Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/379

 ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF INCONTINENCE. 363 this subject, to beware of the danger lurking in the very phrase, the Practical Syllogism of limiting our attempt to understand Aristotle's doctrine too much to purely intel- lectual considerations. If Aristotle does give us nothing but an intellectual juggling performed under the sweet seductiveness of sensuous suggestion, if it is true that he offers us nothing better than " broken knowledge and moral obliviousness," it is clear that he stultifies his own teaching, and forgets the problem he himself formulates. A ' trick of the intellect,' a ' sophism of the imagination ' these imply the admission of that Socratic heresy which Aristotle sets himself to destroy, and, much worse, amount to a denial of the possibility of Incontinence altogether, with the unendur- able consequence, man's moral irresponsibility. Throughout the Nic. Ethics, and the De Anima, nothing is clearer than Aristotle's insistence upon human responsibility. No actions are involuntary except those done under ' physical com- pulsion' or through 'ignorance of the particular fact,' which, just for these reasons, are not actions at all, pro- perly speaking, but ' movements '. The incontinent man, if not (possibly) the ' efficient cause of his actions ' in the fullest sense, is sufficiently so to be held responsible, and morally blameworthy, for them. He cannot escape by pleading ' potential ' versus ' actual ' knowledge, 1 or by urg- ing some sad ' error of judgment '. To confine, again, Aristotle's analysis to these intellectual elements is to ignore that moral ' struggle ' in which the essential nature of Incontinence consists. Incontinence arises from the fact that the human mind is composed not only of a ' rational ' part, but also of ' something else which fights and strains against Eeason'. 2 It would be tedious to enlarge further upon this point. We must believe, without further parley, that in his attempt to solve the problem of Incontinence Aristotle kept clearly before him the convictions (1) that man is morally responsible for this, as for all other, kind of wrong-doing ; (2) that Incontinence consists primarily of a struggle between two different psychical elements Eeason and Feeling and of the victory of the latter over the former ; (3) that, consequently, no ' Sophistic ' attempt to explain the phenomenon as due to fallacious reasoning, to 1 It is interesting to note here that Prof. Cook Wilson, believing that Nic. Eth., vii., 3, offers us only a subtle analysis of 'kinds of knowledge,' concludes, legitimately enough on that assumption, that this portion of bk. vii. is neither Aristotelian nor Eudeuiian. 2 Cf. Nic. Eth., i., 13, 15, et passim.