quires a sphere of life that will
call forth and exercise the highest human capacities. Aristotle frankly
pronounces "external goods" to be indispensable, and happiness to be
therefore "a gift of the gods." The rational man will acquire a certain
exquisiteness or finesse of action, a "mean" of conduct; and this virtue
will be diversified through the various relations into which he must
enter, and the different situations which he must meet. He will be not
merely brave, temperate, and just, as Plato would have him, but liberal,
magnificent, gentle, truthful, witty, friendly, and in all
self-respecting or high-minded. In addition to these strictly moral
virtues, he will possess the intellectual virtues of prudence and
wisdom, the resources of art and science; and will finally possess the
gift of insight, or intuitive reason. Speculation will be his highest
activity, and the mark of his kinship with the gods who dwell in the
perpetual contemplation of the truth.

[Sidenote: The Religion of Fulfilment, and the Religion of
Renunciation.]

Sect. 170. Aristotle's ethics expresses the buoyancy of the ancient
world, when the individual does not feel himself oppressed by the
eternal reality, but rejoices in it. He is not too conscious of his
sufferings to be disinterested in his admiration and wonder. It is this
which distinguishes the religion of Plato and Aristotle from that of the
Stoics and Spinoza. With both alike, religion consists not in making the
world, but in contemplating it; not in cooperating with God, but in
worshipping him. Plato and Aristotle, however, do not find any
antagonism between the ways of God and the natural interests of men.
God does not differ from men save in his exalted perfection. The
contemplation and worship of him comes as the final and highest stage of
a life which is organic and continuous throughout. The love of God is
the natural love when it has found its true object.

"For he who has been instructed thus far in the things of
love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order
and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly
perceive a nature of wondrous beauty--and this, Socrates, is
that final cause of all our former toils, which in the first
place is everlasting--not growing and decaying, or waxing and
waning; in the next place not fair in one point of view and
foul in another, . . . or in the likeness of a face or hands
o