MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON BOMBAY · CALCUTTA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO, OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO OF ARISTOTLE TRANSLATED WITH AN ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL NOTES BY J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D. CANON OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1908 A PREFACE. FTER an interval of four mitted me to follow up my translations of the Politics and Rhetoric of Aristotle with a translation of his Nicomachean Ethics. I have had a good deal of work to do in those four years at Harrow and elsewhere, and it is, I fear, only too likely that the translation will exhibit some traces of the broken manner in which it has been written. But it has been a help to me in teaching my pupils the art of translation to be myself a translator, and the pleasure of entering into the mind of Aristotle, as none but a translator of his writings can, is a sufficient reward for the pains which it is necessary to take in translating them. It hardly falls within the province of a translator to give his reasons for the view which he takes of particular passages. But if I feel some confidence that in adopting my own view I have not ignored the views of others who it is in part at least have before me, gone W. N. E. because I have had the good fortune of submitting my proof-sheets as they were passing through the press to the careful and thoughtful criticism of my friend Mr A. H. Cruickshank, one of my colleagues at Harrow, and Fellow of New College, Oxford, to whom I owe, and desire to express, my sincere thanks. In translating the Nicomachean Ethics I have, I think, made use of all the recent editions and commentaries (they are not very numerous), though Mr Bywater's latest contributions to the study of Aristotle were not within my reach during the earlier portion of my work. It is perhaps right to say that I refrained from consulting such translations as had already been published in England until I had finished my own independently; but in revising it I have not scrupled to refer to them and occasionally to borrow a hint from them. Thus to Mr Williams and to Mr Peters, different as their translations are, I am alike indebted. Perhaps the object which I have chiefly kept in view has been to make each sentence of my translation as clear as possible; the rendering may be wrong or right in various passages, but at least I hope it is intelligible. It may be well to add that |