Now whatever be the other uses of such definitions--and they are serviceable at the outgoing in any branch of enquiry,--they are not precisely the work we expect a philosopher to do for us. And assuredly it is not Aristotle who would stop short at that sort of definitions. We find accordingly that for the purpose of realising what happiness--the common name for human good--means, he is obliged to bring into the field the whole system of his thought in its cardinal notions of Energy, Soul, &c. Aristotle here as elsewhere retraces the path of thought which carries us from mere, vulgar, inadequately-apprehended happiness (he follows the same process in his treatment of pleasure, friendship &c.--to take only ethical examples) to true, essential and completely-apprehended happiness,--or, to use Hegel's technical phrases, from happiness as it is _an-sich_ (in or at itself) or as it is _für-sich_ (for or to itself), to happiness as it is _an-und-für-sich._ In so 'defining' happiness Aristotle is thus obliged to bring in his conceptions of man and of society, of human life and its powers, of natural and acquired faculty, of mind in its relations to nature; and if not to expound, at least to employ, his fundamental categories of philosophical thought. Such a machinery can hardly be called less than a construction, i. e. a re-construction by conscious effort of the latent but actual concatenation of the elements in the fact. In this case we traverse the distance which separates mere happiness from true happiness, from happiness imperfectly or abstractly conceived to happiness adequately and concretely conceived. Of course when we say real or true happiness, we use these terms as they are used within the ordinary range of human speech. An ultimate and absolute in truth and reality is for us at any given time only a comparatively or relatively ultimate and absolute. It is that which, so far as we can see and think (all philosophising presumably goes on under this stipulation, tacit or express), gives an expression, an interpretation, a meaning and a construction to reality which leaves no feature unrecognised, no contradiction unsolved, no discord unreconciled, which leaves nothing outside and alien to it, and suppresses without acknowledgment nothing that has ever been recognised within it. It is, if you like so to call it, the completest, or (if you are really in earnest with your philosophising and have carried it on to what for you is the end) the complete formula of the Absolute--of that which in a transcendent sense _is,_ is _all,_ is the infinite and eternal _one._ Yet, after all, it is a formula. But here that undying adversary of all thought steps in and says A _mere_ formula. And to that we must here as elsewhere rejoin: No, not a mere formula. A mere formula would be not even a formula,--a formula only in name--and with no reality which it served to formulate. It is a real and true formula, if it be a formula at all,