Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/247

No. 2.], the head of the school and its most authoritative exponent, says in the introduction of his principal work on this subject that religion is "un aspect essentiel et permanent de l'humanité" ought to have reassured Mr. Webb. He could then have done Christianity a larger service by showing that it is able and ready to assimilate whatever of truth the new point of view of this school may ultimately prove to have contributed to a scientific understanding of religion.

2em

This essay, by the professor of classical archaeology at Bryn Mawr, has a double claim upon the attention of students of ancient philosophy. In the first place, it is a systematic presentation of the moral ideals which reveal themselves in the speeches of Euripides's characters, as well as in the dramatic movement of his plots, and which accordingly (with proper precautions) may be taken as representing the dramatist's own moral ideals, for which he expected the sympathy of his audience. It is thus, in effect, an analysis of Greek morality at the time when philosophical reflection upon morality first became important. In the second place, it furnishes a most illuminating commentary upon the first five books of the Nicomachean Ethics, and especially upon the doctrine of the golden mean. I may add that to an extent of which the author appears not to be fully aware (cf. p. 44, n. 32) he has illustrated the ethical theory of Plato's Gorgias, which appears in more developed form in the Philebus—the theory that the highest good is to be found in measure and harmony. In relation to Aristotle, Professor Carpenter goes so far as to suggest (p. 9; cf. p. 45) "that the Aristotelian ethic is largely a prose statement, helped out by a certain quantity of logical fermentation, of what the tragic stage inculcated into Athenian audiences; and that the service of Aristotle in his famous Nicomachean Ethics was not so much that of creating a system of ethics as of supplying a logical and psychological framework for an otherwise highly developed and intelligently thought-out morality."

Whatever degree of exaggeration one may be inclined to attribute to this statement, one is compelled to admit that the evidence presented shows that there is much truth in it. The doctrine of the mean is applied by Euripides to courage and fear; to mental and physical strenuousness; to sexual love; to the pursuit of pleasure; to anger and forgiveness; to the love of life; to the desire for the external goods of wealth, power, and honor; and, finally, to justice. In every case, excess and defect are harmful. Even where the ordinary course of human events does not seem to make this necessarily true, the intervention of divine powers nevertheless confirms it. "Nemesis completes the proof of the doctrine of the Mean" (p. 29).

Professor Carpenter complicates his case by maintaining that in Euripides the norm from which excess and defect depart is invariably given by ,