Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/248

236 in the sense of the generic tendencies of the natural man. The right, he holds, is everywhere the. "Man identifies himself in the world by a realization that he is an ordered part of it with a determinate place and function. It is his duty to fulfill that function, to play his part as Nature intended" (p. 37).

The citations clearly show, on the one hand, that the distinctly abnormal (e.g., in sexual love) is felt to be wrong, and, on the other hand, that what is common is felt to be pardonable. But this is far from showing that in all the various departments of the moral life for example, in facing danger and in the pursuit of wealth it is nature that sets the norm. That moral law is natural law was, indeed, already an important opinion in Euripides's time, and he could hardly have remained unaffected by it. But that the observance of the golden mean and the imitation of nature are to be taken as constituting a single principle is, I believe, far from evident.

The golden mean is the very essence of conservatism. From the age of the Sophists to the Darwinians, the imitation of nature has been the war-cry of radicalism. The name of Rousseau is sufficient to remind us of this. It is true that the two conceptions may be combined; and it appears that they are to some extent combined in Euripides. But they may as easily be separated. The golden mean may, for example, be known, not from the observation of nature, but by rational intuitions and by inference from such intuitions. This, I take it, is in principle what one finds in Aristotle. According to him, reason in man supervenes upon the animal man—i.e., upon man as a natural being and remolds him according to its own higher standards. In this refashioning, the natural man does, indeed, in some measure predetermine the development, as any kind of material must in some measure predetermine the direction and limits of its transformations; but that is all. No silk purse from a sow's ear; but, after all, it requires more than the nature of silk adequately to determine the manufacture of silk purses.

In commenting upon the identification of natural and moral, Professor Carpenter remarks that "there must have been an extraordinary sense for the community between man and the rest of the material world. The modern mind opposes itself to Nature" (p. 5). This is the contrast which Schiller has taught us to see, and upon which he based his theory of the distinctive temper of Greek and of modern art. For myself, I am thoroughly sceptical of it. The generation of Euripides was very well acquainted with the difference between and, and was by no means disposed to underestimate the extent of their divergence.

It is true that from Hippias of Elis onward there is an unbroken line of Greek philosophers who found in the standard by which Oicris is to be corrected; but, if I am right, these are not the philosophers of aristocracy, but the philosophers of democracy, the Cynics and Stoics. These are the men who revolted from the trammels of convention and the compromises of good sense and took nature as their guide.

There is another of Professor Carpenter's theses that I feel inclined to