ONE:The passions themselves, and the means by which they can be either excited or controlled, are described in Aristotle��s Rhetoric with wonderful knowledge of human nature in the abstract, but with almost no reference to the art for whose purposes the information is ostensibly systematised; while in the Ethics they are studied, so to speak, statically, in their condition of permanent equilibration or disequilibration; the virtues and vices being represented as so many different396 aspects of those conditions. It is obvious that such an extremely artificial parallelism could not be carried out without a considerable strain and distortion of the facts involved. The only virtue that can, with truth, be described as a form of moderation is temperance; and even in temperance this is accidental rather than essential. Elsewhere Aristotle deduces the extremes from the mean rather than the mean from the extremes; and sometimes one of the extremes is invented for the occasion. To fit justice, confessedly the most important virtue, into such a scheme, was obviously impracticable without reinterpreting the idea of moderation. Instead of an equilibrium between opposing impulses in the same person, we have equality in the treatment of different persons; which again resolves itself into giving them their own, without any definite determination of what their own may be.289 It cannot even be said that Aristotle represented either the best ethical thought of his own age, or an indispensable stage in the evolution of all thought. The extreme insufficiency of his ethical theory is due to the fancied necessity of squaring it with the requirements of his cosmological system. For no sooner does he place himself at the popular point of view than he deduces the particular virtues from regard to the welfare of others, and treats them all as so many different forms of justice.290 TWO:THREE:In deed or thought of his, then it might be."I have not ��20 of ready money in the world."