above his ordinary self, it is not therefore necessarily set above his
total personality. The limitations that he imposes on his ordinary
self may be the necessary condition of his entering into possession of
his ethical self, the self that he possesses in common with other men.
Aristotle says that if a man wishes to achieve happiness he must be a
true lover of himself. It goes without saying that he means the ethical
self. The author of a recent book on Ibsen says that Ibsen’s message to
the world is summed up in the line:
This above all,--to thine own self be true.
It is abundantly plain from the context, however, that Polonius is a
decayed Aristotelian and not a precursor of Ibsen. The self to which
Aristotle would have a man be true is at the opposite pole from the
self that Ibsen and the original geniuses are so eager to get uttered.
To impose the yoke of one’s human self upon one’s temperamental
self is, in the Aristotelian sense, to work. Aristotle conceives of
happiness in terms of work. All types of temperamentalists, on the
other hand, are from the human point of view, passive. The happiness
that they crave is a passive happiness. A man may pursue power with the
energy of a Napoleon and yet remain ethically passive. He may absorb
whole encyclopædias and remain ethically passive. He may expand his
sympathies until, like Schiller, he is ready to “bestow a kiss upon
the whole world” and yet remain ethically passive. A man ceases to
be ethically passive only when he begins to work in the Aristotelian
sense, that is when he begins to put the brake on temperament and
impulse, and in the same degree he tends to become ethically efficient.
By his denial of the dualism of the spirit, Rousseau discredited this
inner working, so that inwardness has come to seem synonymous with mere
subjectivity; and to be subjective in the Rousseauistic sense is to be
diffusive, to lack purpose and concentration, to lose one’s self in a
shoreless sea of revery.
The utilitarian intervenes at this point and urges the romanticist,
since he has failed to work inwardly, at least to work outwardly.
Having missed the happiness of ethical efficiency he may in this way
find the happiness of material efficiency, and at the same time serve
the world. This is the solution of the problem of happiness that Goethe
offers at the end of the Second Faust, and we may affirm without
hesitation that it is a sham solution. To work outwardly and in the
utilitarian sense, without the inner working that can alone save from
ethical anarchy is to stimulate rather than repress the most urgent
of all the lusts--the lust of power. It is only too plain that the
unselective sympathy or joy in service with which Goethe would complete
Faust’s utilitarian activity is not in itself a sufficient counterpoise
to the will to power, unless indeed we assume with Rousseau that one
may control expansive impulses by opposing them to one another.