Natural Justice from which the natural rights of the members of a justly ordered state may be deduced. He notes, however, the need of "equity" as a kind of justice. superior to that which is realised by strict adhesion to the letter of law, and rightly overruling it, where the literal application of the prescriptions of the law to special unforeseen cases would fail to realise its intention.

One defect in Aristotle's account of Virtue which strikes a modern reader is that Benevolence is not recognised, except obscurely in the imperfect form of Liberality. This deficiency, however, is to some extent supplied by a separate discussion on the relations of kind affection which bind men together. This mutual kindness, if not strictly a virtue, is an indispensable element of human wellbeing: as a bond of union among members of a state, it is "more the concern of the legislator even than justice": in the narrower and intenser form which we specially call Friendship, it is needful to complete the happiness even of the philosopher. The proper basis of Friendship is the mutual recognition of goodness: there are indeed relations known by this name that are based merely on "utility" or "pleasure"; but these lack the characteristic, essential to true friendship, of "wishing good to another for that other's sake." True friendship, therefore, can only exist between the good, whose happiness it completes by enlarging through sympathy that consciousness of life which is itself a good: especially it gives them, in fuller measure than their own virtue, the delight of contemplating excellent achievements as something belonging to them. Aristotle, however, supplements this ideal treatment of the basis of friendship by a more empirical discussion of the natural conditions of human affection : recognising, for instance, that in the parental relation it is

produced by a sense of quasi-physical unity: the parent's love for the child is a sort of extended self-love.

From moral excellences Aristotle passed to analyse the intellectual. Here his most important point is the determination of the relation between the two kinds of wisdom which Plato blended in one conception-Speculative Wisdom (oopía) and Practical Wisdom (opóvnois). He holds, as we saw, that Speculative Wisdom does not guide us in determining moral questions: still, it is in a sense practical, in so far as its exercises are the highest forms of human activity it does not define human good, but it pre-eminently consti tutes it. Practical Wisdom, on the other hand, is really involved in moral excellence as already defined, if we suppose this perfect; for it is required to determine in any particular case that due limitation of feeling and action in which perfect virtue consists; and it cannot be conceived as existing apart from moral excellence—we do not count a man practically wise for such mere intellectual cleverness as a vicious man may exhibit. The man we count wise must be not merely skilful in the selection of means to any ends : his ends must also be rightly chosen. It is, however, difficult to form a distinct general idea of the practical syllogism by which Aristotle conceived right action to be ordinarily determined. And, indeed, it would not have been easy for him to make this point plain, without bringing into prominence a profound discrepancy between his own view of rational action and the common opinion and practice of mankind. The kind of reasoning which his view of virtuous conduct requires is one in which the ultimate major premise | states a distinctive characteristic of some virtue, and one or more minor premises show that such characteristic belongs to a certain mode of conduct under given circumstances;

§ 12. Plato and Aris

since he holds it essential to good conduct that it should contain its end in itself, and be chosen for its own sake. But he has not failed to observe that practical reasonings are not commonly of this kind, but are rather concerned with actions as means to ulterior ends; indeed, he lays stress on this as a characteristic of the practical or "political" life, when he wishes to prove its inferiority to the life of pure speculation. Though common sense will admit that virtues are the best of goods, it still undoubtedly conceives practical wisdom as chiefly exercised in providing those inferior goods which Aristotle, after recognising the need or use of them for the realisation of human wellbeing, has dropped out of sight; and the result is that, in trying to make clear his conception of practical wisdom, we find ourselves fluctuating continually between the common notion, which he does not distinctly reject, and the notion required as the keystone of his ethical system.

There is another respect in which Aristotle's view of the relation of intellect to moral action is apt to be found conVoluntary. fusing by the modern reader: in its bearing, namely, on the

totle on The

question of Free Will. On this point it may be said both of Plato and Aristotle that their psychology compels them to teach by implication the opposite doctrine to that which they expressly maintain and desire to enforce. They have every wish to resist and explode the Determinism which presents itself to them as providing a dangerous excuse for vice but their psychological system has no place for that deliberate choice of evil recognised as such, which, for the Christian moral consciousness, is the primary and prominent type of bad volition; and hence they inevitably fail in their attempts to fix on the wrongdoer the full and final responsibility for his acts. The only states of mind which

they recognise as immediate antecedents of bad acts are (1) predominance of irrational impulse overpowering rational judgment or prompting to action without deliberation, and (2) mistaken choice of evil under the appearance of good. In either case the action would seem, according to the account given of it by both these thinkers, to be “necessitated" —as Plato expressly says-by causes antecedent in time to the bad volition. It is true that Plato gives himself much pains to eliminate this necessitation from the ultimate causation of vice; in semi-fanciful or semi-popular expressions of his view-as in the fable at the close of the Republic and in the Laws-he affirms emphatically that each individual soul has full responsibility for its vicious conduct: but in his more scientific analysis of human action it is always presented as due either to Reason determined by the prospect of good, or to Passion or Appetite in blind or disorderly opposition to Reason; the inadequate control of reason in the latter case being completely explained by the original composition of the disordered soul and the external influences that have moulded its development.1 Similarly the "voluntariness" which Aristotle attributes to the acts of a vicious man does not exclude complete determination of them, from moment to moment, by formed character and present external influences; and hence does not really amount to "free agency"

1 It ought to be added that the inconsistency which I find in Plato's doctrine of the origin of bad volition belongs only to the ethical side of the doctrine and not to its theological side. There is no similar difficulty in accepting the view that the pure being of eternal universal Thought, which Plato-and Aristotle after him-identifies with Divine Being, can neither contain evil nor cause it; and that, therefore, evil originates wholly in the inevitable conditions of concrete sensible existence. What I contend is merely that Plato cannot consistently regard evil as originating in any individual soul.

§ 13. Transi

tion to Stoicism,

in the modern philosophical sense. At any given time Aristotle's vicious man, so far as he acts from deliberate purpose, must aim at what then appears to him good; and however misleading this appearance may be, he has no control over it. We may admit, as Aristotle urges, that it is his previous bad conduct which has caused evil to seem good to him: but this argument only seems strong until we fix our attention on that previous bad conduct and investigate its causation. For this conduct, on Aristotle's view, must (if purposed) have been equally directed towards an end apparently though not really good: and this appearance must again be attributed to still earlier wrongdoing: so that the freedom of will recedes like a mirage as we trace back the chain of purposed actions to its beginnings, and cannot be made to rest anywhere. If it be said, as Aristotle probably would say, that in its beginnings vice is merely impulsive, and that it only gradually becomes deliberate as bad habits are formed, it is still more easy to show that Aristotle's psychology provides no philosophical justification for fixing finally on the agent the responsibility for impulsive bad acts: for when he comes to analyse the state of mind in which such acts are done in spite of the knowledge that they are bad, his explanation is that the knowledge at such moments is not really actualised in the mind; it is reduced by appetite or passion to a condition of latency.

On the whole, there is probably no treatise so masterly as Aristotle's Ethics, and containing so much close and valid thought, that yet leaves on the reader's mind so strong an impression of dispersive and incomplete work. I note this that we may better understand the small amount of influence that his system exercised during the five centuries