115. HUMAN NATURE AS ACCEPTED STANDARD.--The three doctrines, that the norm of moral action is to follow nature, that it is to aim at the attainment of perfection, and that it is the realization of one's capabilities, have much in common. They may conveniently be treated in the same chapter. Early in the history of the ethics we find the moralist preaching that it is the duty of man to follow nature, and branding vice as unnatural and, hence, to be abhorred. The word "nature," thus used, has had a fluctuating meaning. Sometimes the thought has been predominantly of human nature, and sometimes the appeal has been to nature in a wider sense. Aristotle, who finds the "good" of man in happiness or "well-being," points out that this is something relative to man's nature. The well- being of a man he conceives as, in large part, "well-doing," and well- doing he defines as performing the proper functions of a man. [Footnote: _Nichomachean Ethics_, Book I, chapters iv, vii, viii.] If we ask him what is proper or natural to man, he refers us to what man, when fully developed, becomes: "What every being is in its completed state, that certainly is the nature of that thing, whether it be a man, a house, or a horse." [Footnote: _Politics_, i, 2.] He conceives man's nature, thus, as that which it is in man to become. Toward this end man strives; and it is this which furnishes him with the law of his action. But, it may be asked, how shall this end be defined in detail? Individual men, who arrive at mature years, are by no means alike. Some we approve; some we disapprove. We evidently appeal to a standard by which the individual is judged. The appeal to the nature of man helps us little unless we can agree upon what we may accept as a just revelation of that nature--a pattern of some sort, divergence from which may be called unnatural, and is to be reprobated. Neither Aristotle, nor those who, after him, took human nature as the moral norm, were without some conception of such a pattern. They kept in view certain things that men may become rather than certain others. They accepted as their standard a type of human nature which tends, on the whole, to realize itself more and more in the course of development of human communities. But as different human societies differ more or less in the characteristics which they tend to transmit to their members, in the kind of man whom they tend to form, we find the ideal of human nature, with which we are presented, somewhat vague and fluctuating. Different traits are dwelt upon by different moralists. Still, the appeals to human nature have a good deal in common; upon man's rational and social qualities especial stress is apt to be laid.