1. Happiness belongs to the first of these classes: it is put along with the divine, the better, soul, intellect, the more ancient, the principle, the cause, &c. (Mag. Moral. i. 2). Such objects as these, we contemplate with awe and reverence.
2. Virtue belongs to the second of the classes: it is good from the acts to which it gives birth, and from the end (happiness) which those acts, when sufficiently long continued, tend to produce.
3. Wealth, power, beauty, strength, &c., belong to the third class: these are generally good because under most circumstances they tend to produce happiness: but they may be quite otherwise, if a man’s mind be so defectively trained as to dispose him to abuse them.
It is remarkable that this classification is not formally laid down and explained, but is assumed as already well known and familiar, in the Nicom. Ethics, i. 12: whereas it is formally stated and explained in the Magna Moralia, i. 2.
Praise, according to Aristotle, “does not belong to the best things, but only to the second-best. The Gods are to be macarised, not praised:� the praise of the Gods must have reference to ourselves, and must be taken in comparison with ourselves and our acts and capacities: and this is ridiculously degrading, when we apply it to the majesty of the Gods. In like manner the most divine and perfect men deserve to be macarised rather than praised. “No man praises happiness, as he praises justice, but macarises (blesses) it as something more divine and better.�
Happiness is to be numbered amongst the perfect and worshipful objects — it is the ἀρχὴ for the sake of which all of us do everything: and we consider the principle and the cause of all good things to be something divine and venerable (i. 12).
Since then Happiness is the action of the soul conformably to perfect virtue, it is necessary to examine what human virtue is: and this is the most essential mark to which the true politician will direct his attention (i. 13).
There are two parts of the soul — the rational and the irrational. Whether these two are divisible in fact, like the parts of the body, or whether they are inseparable in fact, and merely susceptible of being separately dealt with in reasoning, like the concavity and convexity of a circle, is a matter not necessary to be examined in the present treatise. Aristotle speaks as if he considered this as really a doubtful point.
Of the irrational soul, one branch is, the nutritive and vegetative faculty, common to man with animals and plants. The virtue of this faculty is not special to man, but common to the vegetable and animal world: it is in fact most energetic during sleep, at the period when all virtue special to man is for the time dormant (i. 13).
But the irrational soul has also another branch, the appetites, desires, and passions: which are quite distinct from reason, but may either resist reason, or obey it, as the case may happen. It may thus in a certain sense be said to partake of reason, which the vegetative and nutritive faculty does not in any way. The virtue of this department of the soul consists in its due obedience to reason, as to the voice of a parent (i. 13).