We have still to speak of Aristotle’s Politics; he was conscious more or less that the positive substance, the necessary organization and realization of practical spirit, is the state, which is actualized through subjective activity, so that this last finds in it its determination and end. Aristotle hence also looks on political philosophy as the sum total of practical philosophy, the end of the state as general happiness. “All science and all capacity (δύναμις),” he says (Magn. Mor. I. 1), “have an end, and this is the good: the more excellent they are, the more excellent is their end; but the most excellent capacity is the political, and hence its end is also the good.” Of Ethics Aristotle recognizes that it indubitably also applies to the individual, though its perfection is attained in the nation as a whole. “Even if the highest good is the same for an individual and for a whole state, it would yet surely be greater and more glorious to win and maintain it for a state; to do this for an individual were meritorious, but to do it for a nation and for whole states were more noble and godlike still. Such is the object of practical science, and this pertains in a measure to politics.”[107] Aristotle indeed appreciates so highly the state, that he starts at once (Polit. I. 2) by defining man as “a political animal, having reason. Hence he alone has a knowledge of good and evil, of justice and injustice, and not the beast,” for the beast does not think, and yet in modern times men rest the distinction which exists in these determinations on sensation, which beasts have equally with men. There is also the sense of good and evil, &c., and Aristotle knows this aspect as well (_supra_, p. 202); but that through which it is not animal sensation merely, is thought. Hence rational perception is also to Aristotle the essential condition of virtue, and thus the harmony between the sensational point of view and that of reason is an essential moment in his eudæmonism. After Aristotle so determines man, he says: “The common intercourse of these, forms the family and the state; in the understanding, however, that the state, in the order of nature” (_i.e._ in its Notion, in regard to reason and truth, not to time) “is prior to the family” (the natural relation, not the rational) “and to the individual among us.” Aristotle does not place the individual and his rights first, but recognizes the state as what in its essence is higher than the individual and the family, for the very reason that it constitutes their substantiality. “For the whole must be prior to its parts. If, for example, you take away the whole body, there is not a foot or hand remaining, excepting in name, and as if anyone should call a hand of stone a hand; for a hand destroyed is like a hand of stone.” If the man is dead, all the parts perish. “For everything is defined according to its energy and inherent powers, so that when these no longer remain such as they were, it cannot be said