the criterion? Is any better than experience and wisdom and reason? There cannot be a better, he said. If wealth and gain were the criterion, then what the lover of gain praised and blamed would surely be the truest? Assuredly. Of if honor or victory or courage, in that case the ambitions or contentments would decide best? Clearly. But since experience and wisdom and reason are the judges, the inference of course is, that the truest pleasures are those which are approved by the lover of wisdom and reason."[77] It is thus evident that even if we start out to find the good in pleasure, we need some kind of measuring art. We need a "standard for pleasure," and this standard can be found only in wisdom. And this forces us to maintain that wisdom is after all _the_ good. Not merely intellectual attainment--a life of intellect without feeling would be just as little a true human life as would the life of an oyster, which has feeling with no intelligence. A life which includes sciences and arts, and the pure pleasures of beauty, presided over by wisdom and measure and symmetry,--this is Plato's vision of the life of the individual, viewed from within. =Eudaemonism.=--Aristotle's conception of the good is fundamentally the same. It is a full development of man's capacities, culminating in a rational and harmonious life. If, says Aristotle, we are to find the ultimate good, we must try to find, if possible, some one end which is pursued as an end in itself, and never as a means to something else, and the most general term for this final end is "eudaimonia," or well-being, "for we also choose it for itself and never for the sake of something else." What is the essence of well-being? This, according to Aristotle, is to be found by asking what is the function of man. The life of nutrition and growth man has in common with the plants; the life of sense in common with the animal. It is in the life of his rational nature that we must find his especial function. "The good of man is exercise of his faculties in accordance with their appropriate excellence." External goods are valuable because they may be instruments toward such full activity. Pleasure is to be valued because it "perfects the activities, and therefore perfects life, which is the aim of human desire"--rather than valued as an end in itself. No one would choose to live on condition of having a child's intellect all his life, though he were to enjoy in the highest possible degree all the pleasures of a child.[78]