1

the energizing entelechy of the whole. He is pure energy the Scholastic Actus Purus-activity per se; perhaps the mystic "Force" of modern physics and philosophy. He is not so much a person as a magnetic power.2

Yet, with his usual inconsistency, Aristotle represents God as self-conscious spirit. A rather mysterious spirit; for Aristotle's God never does anything; he has no desires, no will, no purpose; he is activity so pure that he never acts. He is absolutely perfect; therefore he cannot desire anything; therefore he does nothing. His only occupation is to contemplate the essence of things; and since he himself is the essence of all things, the form of all forms, his sole employment is the contemplation of himself. Poor Aristotelian God!-he is a roi fainéant, a do-nothing king; "the king reigns, but he does not rule." No wonder the British like Aristotle; his God is obviously copied from their king.

3

Or from Aristotle himself. Our philosopher so loved contemplation that he sacrificed to it his conception of divinity. His God is of the quiet Aristotelian type, nothing romantic, withdrawn to his ivory tower from the strife and stain of things; all the world away from the philosopher-kings of Plato, or from the stern flesh-and-blood reality of Yahveh, or the gentle and solicitous fatherhood of the Christian God.

VI. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE NATURE OF ART

Aristotle's psychology is marred with similar obscurity and vacillation. There are many interesting passages: the power of habit is emphasized, and is for the first time called "second nature"; and the laws of association, though not developed, find here a definite formulation. But both the crucial problems of philosophical psychology-the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul-are left in haze and doubt. Aristotle talks at times like a determinist- "We cannot di1 Ibid., xii, 8.

2 Grant, 173.

3 Meta. xii, 8; Ethics, x, 8.

rectly will to be different from what we are";

but he goes on

to argue, against determinism, that we can choose what we shall be, by choosing now the environment that shall mould us; so we are free in the sense that we mould our own characters by our choice of friends, books, occupations, and amusements.1 He does not anticipate the determinist's ready reply that these formative choices are themselves determined by our antecedent character, and this at last by unchosen heredity and early environment. He presses the point that our persistent use of praise and blame presupposes moral responsibility and free will; it does not occur to him that the determinist might reach from the same premisses a precisely opposite conclusion—that praise and blame are given that they may be part of the factors determining subsequent action.

Aristotle's theory of the soul begins with an interesting definition. The soul is the entire vital principle of any organism, the sum of its powers and processes. In plants the soul is merely a nutritive and reproductive power; in animals it is also a sensitive and locomotor power; in man it is as well the power of reason and thought. The soul, as the sum of the powers of the body, cannot exist without it; the two are as form and wax, separable only in thought, but in reality one organic whole; the soul is not put into the body like the quick-silver inserted by Daedalus into the images of Venus to make "stand-ups" of them. A personal and particular soul can exist only in its own body. Nevertheless the soul is not material, as Democritus would have it; nor does it all die. Part of the rational power of the human soul is passive: it is bound up with memory, and dies with the body that bore the memory; but the "active reason," the pure power of thought, is independent of memory and is untouched with decay. The active reason is the universal as distinguished from the individual element in man; what survives is not the personality, with its transitory affections and de

1 Ethics, iii, 7. 2 De Anima, ii.

sires, but mind in its most abstract and impersonal form.1 In short, Aristotle destroys the soul in order to give it immortality; the immortal soul is "pure thought," undefiled with reality, just as Aristotle's God is pure activity, undefiled with action. Let him who can, be comforted with this theology. One wonders sometimes whether this metaphysical eating of one's cake and keeping it is not Aristotle's subtle way of saving himself from anti-Macedonian hemlock?

In a safer field of psychology he writes more originally and to the point, and almost creates the study of esthetics, the theory of beauty and art. Artistic creation, says Aristotle, springs from the formative impulse and the craving for emotional expression. Essentially the form of art is an imitation of reality; it holds the mirror up to nature.2 There is in man a pleasure in imitation, apparently missing in lower animals. Yet the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not the external mannerism and detail, is their reality. There may be more human verity in the sternly classic moderation of the Edipus Rex than in all the realistic tears of the Trojan Women.

The noblest art appeals to the intellect as well as to the feelings (as a symphony appeals to us not only by its harmonies and sequences but by its structure and development); and this intellectual pleasure is the highest form of joy to which a man can rise. Hence a work of art should aim at form, and above all at unity, which is the backbone of structure and the focus of form. A drama, e. g., should have unity of action: there should be no confusing sub-plots, nor any digressive episodes. But above all, the function of art is catharsis, purification: emotions accumulated in us under the pressure of social restraints, and liable to sudden issue

1 De Amina, ii, 4; i, 4; iii, 5.

2 Poetics, i, 1447.

3 Aristotle gives only one sentence to unity of time; and does not mention unity of place; so that the "three unities" commonly foisted upon him are later inventions (Norwood, Greek Tragedy, p. 42, note).

in unsocial and destructive action, are touched off and sluiced away in the harmless form of theatrical excitement; so tragedy, "through pity and fear, effects the proper purgation of these emotions." 1 Aristotle misses certain features of tragedy (e. g., the conflict of principles and personalities); but in this theory of catharsis he has made a suggestion endlessly fertile in the understanding of the almost mystic power of art. It is an illuminating instance of his ability to enter every field of speculation, and to adorn whatever he touches.

VII. ETHICS AND THE NATURE OF HAPPINESS

And yet, as Aristotle developed, and young men crowded about him to be taught and formed, more and more his mind turned from the details of science to the larger and vaguer problems of conduct and character. It came to him more clearly that above all questions of the physical world there loomed the question of questions-what is the best life?— what is life's supreme good?-what is virtue?-how shall we find happiness and fulfilment?

He is realistically simple in his ethics. His scientific training keeps him from the preachment of superhuman ideals and empty counsels of perfection. "In Aristotle," says Santayana, "the conception of human nature is perfectly sound; every ideal has a natural basis, and everything natural has an ideal development." Aristotle begins by frankly recognizing that the aim of life is not goodness for its own sake, but happiness. "For we choose happiness for itself, and never with a view to anything further; whereas we choose honor, pleasure, intellect . . . because we believe that through them we shall be made happy." 2 But he realizes that to call happiness the supreme good is a mere truism; what is wanted is some clearer account of the nature of happiness, and the way to it. He hopes to find this way by asking wherein man 1 Poetics, vi, 1449.

2 Ethics, i, 7.

differs from other beings; and by presuming that man's happiness will lie in the full functioning of this specifically human quality. Now the peculiar excellence of man is his power of thought; it is by this that he surpasses and rules all other forms of life; and as the growth of this faculty has given him his supremacy, so, we may presume, its development will give him fulfilment and happiness.

The chief condition of happiness, then, barring certain physical pre-requisites, is the life of reason-the specific glory and power of man. Virtue, or rather excellence,1 will depend on clear judgment, self-control, symmetry of desire, artistry of means; it is not the possession of the simple man, nor the gift of innocent intent, but the achievement of experience in the fully developed man. Yet there is a road to it, a guide to excellence, which may save many detours and delays: it is the middle way, the golden mean. The qualities of character can be arranged in triads, in each of which the first and last qualities will be extremes and vices, and the middle quality a virtue or an excellence. So between cowardice and rashness is courage; between stinginess and extravagance is liberality; between sloth and greed is ambition; between humility and pride is modesty; between secrecy and loquacity, honesty; between moroseness and buffoonery, good humor; between quarrelsomeness and flattery, friendship; between Hamlet's indecisiveness and Quixote's impulsiveness is self-control.2 "Right," then, in ethics or conduct, is not different from "right" in mathematics or engineering; it means correct, fit, what works best to the best result.

The golden mean, however, is not, like the mathematical mean, an exact average of two precisely calculable extremes;

1 The word excellence is probably the fittest translation of the Greek arete, usually mistranslated virtue. The reader will avoid misunderstanding Plato and Aristotle if, where translators write virtue, he will substitute excellence, ability, or capacity. The Greek arete is the Roman virtus; both imply a masculine sort of excellence (Ares, god of war; vir, a male). Classical antiquity conceived virtue in terms of man, just as medieval Christianity conceived it in terms of woman.

2 Ethics, i, 7.