, and social stability. It is including the welfare of society, and of every man, woman, and child involved, in the comprehensive end for which we live; and holding all appetites and passions in strict relation to that reasonable and righteous end.