tion for a night's sound sleep, and bring you to the contest on the morrow in prime physical and mental condition.

Aristotle, in his doctrine of the mean, is simply telling us that this problem of the athlete on the night before the contest is the personal problem of us all every day of our lives.

How late shall the student study at night? Shall he keep on until past midnight year after year? If he does, he will undermine his health, lose contact with society, and defeat those ends of social usefulness which ought to be part of every worthy scholar's cherished end. On the other hand, shall he fritter away all his evenings with convivial fellows, and the society butterflies? Too much of that sort of thing would soon put an end to scholarship altogether. His problem is to find that amount of study which will keep him sensitively alive to the latest problems of his chosen subject; and yet not make all his acquisitions comparatively worthless either through broken health, or social estrangement from his fellow-men. How rare and precious that mean is, those of us who have to find college professors are well aware. It is easy to find scores of men who know their subject so well that they know nothing and nobody else aright. It is easy to find jolly, easy-going fellows who would not object to positions as college professors. But the man who has enough good fellowship and physical vigour to make his scholarship attractive and effective, and enough scholarship to make his vigour and good fellowship intellectually powerful and personally stimulating, he is the man who has hit the Aristotelian mean; he is the man we are all after; he is the man whom we would any of us give a year's salary to find.

The mean is not midway between zero and the maximum attainable. As Aristotle says, "By the mean relatively to us I understand that which is neither too much nor too little for us; and that is not one and the same for all. For instance, if ten be too large and two be too small, if we take six, we take the mean relatively to the thing itself, or the arithmetical mean. But the mean relatively to us cannot be found in this way. If ten pounds of food is too much for a given man to eat, and two pounds too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order him six pounds; for that also may perhaps be too much for the man in question, or too little; too little for Milo, too much for the beginner. And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it - not the absolute but the relative mean. So that people are wont to say of a good work, that nothing could be taken from it or added to it, implying that excellence is destroyed by excess or deficiency, but secured by observing the mean."

The Aristotelian principle, of judging a situation on its merits, and subordinating means to the supreme end, was never more clearly stated than in Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley: "I would save the Union. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more when I shall believe doing more will help the cause."

VI

THE ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUES AND THEIR

ACQUISITION

The special forms that the one great virtue of seeking the relative mean takes in actual life bear a close correspondence to the cardinal virtues of Plato; yet with a difference which marks a positive advance in insight. Aristotle, to begin with, distinguishes wisdom from prudence. Wisdom is the theoretic knowledge of things as they are, irrespective of their serviceableness to our practical interests. In modern terms it is devotion to pure science. This corresponds to Plato's contemplation of the Good. According to Aristotle this devotion to knowledge for its own sake underlies all virtue; for only he who knows how things stand related to each other in the actual world, will be able to grasp aright that relation of means to ends on which the success of the practical life depends. Just as the engineer cannot build a bridge across the Mississippi unless he knows those laws of pure mathematics and physics which underlie the stability of all structures, so the man who is ignorant of economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and ethics is sure to make a botch of any attempts he may make to build bridges across the gulf which separates one man from another man; one group of citizens from another group. Pure science is at the basis of all art, consciously or unconsciously; and therefore wisdom is the fundamental form of virtue.

Prudence comes next; the power to see, not the theoretical relations of men and things to each other, but the practical relationships of men and things to our self-chosen ends. Wisdom knows the laws which govern the strength of materials. Prudence knows how strong a structure is necessary to support the particular strain we wish to place upon it. Wisdom knows sociology. Prudence tells us whether in a given case it is better to give a beggar a quarter of a dollar, an order on a central bureau, a scolding, or a kick. The most essential, and yet the rarest kind of prudence is that considerateness which sensitively appreciates the point of view of the people with whom we deal, and takes proper account of those subtle and complex sentiments, prejudices, traditions, and ways of thinking, which taken together constitute the social situation.

Temperance, again, is not the repression of lower impulses in the interest of those abstractly higher, as it came to be in the popular interpretations of Platonism, and as it was in Stoicism.