attention of a crowd of listeners may be secured without fatiguing them, and conclusions be most concisely suggested. He points out the use to an orator of political and historical facts, and of travellers' notes. Premising that men are actuated in deliberation by the idea of happiness, he specifies thirty different grounds on which a thing might be recommended as good, and forty others as comparatively good. Virtue, and a sense of what is honourable, he says, must also be clearly comprehended; and, for accusation or defence, he dilates on the motives of human action,—the most prominent of which are things pleasurable,—the moods in which men commit injustice, the distinctions between different kinds of law and right, degrees of guilt, and the modes of dealing with documents and witnesses. equity, he teaches, to look to the spirit and not to the letter of the law, to the intent rather than the action, to the whole and not to the part, and to prefer arbitration to judgment. His definitions of the human passions and dispositions are most original and elaborate; he thinks benevolent feelings are natural, and that the majority of mankind are rather weak than wicked. The body, he says, is in its prime from the age of thirty to thirty-five, and the mind about the age of forty-nine. His remarks on style and arrangement are more applicable to students of his own time than to modern readers. He gives some shrewd advice, however, and quotes with approval the maxim that when your adversary is earnest, you should silence him with ridicule, and when he tries ridicule, he should be silenced with earnestness.

It is

His next treatise on the Art of Poetry' is very interesting, but he does not take the modern or romantic view of it. He defines it simply as one of the imitative arts, but admits the idea of some creativeness in the poet. In describing Comedy he gives his celebrated definition of the 'ludicrous,' namely, some fault or blemish not suggesting the idea of pain or death; as, for instance, an ugly twisted face is ludicrous, if there is no idea that the owner of it is in pain. In his account of Tragedy, he calls it the imitation of some noble action, great and complete in itself, in melodious diction, with different measures to suit different parts, by men acting and not by narration, effecting through pity and

fear the purging of such feelings. He also says respecting it that the element of undeserved calamity is needed, combined with justice, as in the case of Edipus; and that, in common with every other work of art, it must have internal unity, which consists in making every part bear an organic relation to the whole, so that no portion could be altered or omitted without the whole suffering. He deprecates episodes to suit particular actors, and considers that spectacle is carried too far. His remarks on Epic poetry are brief; he holds it to be of less importance than tragedy, but more philosophical and more earnest than history.

Having expounded the reasonings by which knowledge is obtained, and how it may be best set forth, Aristotle, in his treatise on Ethics,' or Morals, deals with the theory of human life, or what is the supreme good aimed at by human actions. At first he implies that the aims of the individual and of the State are identical; but, as be proceeds, he perceives that each citizen has needs and virtues of his own, and thus he establishes the separation of the science of Ethics from that of Politics. Happiness, he says, must be an end in itself, and must lie within the proper function of man, whose highest endowment is speculative reason, and whose truest happiness consists in philosophic thought. Such a life, however, would be superhuman, but still we should aim at it, and strive to live up to that divine particle within us which is man's proper self. Next to this is virtue, which may be moral or intellectual. The former he defines as a state of the will, distinct from reason, and he argues that as practice in the arts makes perfect, so by doing just things a man becomes just; and thus actions generally, having a tendency to repeat themselves, produce habits or states of the will. In his doctrine that it is the characteristic of virtue to preserve 'the mean,' he merely formulated the earlier conception of moderation, excess in any shape having always been despised by the Greeks as unintellectual and barbarous. Adopting Plato's ideas on the subject, he tabulates the virtues, and shows that each is a mean between two extremes; courage, for example, lying between cowardice and rashness. The sense of moral beauty, he says, is inherent in human nature, but it only exists in perfection in the mind

of the wise man, after cultivation by experience, for virtue is more nice and delicate than the finest of the fine arts. Thus a brave man, who consciously meets death in a good cause, and sacrifices a happy life full of objects which he holds dear, attains the beautiful,' or moral perfection. Aristotle, however, separates Ethics from religion, and defines Wisdom as an excellence of the intellect, and Justice as dependent on the institutions of the State. Temperance he says consists in preserving a balance in regard to the pleasures of sense, and he prefers liberality to parsimony. Magnanimity he describes as loftiness of soul, which disdains trifles, and cares more for what is beautiful than what is profitable. movements of such a man, he adds, are slow, his voice deep, and his diction stately. The minor excellencies in the list are, to be mild without being spiritless, and friendly without servility; to have a simple manner without assumption or humility; and to be witty without buffoonery.

The

The subject-matter of the next three books of the Ethics was no doubt expounded by Aristotle, but probably not actually written by him. In the theory of Justice the most interesting points are those on the nature of money, on value, and on price. With regard to intellectual excellences, we are told that Wisdom is the culmination of philosophic reason, and Thought the perfection of practical reason. A discussion follows on the intermediate states between virtue and vice, especially the incontinence or weakness exhibited in yielding to temptation; and the idea is introduced of a mind without conscience or remorse, wholly in harmony with the dictates of vice.

The doctrine of Friendship is dealt with in Aristotle's own language again. He does not sympathise with 'Platonic love,' or passionate attachments between persons of the same sex; but he asserts the glow of the heart caused by contemplating the actions of a virtuous friend, without which no one can be called truly happy. What a friend really does for you, he says, is-by the joint operation of sympathy and contrast, of identity and yet diversity-to intensify the sense of your personal existence, and to give you that vividness of vitality on which happiness depends. The only other matter of any importance treated of in the Ethics is Pleasure,

which Aristotle shows is not the sense of what promotes life, but the sense of life itself, the sense that any faculty whatsoever has met its proper object. Therefore, pleasure must in itself be a good; but for anything to be good it must be an end-in-itself, or something desirable for its own sake something thoroughly worthy, in which the mind can rest satisfied; and thus all mere amusements are excluded from being good.

In his Politics' Aristotle treats of the Family as a constituent element in the State; and, after criticising previous theories and some actual constitutions, he gives his own conceptions of an Ideal State, and concludes with some suggestions on practical statesmanship. He makes use of a rich repertory of historical facts, as well as of his researches into the customs of barbarous tribes; but he is somewhat illogical in his appeals to nature. He argues, for instance, that a family naturally consists of man, wife, child, and slave; that slavery is a necessary institution to provide citizens with leisure for intellectual pursuits; and that it is lawful to make war upon races intended by nature to be slaves, in order to reduce them to bondage. He also sneers at trade and traffic, although he allows that they must go on, and declares that lending at interest is the most unnatural of all forms of gain, because it diverts money from being a mere instrument of exchange, and forces it to breed. In discoursing of an Ideal State, he says it is quite possible for a state or community enjoying good laws, and knowing nothing of war or foreign relations, to be so isolated that it may engage in contemplations which do not aim at any external results, but brood over their own perfections, meaning that mental activities are the highest things of all. His more practical sketch of such a State is that it must be of limited size; that every full citizen should share in the government; that no artisan or tradesman should be a citizen; that the influx of strangers should not be encouraged; that the navy should be manned by slaves; that the city should slope towards the east; and that the discipline should be Spartan in its perfection. In the public schools everything should be taught with the view to culture rather than utility; in gymnastics a premature strain of the physical

powers should be carefully guarded against; and music should be cultivated because of its moral and educational influence, and its efficacy in purging the emotions. He defends the institution of property as natural, and says it makes an unspeakable difference in the enjoyment of a thing to feel that it is your own.

Turning from the ideal to the actual, he lays down a theory of the different forms of government, the causes which give rise to them, their respective merits and disadvantages, and the practical means for obviating the evils to which they are exposed;-sagely remarking that small things are never the cause, though they are often the occasion, of popular revolt. He shows how monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and a mixed government into democracy, with the peculiar jealousies which each is apt to create; and that the true cause of political stability consists in approaching the golden mean.

Aristotle next passed on to the speculative sciences, under the three heads of Natural Philosophy, Biology, and Metaphysics. He commences the first by inquiring into the nature of Existence, and solves the difficulties of previous philosophers on the subject by making a distinction between the possible and the actual. In everything that exists he traces three principles, the matter out of which it arose, the form or nature it possesses, and the negation of all other natures. Thus a thing is what it is by not being what it is not, and all existence has a negative as well as a positive side. The existence of nature, he says, is selfevident, as a principle of motion and rest inherent in things, and the origin of natural things must be attributed to design. He repudiates the notion that the heavens and the. divinest of visible things can have been the result of blind chance. The world, he contends, must have been eternal, for everything that is created comes into the actual out of the possible; an egg and seed being instances of the latter, and a fowl and a flower of the former. But as there must have been a fowl before there was an egg, and a flower before there was seed, so the actual must have always been first, and we cannot conceive that the world was ever non-existent. Beyond the universe he argued that there