What, then, is this good, which is neither a sum of pleasures, nor conformity to law; nor yet superiority to appetite and passion? What is this principle which can at once enjoy pleasure to the full, and at the same time forego it gladly; which can make laws for itself more severe than any lawgiver ever dared to lay down; and yet is not afraid to break any law which its own conception of good requires it to break; which honours all our elemental appetites and passions, uses money and honour and power as the servants of its own ends, without ever being enslaved by them? Evidently we are now on the track of a principle infinitely more subtle and complex than anything the pleasure-loving Epicurean, or the formal Stoic, or the transcendental Platonist has ever dreamed of. We are entering the presence of the world's master moralist; and if we have ever for a moment supposed that either of these previous systems was satisfactory or final, it behooves us now to take the shoes from off our feet, and reverently listen to a voice as much profounder and more reasonable than them all, as they are superior to the senseless appetites and blind passions of the mob. For if we have a little patience with his subtlety, and can endure the temporary shock of his apparent laxity, he will admit us to the very holy of holies of personality. II THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN Before coming to Aristotle's positive doctrine we must consider one fundamental axiom. Man is by nature a social being. Whatever a man seeks has a necessary and inevitable reference to the judgment of other men, and the interest of society as a whole. Strip a man of his relations and you have no man left. The man who is neither son, brother, husband, father, citizen, neighbour or workman, is inconceivable. The good which a man seeks, therefore, will express itself consciously or unconsciously in terms of other men's approval, and the furtherance of interests which he inevitably shares with them. The Greek word for private, peculiar to myself, unrelated to the thought or interest of anybody else, is our word for idiot. The New Testament uses this word to describe the place to which Judas went; a place which just suited such a man as he, and was fit for nobody else. Now a man who tries to be his own scientist, or his own lawgiver, or his own statesman, or his own business manager, or his own poet, or his own architect, without reference to the standards and expectations of his fellow-men, is just an idiot; or, as we say, a "crank." A wise man may defy these standards. The reformer often must do so. But if he is really wise, if he is a true reformer, he must reckon with them; he must understand them; he must appeal to the actual or possible judgment and interest of his fellows for the confirmation of what he says and the justification of what he does. This social reference of all our thoughts and actions, which Aristotle grasped by intuition, psychology in our day is laboriously and analytically