Page:The ethics of Aristotle.djvu/299

. This illustration sets in so clear a light the doctrines entertained respectively by Aristotle, Eudoxus, and the Stoics regarding pleasure, that it is worth while to go into it fully. The reference is to Iliad. 154-160. The old counsellors, as Helen comes upon the city wall, acknowledge her surpassing beauty, and have no difficulty in understanding how both nations should have incurred such suffering for her sake: still, fair as she is, home she must go, that she bring not ruin on themselves and their posterity. This exactly represents Aristotle's relation to Pleasure: he does not, with Eudoxus and his followers, exalt it into the Summum Bonum (as Paris would risk all for Helen), nor does he with the Stoics call it wholly evil, as Hector might have said that the woes Helen had caused had “banished all the beauty from her cheek,” but, with the aged counsellors, admits its charms, but aware of their dangerousness resolves to deny himself; he “feels her sweetness, yet defies her thrall.”  .  is here used as an analogous noun, to denote the faculty which, in respect of moral matters, discharges the same function that bodily sense does in respect of physical objects. It is worth while to notice how in our colloquial language we carry out the same analogy. We say of a transaction, that it “looks ugly,” “sounds oddly,” is a “nasty job,” “stinks in our nostrils,” is a “hard dealing.”  . A man is not responsible for being, because “particular propensions, from their very nature, must be felt, the objects of them being present; though they cannot be gratified at all, or not with the allowance of the moral principle.” But he is responsible for being , because, though thus formed, he “might have improved and raised himself to an higher and more secure state of virtue by the contrary behaviour, by steadily following the moral principle, supposed to be one part of his nature, and thus withstanding that unavoidable danger of defection which necessarily arose from propension, the other part of it. For by thus preserving his integrity for some time, his danger would lessen; since propensions, by being inured to submit, would do it more easily and of course: and his security against this lessening danger would increase; since the moral principle would gain additional strength by exercise, both which things are implied in the notion of virtuous habits.” (From the chapter on Moral Discipline in the Analogy, sect. ) The purpose of this disquisition is to refute the Necessitarians; it is resumed in the third chapter of this Book.  . Virtue is not only the duty, but (by the laws of the Moral Government of the World) also the interest of Man, or to express it in Bishop Butler's manner, Conscience and Reasonable Self-love are the two principles in our nature which of right have 