Now this analogy of particular artists and professional men might have conducted Aristotle to the idea of the general happiness of society as a standard. For the business of every artist or artisan consists in conducing to the comfort, the protection, or the gratification of the public, each in his particular walk: professional excellence for them consists in accomplishing this object perfectly. For every special profession therefore the happiness of society at large, under one form or another, is introduced as the standard by which good and excellence are to be measured.
Apply this analogy to man in general, taken apart from any particular craft or profession. If each man, considered simply as such, has his appropriate business, in the good performance of which happiness for him consists, the standard of excellence in respect to such performance is to be found in its conduciveness to the happiness of society at large. It can be found nowhere else, if we are to judge according to the analogy of special arts and professions.
Until this want of a standard or measure is supplied, it is clear that the treatise of Aristotle is defective in a most essential point — a defect which is here admitted by himself in the first chapter of the Sixth Book. Nor is there any other way of supplying what is wanting except by reference to the general happiness of society, the end and object (as he himself tells us) of the statesman.
“What then,� says Aristotle,� prevents our calling him happy who is in the active exercise of his soul agreeably to perfect virtue, and is sufficiently well furnished with external goods, not for a casual period but for a complete lifetime?� (i. 10). He thinks himself obliged to add, however, that this is not quite sufficient — for that after death a man will still be affected with sympathy for the good or bad fortunes and conduct of his surviving relatives, affected however faintly and slightly, so as not to deprive him of the title to be called happy, if on other grounds he deserves it. The deceased person sees the misfortunes of his surviving friends with something of the same kind of sympathetic interest, though less in degree, as is felt by a living person in following the representation of a tragedy (i. 11). The difference between a misfortune, happening during a man’s life or after his death, is much greater than that between scenic representation of past calamities and actual reality (ib.).
It seems as if Aristotle was reluctantly obliged to make this admission — that deceased persons were at all concerned in the calamities of the living — more in deference to the opinions of others than in consequence of any conviction of his own. His language in the two chapters wherein he treats of it is more than usually hesitating and undecided: and in the beginning of Chapter XI., he says — “To have no interest whatever in the fortunes of their descendants and friends, seems exceedingly heartless and contrary to what we should expect� — he then, farther on, states it to be a great matter of doubt whether the dead experience either good or evil — but if anything of the kind does penetrate to them, it must be feeble and insignificant, so as to make no sensible difference to them.
II.
Aristotle distributes good things into three classes — the admirable or worshipful — the praiseworthy — the potential.
1. Good — as an End: that which is worthy of being honoured and venerated in itself and from its own nature, without regard to anything ulterior: that which comes up to our idea of perfection.
2. Good — as a means: that which is good, not on its own account nor in its own nature, but on account of certain ulterior consequences which flow from it.
3. Good — as a means, but not a certain and constant means: that which produces generally, but not always, ulterior consequences finally good: that which, in order to produce consequences in themselves good, requires to be coupled with certain concomitant conditions.