THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
Aristotle's ethics is a branch of his logic: the ideal life is like a proper
syllogism. He gives us a handbook of propriety rather than a stimulus to
improvement. An ancient critic spoke of him as "moderate to excess."
An extremist might call the Ethics the champion collection of platitudes
in all literature; and an Anglophobe would be consoled with the thought
that Englishmen in their youth had done advance penance for the imperialistic
sins of their adult years, since both at Cambridge and at Oxford
they had been compelled to read every word of the Nicomachean Ethics.
We long to mingle fresh green Leaves of Grass with these drier pages,
to add Whitman's exhilarating justification of sense joy to Aristotle's ex-
altation of a purely intellectual happiness. We wonder if this Aristotelian
ideal of immoderate moderation has had anything to do with the color-
less virtue, the starched perfection, the expressionless good form, of the
British aristocracy. Matthew Arnold tells us that in his time Oxford tutors
this book
looked upon the Ethics as infallible. For three hundred years
and the Politics have formed the ruling British rnind, perhaps to great
and noble achievements, but certainly to a hard and cold efficiency. What
would the result have been if the masters of the greatest of empires had
been nurtured, instead, on the holy fervor and the constructive passion of
the Republic?
After all, Aristotle was not quite Greek; he had been settled and
formed before coming to Athens; there was nothing Athenian about him,
nothing of the hasty and inspiriting experimentalism which made Athens
throb with political elan and at last helped to subject her to a unifying
despot. He realized too completely the Delphic command to avoid excess:
he is so anxious to pare away extremes that at last nothing is left. He
is so fearful of disorder that he forgets to be fearful of slavery; he is so
timid of uncertain change that he prefers a certain changelessness that
near resembles death. He lacks that Heraclitean sense of flux which
justifies the conservative in believing that all permanent change is gradual,
and justifies the radical in believing that no changelessness is permanent.
He forgets that Plato's communism was meant only for the elite,
the unselfish and ungreedy few; and he comes deviously to a Platonic
result when he says that though property should be private, its use should
be as far as possible common. He does not see (and perhaps he could not
be expected in his early day to see) that individual control of the means
of production was stimulating and salutary only when these means were
so simple as to be purchasable by any man; and that their increasing
complexity and cost lead to a dangerous centralization of ownership and
power, and to an artificial and finally disruptive inequality.
But after all, these are quite inessential criticisms of what remains
the most marvelous and influential system of thought ever put together
by any single mind. It may be doubted if any other thinker has contributed
so much to the enlightenment of the world. Every later age has