This statement taken almost literally from the first eight chapters of the first book of the _Ethics_, will, it is hoped, make the moral attitude of Aristotle {150} sufficiently intelligible. He does not say, with Bentham and the modern utilitarians, “Look round about you for what is pleasurable; and that which affords pleasure to you, and to the greatest possible number of creatures with whom you are socially connected, is your duty;” but he looks about to find your distinctive excellence, your peculiar faculty among all creatures,--“Exercise that,” he says, “and you fulfil your destiny, and attain your chief good. As for pleasure, that you will have also, not as an amulet hung about your neck, but in the very necessity of your energy exercised according to your special nature. Cultivate what is noblest in you, and you cannot fail to find what is most agreeable. The doing of this, however, is by no means so simple a matter as in the mere abstract statement might appear. It is the business of a man, no doubt, to act reasonably, that is virtuously, just as much as it is the business of a bee to bag honey; but it is a much easier thing for the bee to suck honey from the flowers than for a man to force fragrant deeds from the stuff that daily life presents. How is this? The difficulty lies in the compound nature of man: a nature not compound only, but composed of parts of which one is found to be often strangely at variance with the others; so much so, indeed, that while reason is the distinctive faculty of man, and to act reasonably is at once his safety, his happiness, and his glory, he bears within himself likewise a principle of unreason, an ἄλογον opposed to his λόγος,--a principle in the normal state of man altogether dependent and servile, but which, as things are, has a strong tendency to rebel, assert an unruly independence, and even cast down from his throne {151} the lawful regent of the soul. This, the reader will remark, is exactly the doctrine of St. Paul, with regard to the contrariety of Flesh and Spirit, in the eighth chapter of the Romans, and expressed in almost the same terms. The exact words of Aristotle are: “_There appear manifestly in human beings some strong natural tendencies different from reason, and not only different, but fighting with and resisting reason_.” But this remarkable peculiarity in the complex creature Man does not in the least change the nature of human good; it only adds to it another element which makes it in the end more glorious--the element of resistance, struggle, victory, and triumph,--of course always with the necessary alternative of possible feebleness, cowardice, and defeat. And the same fact,--the same original sin, as our theologians term it,--nicely considered, raises a noticeable question about the origin of laws and moral obligation; that old question so often discussed by the Sophists, and argued, as we have seen, by Socrates, in his