EDUCATION AFTER TWENTY-ONE

Be assured that happiness has its source, not in extensive possessions, but in a right disposition of the soul. Even in the case of the body, no one would call it fortunate for being arrayed in splendid garments; but one would do so, if it had health, and were nobly developed, even without such appendages. In the same manner, we ought to ascribe happiness to the soul only when it is cultivated, and to call a man happy only if he possesses such a soul, not if he is splendidly attired outwardly, but has no worth of his own.... For those whose souls are ill-conditioned, neither wealth, nor power, nor beauty is a blessing; on the contrary, the more excessive these conditions are, the more widely and deeply do they injure their possessors, being unaccompanied with right-mindedness.—Aristotle.

Zeno used to tell a story about Crates, to this effect: One day Crates was sitting in a shoemaker's shop, reading aloud Aristotle's Exhortation (to Philosophy), addressed to Themison, king of the Cyprians, in which the king is reminded that he possesses, in an exceptional degree, all the conditions of philosophy, superabundant wealth, and high position. As he was reading, the shoemaker, without interrupting his sewing, listened to him, until at last Crates said: "Philiscus, I think I will write an Exhortation for you; for I see you have more of the conditions of philosophy than Aristotle has enumerated."—Teles.

At the age of twenty-one, those young men who have successfully completed the State system of training become citizens or politicians, and begin to exercise the functions of such. These are of two kinds, (1) active, practical, or executive, and (2) deliberative, theoretical, or legislative. As action must, on the one hand, be vigorous, and, on the other, guided by deliberation, which requires large experience, the functions of the State must be so arranged that the active duties fall to the young and robust, the deliberative to the elderly and mature. The distinguishing virtue of the former is fortitude, with endurance or patience; that of the latter philosophy. Both equally have self-control and justice. In this way does Aristotle distribute Plato's four cardinal virtues.

When young men first become citizens, they are assigned to posts of active service, civil and military, and thus study practical philosophy—Ethics and Politics—in a practical way. As they grow older, they gradually rise to posts demanding less practice and more thought, until at last they are admitted to the deliberative body, or council, when their active duties cease, and they are able to devote themselves to Speculative Philosophy or Theoretics. These men have now reached the end of life, as far as this world is concerned. They spend their days in cultured leisure, and the contemplation of divine things (?e???a). The very oldest of them, those who are most conversant with divine things, are chosen as priests, so that they may, as it were, live with the gods, and these be worthily served. Thus gradually, almost insensibly, they pass from the world of time to that of eternity; from the imperfect activity of practice, whose end is beyond itself, to the perfect energy of contemplation, which is self-sufficient and the life of God. In this way Aristotle settles the vexed question with regard to the compatibility and relative value of the practical and the contemplative life. They are necessary complements of each other. Practice is the realization of what contemplation discovers in the pure energy of God, revealing itself in the world. Thus the practical life of man glides gradually into the contemplative life of God.

Such is the highest view of man's destiny, and the way thither, that the Greeks ever reached, and it is in many ways a most attractive and inspiring one. Its defects are the defects of all that is Greek. They are two: (1) its ideal is intellectual and Æsthetic,—a coÖrdinated, harmonious whole, whereof the individual is but a part: not moral or religious—a self-surrender of the individual to the supreme will; consequently, (2) it does not provide for every human being, as such, but only for a small, select number, the fruit of the whole. Its ethics are institutional not personal, and, indeed, the Greek never arrived at a distant conception of personality, that being possible only through the moral consciousness, which is its core. It seeks to find happiness in a correlation and balancing of individual selves, not in the independent conformity of each self to a supreme self. Hence it was that, with all its marvellous grasp and manly prudence, the ideal of Aristotle proved powerless to restore the moral unity of man, until it was absorbed in a higher.

BOOK IV

THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD
(b.c. 338-a.d. 313)