I. The utilitarian character of Greek Ethic has been affirmed on several occasions; but one experiences a certain repugnance in applying so precise a term to the documents of ancient thought that remain to us. Socrates, it is true, posited the useful as the supreme concept of morality, and identified the good life with eudæmonia; but for him that useful was nevertheless distinct from the merely pleasing, since it consisted in what is useful to man as man, and his eudæmonia bore much resemblance to the tranquil conscience of him who fulfils his proper duties. Plato (for example, in the _Protagoras_) expounds the doctrine that good things are nothing but pleasant things, and bad things painful; but this doctrine is enunciated in order to place in relief the thesis that man does not do wrong, save through ignorance, and because the bad seems to him to be the good; without saying that in other dialogues the distinction between pleasure and the good is recognized. Nor can the most systematic of the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, be called without reserve a hedonist, a eudæmonist, or a utilitarian, on the strength of his doctrine of happiness. Happiness is the supreme good, it is an end for itself; but virtue is already included for Aristotle in happiness, virtue which is found there, not as an adjunct, but intrinsic, for which exterior goods are indeed necessary, but only as instruments. The virtuous man must be a lover of himself (φίλαυτος), that is to say, just, temperate, liberal of his possessions, ready to yield honours and offices to his friends; lover of himself, then, in the lofty signification of the word (lover, not of the empirical, but of the metempirical ego), as opposed to the wicked man, who is his own enemy. Even Epicurus could not be included among the hedonists, since for him pleasure is not an end, but a means for _calm,_ which is the true good, and calm is tranquillity of the spirit, which only the virtuous man can enjoy.