Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/239

223 notion of nature as a mechanical system, and the idea of the extension of the mechanical principle to physiology and psychology. He went further than Descartes in reducing all mental activity to modes of motion, and thus resolved the dualism of Descartes into materialism pure and simple. To the physical sciences of his day, especially, Hobbes owes the principle by which he explains every form of mental phenomena.

Man being an end to himself, he is endowed with a proper self-love that he may preserve and develop his own being. Aristotle carefully distinguishes the proper from the improper love of self. Only by the subjection of desire to reason does man acquire moral freedom. This freedom, however, is only to be found within society, and hence arises the duty of the state to complete the individual in mind and body. Saint Thomas develops this theory into the doctrine that the state should coöperate with the church—the more perfect society of the two—to realize the reign of God and to establish the moral order. But what is the happiness which man can realize only within society? In essence it is the activity of the reason continued throughout a life-time. Hence the value of the contemplative life. St. Thomas points out that happiness really results from a union with God through knowledge and love, since God is the object of happiness, the final end. It is religion which gives to man his highest perfection. In conclusion Kaufmann considers the present and future significance of the ethics and politics of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. He finds it to consist mainly in: (1) the founding of ethics and politics upon the reasonable nature of man developed by Saint Thomas into the doctrine of a natural law, part of the eternal divine law; (2) the demonstration of the immutability of this law; (3) the doctrine that what corresponds to the reasonable nature of man is morally good; and (4) the establishment of the strict dependence of true morality upon religion.