character as a preliminary condition of goodness of intellect or judgment in moral matters. Finally, if we ask by _what_ rule the mean is determined, the answer will be that the rule is the judgment of the legislator who determines what is the right mean by his knowledge of the conditions on which the well-being of the community depends. He then embodies his insight in the laws which he makes and the regulations he imposes on the educators of youth. The final aim of education in goodness is to make our immediate judgment as to what is right coincide with the spirit of a wise legislation. The introduction of the reference to will or choice into the definition of goodness of character leads Aristotle to consider the relation of will to conduct. His main object is to escape the paradoxical doctrine which superficial students might derive from the works of Plato, that wrong-doing is always well-meaning ignorance. Aristotle’s point is that it is the condition of will revealed by men’s acts which is the real object of our approval or blame. This is because in voluntary action the man himself is the efficient cause of his act. Hence the law recognises only two grounds on which a man may plead, that he is not answerable for what he does. (1) Actual physical compulsion by _force majeure_. (2) Ignorance, not due to the man’s own previous negligence, of some circumstances material to the issue. When either of these pleas can be made with truth the man does not really contribute by his choice to the resulting act, and therefore is not really its cause. But a plea of ignorance of the general laws of morality does not excuse. I cannot escape responsibility for a murder by pleading that I did not know that murder is wrong. Such a plea does not exempt me from having been the cause of the murder; it only shows that my moral principles are depraved. More precisely will is a process which has both an intellectual and an appetitive element. The appetitive element is our wish for some result. The intellectual factor is the calculation of the steps by which that result may be obtained. When we wish for the result we begin to consider how it might be brought about, and we continue our analysis until we find that the chain of conditions requisite may be started by the performance of some act now in our power to do. Will may thus be defined as the deliberate appetition of something within our power, and the very definition shows that our choice is an efficient cause of the acts we choose to do. This is why we rightly regard men as responsible or answerable for their acts of choice, good and bad alike.