When he has to ask the decisive question as to what make activity moral, he shrinks from discussing the problem of the basic principle of the moral. Ethics are not some sort of knowledge which gives a content to activity, he says in opposition to Socrates. The content of the will is already given. No reflexion and no knowledge can put anything new into it, or alter it. Ethics consist, then, not in a guiding of the will by aims and objects which knowledge puts before it, but in the will’s [pg 044] own regulation of itself. The right thing to do is to establish the correct balance between the different elements in the given contents of the will. Left to itself, the latter rushes to extremes. Rational reflexion keeps it in the correct middle path. Thus brought to a state of harmony, human activity can be conceived as motived and ethical. Virtue, therefore, is readiness to observe the correct mean which is to be acquired by practice. Instead of creating an ethic, Aristotle contents himself with a doctrine of virtue. This depreciation of the ethical is the price he pays in order to reach an ethic which ends neither in the abstract nor in resignation. While he shirks the problem of the basic principle of the moral, he still remains able to establish an ethic of activity, though the latter contains indeed no live forces, only dead ones. Aristotle’s ethic is therefore an æsthetic of the impulses of the will. It consists in a catalogue of virtues and in the demonstration that they are to be conceived as a mean. Thus courage lies between rashness and cowardice, temperance between sensuality and insensibility, truthfulness between boastfulness and irony,_(_7_)_ liberality between prodigality and avarice, high-mindedness between conceit and small-mindedness, gentleness between quarrelsomeness and characterless good-nature. On this excursion through the field of the ethical, there open up many interesting views. In an acute and living discussion Aristotle lets his readers survey the questions of the relations of man to his fellow-men and to society. How much that is deep and true there is in the chapter on moral excellence and in that on friendship! How he wrestles with the problem of justice! No one can fail to feel the charm of the _Nicomachean Ethics_. There is revealed in them a noble personality with abundant experience of life, depicted with a magnificent simplicity. But just in proportion as the method followed [pg 045] is advantageous technically, it is valueless in itself. The ethical is reconciled with reality without having first tried to come to clear understanding of itself. It is in this reconciliation that the understanding is to be found, so Aristotle thinks, but he is mistaken. His mind is seduced through his having observed that some virtues—but even these more or less under compulsion—allow themselves to be conceived as real means between two extremes, and he is misled into developing on these lines the whole of his ethical system.