Book ii

., suggested that both were by Aristotle. Above all, we must consider our present point that Platonic influence is a sign of earliness in an Aristotelian work; and generally, the same man may both think and write differently at different times, especially if, like Aristotle, he has been a prolific author.

These considerations make it probable that the author of all three treatises was Aristotle himself; while the analysis of the treatises favours the hypothesis that he wrote the _Eudemian Ethics_ and the _Magna Moralia_ more or less together as the rudimentary first drafts of the mature _Nicomachean Ethics_.

As the Platonic philosophy was primarily moral, and its metaphysics a theory of the moral order of the universe, Aristotle from the first must have mastered the Platonic ethics. At first he adopted the somewhat ascetic views of his master about soul and body, and about goods of body and estate; but before Plato's death he had rejected the hypothesis of forms, formal numbers and the form of the good identified with the one, by which Plato tried to explain moral phenomena; while his studies and teaching on rhetoric and poetry soon began to make him take a more tolerant view than Plato did of men's passions. Throughout his whole subsequent life, however, he retained the fundamental doctrine, which he had learnt from Plato, and Plato from Socrates, that virtue is essential to happiness. Twice over this tenet, which makes Socrates, Plato and Aristotle one ethical school, inspired Aristotle to attempt poetry: first, in the Elegy to Eudemus of Cyprus, in which, referring to either Socrates or Plato, he praises the man who first showed clearly that a good and happy man are the same (_Fragm._ 673); and secondly, in the Hymn in memory of Hermias, beginning "Virtue, difficult to the human race, noblest pursuit in life" (_ib._ 675). Moreover, the successors of Plato in the Academy, Speusippus and Xenocrates, showed the same belief in the essentiality of virtue. The question which divided them was what the good is. Speusippus took the ascetic view that the good is a perfect condition of neutrality between two contrary evils, pain and pleasure. Xenocrates took the tolerant view that it is the possession of appropriate virtue and noble actions, requiring as conditions bodily and external goods. Aristotle was opposed to Speusippus, and nearly agreed with Xenocrates. According to him, the good is activity of soul in accordance with virtue in a mature life, requiring as conditions bodily and external goods of fortune; and virtue is a mean state of the passions. It is probable that when, after Plato's death and the accession of Speusippus in 347, Aristotle with Xenocrates left Athens to visit his former pupil Hermias, the three discussed this moderate system of Ethics in which the two philosophers nearly agreed. At any rate, it was adopted in each of the three moral treatises which pass under the name of Aristotle.

The three treatises are in very close agreement throughout, and in the following details. The good of Ethics is human good; and human good is happiness, not the universal good or form of the good to which Plato subordinated human happiness. Happiness is activity of soul according to virtue in a mature life: it requires other goods only as conditions. The soul is partly irrational, partly rational; and therefore there are two kinds of virtue. Moral virtue, which is that of the irrational desires so far as they are obedient to reason, is a purposive habit in the mean. The motive of the moral virtues is the honourable ([Greek: to kalon], _honestum_). As the rational is either deliberative or scientific, either practical or speculative intellect, there are two virtues of the intellect--prudence of the deliberative or practical, and wisdom of the scientific or speculative, intellect. The right reason by which moral virtue is determined is prudence, which is determined in its turn by wisdom. Pleasure is a psychical state, and is not a generation in the body supplying a defect and establishing a natural condition, but an activity of a natural condition of the soul. It should be specially noted that this doctrine like the rest is common to the three treatises: in