Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/18

8 as has been well said, he sounds sometimes like a man talking to himself.

In an age of philosophical sciolism and impossible systems, a reinterpretation in modern terms of the greatest of thinkers is one of the needs of the times.

The Politics of Aristotle, though it is a treasury of political wisdom, is in some ways an unsatisfactory work. It has come down to us in a form which is certainly not the final form that the Master would have given it. The parts do not combine into a logically connected whole, and cannot be rearranged to do so. We cannot be sure that any given paragraph—still less any given sentence—contains the actual words of Aristotle. And yet we feel that, as Jowett says, the whole bears the 'imprint of the master mind', and that the apparently simple and yet profound aphorisms which light up its pages are the expression of that mind alone.

The Politics of Aristotle, says Jowett, 'continue to have a practical relation to our own times'; the objection that Aristotle dealt only or mainly with the city-state is plausible, but superficial. Aristotle dealt with the fundamental qualities and relations of man in society.

To enable us better to understand the way in which he would have looked at modern socialist and communist schemes, let us briefly review some of his leading ideas.

The object of the State, he says, is to enable its citizens not merely to live, but to live well. It should therefore be something more than a mere guarantee for the mutual respect of rights, and should develope the virtue of its citizens (Book III., Chapter 9 ). This is surely a higher ideal than that of Herbert Spencer and the Philosophical Radicals. But Aristotle knew that mere laws and prohibi-