2

without that it does not result from mere physical generation in the way that the faculties for sustaining life—the ʊxn OрETTIKη-may be said to do'. No doubt as so introduced into the mind this creative reason is only a dúvapis: but the first key to understanding Aristotle is to know that durauis and évépyeta are relative terms: and that what is an évépyeta from one aspect may be a dúvaμis from another. And thus Aristotle may perfectly well say that the different forms of soul must exist in man potentially before they do so in actuality and yet hold that it is in potential form that reason as an actual or rather an actualizing faculty is present originally in man. Such a view at least is perfectly consistent with the view of reason as a creative faculty which has been here set forth. For the creative reason is just, we have seen, the source of those general forms or categories by which a world of sense becomes a world for intellect. But of course such categories are, to start with, only implicit in experience, they are mere potential forms which can be applied to experience: and the ypaμμareîov of the human mind is at first destitute of anything but the forms themselves which, as they first exist in the mind, are indeed potentially all things-able to explain and interpret all the sensations which things can convey-but actually nothing; devoid of any particular content until experience provide them with it.

XII. THE WILL AND PRACTICAL REASON.

The analysis of man as a cognitive and intellectual being is followed immediately in Aristotle by the account of him as an active and conative being: and the theory of knowing determines directly his theory of acting. It might have been expected that

1 De Gen. An. II. 3, 736 17, λείπεται δὲ τὸν νοῦν μόνον θύραθεν ἐπεισιέναι καὶ θεῖον εἶναι μόνον· οὐθὲν γὰρ αὐτοῦ τῇ ἐνεργείᾳ κοινωνεῖ σωματικὴ ἐνέργεια.

2 Ibid. 73615.

an intermediate stage would have been discussed, and that before proceeding to analyze man as an active being he would have treated him as emotional. But neither in the Psychology nor in the Ethics does Aristotle give us any account of the feelings as such. It is the powers and faculties not the susceptibilities of man with which he is occupied and among such Svváμeis no place is left for the Táon or emotions. At the beginning indeed of the treatise, these feelings had excited considerable interest in Aristotle: their semi-bodily character had seemed to him to suggest some of the most difficult questions which he would have to discuss. The feelings he saw were always materialized notions (λóyoi évvλoi) and could only be described correctly when explained not merely from the standpoint of the physicist or physiologist, but also from that of the dialectician or metaphysician. But the conception of soul as a first entelechy or perfect realization left, it would seem, no opportunity for treating of the feelings. Man is an emotional being simply in so far as he is a sensitive or perceptive being1: and there is no definite phase of life which we can speak of as having a pathetic or emotional soul.

It is to the Rhetoric and Ethics that we must go if we would find out what little Aristotle has said on the subject of the feelings. Even in these treatises what we find is not any systematic exposition of the feelings but simply a description of some aspects of them. What we have in the Rhetoric is a popular delineation of some of the more obvious feelings to which we are subject: the Ethics gives us an analysis of the universal concomitants of all feelings. These concomitants are pleasure and pain feelings in fact are just the states which are followed by pleasure and pain. And of pleasure and pain Plato had given a more than usually exhaustive account. Pleasure, he had explained, arose from the npwois, the filling up and satis

1 Ι. 2, 41323, ὅπου μὲν γὰρ αἴσθησις, καὶ λύπη τε καὶ ἡδονή, ὅπου δὲ ταῦτα, ἐξ ἀνάγκης καὶ ἐπιθυμία.

2 Eth. Nic. II. 4, 115 21, λέγω δὲ πάθη μὲν ἐπιθυμίαν, ὀργήν, φόβον, θράσος, φθόνον, χαράν, φιλίαν, μῖσος, πόθον, ζῆλον, ἔλεον, ὅλως οἷς ἔπεται ἡδονὴ ἢ λύπη.

faction of a preceding state of deficiency; pain on the other hand was just the sense of want and deficiency, evdeta. And though the explanation was suggested by and referred directly to the bodily pleasures it was still held by its author to apply also to the higher pleasures as similarly the answer to a sense of want which was waiting to be replenished by intellectual nourishPleasure accordingly was always a yéveois, a process towards the normal condition of a subject, and therefore as such never in itself an end. And the theory had consequently received a moral application as shewing, by the absence of finality from pleasure, that pleasure, taken by itself, could not be the end of life. It is similarly from a moral point of view that Aristotle analyses pleasure; and his immediate object is to shew that the argument which maintains that pleasure cannot be the summum bonum, because of its being a mere process towards an end, is unsatisfactory. Rather, he maintains, pleasure is an évépyela it arises from the free play, the unimpeded, unthwarted operation of our faculties: it results from the contact of a perfectly acting organ with an appropriate object just as pain is on the contrary the result of thwarted constrained action on the part of either a sensitive or intellectual faculty1.

Of such pleasure and pain the importance in the economy of man's nature is that it is just through them that man passes from the state of a merely cognitive and intellectual and begins to be a moral and active being: "it is when the sense perceives something as pleasant or painful that the mind affirms or denies it-that it pursues it or avoids it." Aristotle in fact is fond

1 Eth. Nic. VII. 12, 1153 13, διὸ καὶ οὐ καλῶς ἔχει τὸ αἰσθητὴν γένεσιν φάναι εἶναι τὴν ἡδονήν, ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον λεκτέον ἐνέργειαν τῆς κατὰ φύσιν ἕξεως, ἀντὶ δὲ τοῦ αἰσθητὴν ἀνεμπόδιστον. Cp. Eth. Nic. Χ. 4, 1174 20: κατὰ πᾶσαν αἴσθησίν ἐστιν ἡδονή, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ διάνοιαν καὶ θεωρίαν, ἡδίστη δ ̓ ἡ τελειοτάτη, τελειοτάτη δ ̓ ἡ τοῦ εὖ ἔχοντος πρὸς τὸ σπουδαιότατον τῶν ὑφ ̓ αὐτήν. The Rhetoric contents itself with the popular theory criticised in the Ethics, v. Rhet. 1. 11, 1369b33: vπokeio0w d' yμîv eivai tǹv ýdovýv κίνησίν τινα τῆς ψυχῆς καὶ κατάστασιν ἀθρόαν καὶ αἰσθητὴν εἰς τὴν ὑπάρχουσαν φύσιν, λύπην δὲ τοὐναντίον.

2 ΙΙΙ. 7, 2, 4318, τὸ μὲν οὖν αἰσθάνεσθαι ὅμοιον τῷ φάναι μόνον καὶ νοεῖν· ὅταν δὲ ἡδὺ ἢ λυπηρόν, οἷον καταφᾶσα ἢ ἀποφᾶσα διώκει ἢ φεύγει.

of pointing out the correspondence between the practical and the speculative side of human nature. What is in the speculative intellectual sphere truth and error, is in the moral and practical good and evil: what is in the one affirmation and negation is in the other pursuit and avoidance'. Pleasure and pain in fact form distinctively the field of Ethics: and the especial weakness in Socrates' intellectual apprehension of Ethics is just the fact that he left no room for the effect of the man in influencing conduct?.

But while our feelings of pleasure and pain are thus the phenomena on which our moral and active life reposes, they do not enter into our life as mere feelings, as mere natural tendencies or unformed susceptibilities. The same constructive work, as intellectually translates a mere sensitive impression into a real object of cognition, displays itself also in building up the motives which ultimately constitute our wills, and the practical reason is shortly nothing but the intellectual reason applied to explain and create action. The sensuous images of pavraola which suggest our action are really little else than mere sensations; it is only when the mind proceeds to view them as good or evil that it pursues or avoids them. Thus the sensitive or emotional capacities of our nature are but the material substratum, the λn of our moral experience. To construct a moral world we must translate the sensitive into the rational, the phenomenal into the real, just as we require to do in order to build up an intelligible world; we must think the materials which sense supplies and discover in them the general forms or ideal truths which underlie them*. And though the practical reason never carries on its work without the help of images of sense, these images themselves are no

1 Eth. vi. 2, 113921, ἔστι δ ̓ ὅπερ ἐν διανοίᾳ κατάφασις καὶ ἀπόφασις, τοῦτ' ἐν ὀρέξει δίωξις καὶ φυγή.

* Mag. Mor. 118222, συμβαίνει οὖν αὐτῷ ἐπιστήμας ποιοῦντι τὰς ἀρετὰς ἀναιρεῖν τὸ ἄλογον μέρος τῆς ψυχῆς, τοῦτο δὲ ποιῶν ἀναιρεῖ καὶ πάθος καὶ ἦθος.

8 ΙΙΙ. 7, 431 14, τῇ δὲ διανοητικῇ ψυχῇ τὰ φαντάσματα οἷον αἰσθήματα υπάρχει

ὅταν δὲ ἀγαθὸν ἡ κακὸν φήσῃ ἢ ἀποφήσῃ φεύγει ἡ διώκει.

4

* 43152, τὰ μὲν οὖν εἴδη τὸ νοητικὸν ἐν τοῖς φαντάσμασι νοεῖ.

more the practical reason itself than the air which forms the medium and condition of eyesight constitutes the pupil'.

The motive or conative aspect of the soul thus includes two main factors which require to act in unison in order that action may result. And thus a dúvapis like this conative power just shews the weakness of a system of mental faculties. One element which enters into it belongs to the sphere of the rational, another falls within the limits of the irrational'. The real truth is that desire and reason must co-operate in order that a moral conclusion may be carried into effect: in the language of the Ethics, moral choice or poaípeois may be described as either νοὺς ὀρεκτικὸς reason stimulated by desire, or ὄρεξις διανοητικὴ desire guided by understanding3.

This conception of the will, or (if the term be disapproved) the origin of moral decision is explained for us by what Aristotle tells us in the Psychology itself about the springs of action. The spring of action cannot, he there shews at length, be found either in mere animal processes of vegetation and nutrition which contain no conception of an end at which they aim, or in the faculties of sense which often exist without the concomitant of any tendency to spontaneous action, or even in the purely cognitive reason which is as such impotent to produce any effect upon the feelings or even to counteract their influence'. And here the Ethics itself comes in in turn to expand and interpret these remarks. The merely logical understanding, says the writer in the sixth book, never leads to action". But if reason as reasoning be thus powerless to influence and shape the will, as little can mere animal appetite produce this end. For appetite is merely affected by what is pleasant and painful—and

1 431 17, ὥσπερ ὁ ἀὴρ τὴν κόρην τοιανδὶ ἐποίησεν, αὐτὴ δ ̓ ἕτερον.

2 III. 9, 432b5.

3 Eth. Nic. VI. 2.

4 De An. III. 9, 43226, ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐδὲ τὸ λογιστικὸν καὶ ὁ καλούμενος νοῦς ἐστὶν ὁ κινῶν· ὁ μὲν γὰρ θεωρητικὸς οὐθὲν νοεῖ πρακτόν ἀλλ ̓ οὐδ ̓ ὅταν θεωρῇ τι τοιοῦτον, ἤδη κελεύει φεύγειν ἢ διώκειν, οἷον πολλάκις διανοεῖται φοβερόν τι ἢ ἡδύ, οὐ κελεύει δὲ φοβεῖσθαι.

5 Eth. Nic. VI. 2, 1139*35.