Before attempting to set forth in its great salient points the ethical system of Aristotle, it will be at once interesting and useful to sketch shortly the leading events of his life, omitting altogether, as a matter of course, those hundred and one points of uncertain report and slippery slander which are wont to attach themselves to the fame of any great man as to a natural nucleus. And when a man like Aristotle is not only a great man according to the common measure of human greatness, but an altogether extraordinary man, it is as natural that he should be spoken against from all sides as that dogs should bark at a stranger. The epiphany of an intellectual giant in any assembly of men of average talent makes those appear dwarfs who had previously, not without reason, accounted themselves of reputable stature; and as no man likes to be dwarfed, the necessary result of such an apparition is to set men’s wits agog to find out cunning devices, whereby the overwhelming stature of the huge intruder may seem to be curtailed. So Aristotle, we are told, had “a whole host of enemies;” and we shall therefore, as just judges, be justified in throwing out of court, as vitiated in its source, the greater part of the merely anecdotal {134} accretions that cling to the name of the mighty Stagirite. The adjuncts of high social position and freedom from pecuniary pressure, always advantageous to wise men, hurtful only to fools, Aristotle enjoyed in a remarkable degree. Born 384 B.C. in a Greek town, but under Macedonian influence, his father, who belonged to an old Asclepiad family, as court physician to King Amyntas, had ample opportunities of launching him into the world with all the training, equipment, and supports that are the natural harbingers of a prosperous career. He was not therefore a Greek in the strict sense of the word; and, though he borrowed his language and culture from Attica, and sympathized mainly with popular institutions, as his great work on Politics shows, he had good reason to congratulate himself that he did not lose his original citizenship when the eloquence of Demosthenes thundered in vain against the gold and the iron of the Macedonian. In the period of Aristotle’s youth there was nothing in Greece proper to make any thoughtful person lament that he had been born a subject of a sturdy and semi-barbarous but rising monarchy, rather than a citizen of an exhausted and decaying democracy; for though the victories of Chabrias had restored in some sort the supremacy of the Athenians at sea, the brilliant career of Epaminondas had elevated Thebes for a moment only to make general Greece more divided and less able to resist the growing power of Macedonia. Whether his father had destined him to follow his own profession is uncertain; there are however in the _Ethics_, and elsewhere in his works, frequent allusions to the medical art, such as might have been expected from {135} the associations of his parentage; and the