Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ward tendency of the stone. The idea is plainly different in the one case and in the other. On the other hand, there seems to be not less variance between the one passage quoted out of the Nicomacheian Ethics and the other. For in the passage last quoted, we are told that none of the ethical virtues is generated in us by nature neither by nature, nor contrary to nature: nature makes us fit to receive them, habit introduces and creates them an observation perfectly true and accurate. But if this was the sentiment of Aristotle, how could he also believe that the pleasures arising out of the active manifestation of ethical virtue were the na i tural pleasures of man ? If ethical virtue does not come by .nature, the pleasures belonging to it cannot come by nature either. On the whole, these three passages present a variance which I am unable to reconcile in the meaning which Aristotle annexes to the very equivocal word nature. Although Aristotle tells us that the active exercise of the functions of the soul according to virtue confers happiness, yet he admits that a certain measure of external comfort and advantages must be super added as an indispensable auxiliary and instrument. Disgusting ugliness, bad health, low birth, loss of friends and relatives or vicious conduct of friends and relatives, together with many other misfortunes,are sufficient to sully the blessed condition of the most virtuous man (pviraivovcn To paKapiov i. 8) for which reason it is that some persons have ranked both virtue and good fortune as co ordinate ingredients equally essential to happiness : and have doubted also whether it can ever be acquired either by teaching, or by training, or by any other method except chance or Divine inspiration. To suppose that so magnificent a boon is conferred by...
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