CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOTELIAN SENSE OF PROPORTION

I

ARISTOTLE'S OBJECTIONS TO PREVIOUS SYSTEMS

OUR principles of personality thus far, though increasingly complex, have all been comparatively simple. To get the maximum of pleasure; to keep the universal law; to subordinate lower impulses to higher according to some fixed scale of value, are all principles which are easy to grasp and by no means difficult to apply. The fundamental trouble with them all is that they are Life is not the cut-and-dried affair which they presuppose. A man might have a lot of pleasure, and yet be contemptible. He might keep all the commandments, and yet be no better than a Pharisee. Even Plato's principle in actual practice has not always escaped the awful abyss of asceticism.

too easy.

In opposition to Epicurus Aristotle says, "Pleasure is not the good and all pleasures are not desirable. No one would choose to live on condition

of having no more intellect than a child all his life, even though he were to enjoy to the full the pleasures of a child. With regard to the pleasures which all admit to be base, we must deny that they are pleasures at all, except to those whose nature is corrupt. What the good man thinks is pleasure will be pleasure; what he delights in will be truly pleasant. Those pleasures which perfect the activity of the perfect and truly happy man may be called in the truest sense the pleasures of a man. The pleasure which is proper to a good activity is therefore good; that attached to a bad one is bad. As, then, activities differ, so do the pleasures which accompany them."

In our discussion of Epicureanism we saw that the principle of pleasure consistently carried out produced bad results, and, as in the case of Tito Melema, developed the most contemptible character. Aristotle shows conclusively why this must be so. Pleasure is the sign and seal of healthful exercise of function. A life which has all its powers in effective and well-proportioned exercise will, indeed, be a life crowned with pleasure. You cannot, however, reverse this proposition, as the Epicurean attempts to do, and say that a life which seeks the maximum of pleasure will inevitably have the healthy and proportionate exercise of function as

its consequent. According to Aristotle healthy exercise of function in a well-proportioned life in devotion to wide social ends and permanent personal interests, is the cause of which happiness is the appropriate and inevitable effect. Seek the cause and you will get the effect. Seek directly the effect, and you will miss both the cause you neglect and the effect which only the cause can bring. The criticism which we quoted from George Eliot on the career of Melema is the quintessence of the Aristotelian doctrine. To put it in a figure: Build a good fire and warm your room, and the mercury in the thermometer will rise. The cause produces the effect But it does not follow that because you raise the mercury in the thermometer by breathing on the bulb, or holding it in your hand, that the fire will burn, or the room will be warmed. The Epicureans and hedonists are people who go about with the clinical thermometer of pleasure under their tongues all the time, and expect to see the world lighted with benevolence and warmed with love in consequence. Aristotle bids them take their clinical thermometers out of their mouths; stop fingering their emotional pulse; go to work about some useful business; pursue some large and generous end; and then, not otherwise, in case from time to time they have occa

sion to feel their pulse and take their temperature, they will as a matter of fact find that they are normal. But it isn't taking the temperature and feeling the pulse that makes them morally sound; it is doing their proper work and keeping in vigorous exercise that gives them the healthy pulse and normal temperature.

There are, however, two apparently contradictory teachings about pleasure in Aristotle, and it is a good test of our grasp of his doctrine to see whether we can reconcile them. First he says, "In all cases we must be especially on our guard against pleasant things, and against pleasure; for we can scarce judge her impartially. And so, in our behaviour toward her, we should imitate the behaviour of the old counsellors toward Helen, and in all cases repeat their saying: If we dismiss her, we shall be less likely to go wrong." "It is pleasure that moves us to do what is base, and pain that moves us to refrain from what is noble."

On the other hand he says: "The pleasure or pain that accompanies the acts must be taken as a test of character. He who faces danger with pleasure, or, at any rate, without pain, is courageous, but he to whom this is painful is a coward. Indeed we all more or less make pleasure our test in judging actions."

Can we reconcile these two seemingly contradictory statements? Perfectly. On the one hand if we do an act simply for the pleasure it will give, without first asking how the proposed act will fit into our permanent plan of life, we are pretty sure to go astray. For pleasure registers the goodness of the isolated act; not the goodness of the act as related to the whole plan of life. Thus if I drink strong coffee at eleven o'clock at night, the taste is pleasant and the immediate effect is stimulating. But if it keeps me awake half the night and unfits me for the duties of the next day, in spite of the pleasure gained, the act is wrong. And it is wrong, not fundamentally because of the pains of wakefulness it brings; it is wrong because it takes out of my life as a whole, and my contribution to the life of the world, something for which the petty transient pleasure I gained at the moment of indulgence is no compensation whatsoever. Is not Aristotle right? Do we not pity as a miserable weakling, hardly fit to have been graduated from the nursery, any man or woman who will let the mere physical sensation of a few moments at the end of an evening count so much as the dust in the balance against the efficiency of the coming forenoon's life and work?

If we see this half of Aristotle's truth, we see