s their lowest
instrument. Matter has only the values of the forms which it assumes,
and while each stratification may create some intrinsic ideal and
achieve some good, these goods are dull and fleeting in proportion to
their rudimentary character and their nearness to protoplasmic thrills.
Where reason exists life cannot, indeed, be altogether slavish; for any
operation, however menial and fragmentary, when it is accompanied by
ideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success in
attaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom.
Nevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, though
not so much by what such an interest contains as by what it ignores.
Happiness in a treadmill is far from inconceivable; but for that
happiness to be rational the wheel should be nothing less than the whole
sky from which influences can descend upon us. There would be meanness
of soul in being content with a smaller sphere, so that not everything
that was relevant to our welfare should be envisaged in our thoughts and
purposes. To be absorbed by the incidental is the animal's portion; to
be confined to the instrumental is the slave's. For though within such
activity there may be a rational movement, the activity ends in a fog
and in mere physical drifting. Happiness has to be begged of fortune or
found in mystical indifference: it is not yet subtended by rational art.

[Sidenote: Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.]

The Aristotelian theory of slavery, in making servile action wholly
subservient, sins indeed against persons, but not against arts. It sins
against persons because there is inconsiderate haste in asserting that
whole classes of men are capable of no activities, except the physical,
which justify themselves inherently. The lower animals also have
physical interests and natural emotions. A man, if he deserves the name,
must be credited with some rational capacity: prospect and retrospect,
hope and the ideal portraiture of things, must to some extent employ
him. Freedom to cultivate these interests is then his inherent right. As
the lion vindicates his prerogative to ferocity and dignity, so every
rational creature vindicates his prerogative to spiritual freedom. But a
too summary classification of individuals covers, in Aristotle, a just
discrimination among the arts. In so far as a man's occupation is merely
instrumental and justified only externally, he is obviously a slave and