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THREE:Such is the mild and conciliatory mode of treatment at first adopted by Plato in dealing with the principal representative of the Sophists��Protagoras. In the Dialogue which bears his name the famous humanist is presented to us as a professor of popular unsystematised morality, proving by a variety of practical arguments and ingenious illustrations that virtue can be taught, and that the preservation of social order depends upon the possibility of teaching it; but unwilling to188 go along with the reasonings by which Socrates shows the applicability of rigorously scientific principles to conduct. Plato has here taken up one side of the Socratic ethics, and developed it into a complete and self-consistent theory. The doctrine inculcated is that form of utilitarianism to which Mr. Sidgwick has given the name of egoistic hedonism. We are brought to admit that virtue is one because the various virtues reduce themselves in the last analysis to prudence. It is assumed that happiness, in the sense of pleasure and the absence of pain, is the sole end of life. Duty is identified with interest. Morality is a calculus for computing quantities of pleasure and pain, and all virtuous action is a means for securing a maximum of the one together with a minimum of the other. Ethical science is constituted; it can be taught like mathematics; and so far the Sophists are right, but they have arrived at the truth by a purely empirical process; while Socrates, who professes to know nothing, by simply following the dialectic impulse strikes out a generalisation which at once confirms and explains their position; yet from self-sufficiency or prejudice they refuse to agree with him in taking their stand on its only logical foundation.

FORE:103 FORE:It will be seen that we do not consider the two kinds of Nous to differ from each other as a higher and a lower faculty. This, in our opinion, has been the great mistake of the commentators, of those, at least, who do not identify the active Nous with God, or with some agency emanating from God��a hypothesis utterly inconsistent with Aristotle��s theology. They describe it as a faculty, and as concerned with some higher kind of knowledge than what lies within the reach of the passive Nous.258 But with Aristotle faculty is always a potentiality and a passive recipient, whereas the creative reason is expressly declared to be an actuality, which, in this connexion, can mean nothing but an individual idea. The difficulty is to understand why the objective forms of things should suddenly be spoken of as existing within the mind, and denominated by a term carrying with it such subjective associations as Nous; a difficulty not diminished by the mysterious comparison with light in its relation to colour, an illus368tration which, in this instance, has only made the darkness visible. We believe that Aristotle was led to express himself as he did by the following considerations. He began by simply conceiving that, just as the senses were raised from potency to actuality through contact with the corresponding qualities in external objects, so also was the reasoning faculty moulded into particular thoughts through contact with the particular things embodying them; thus, for instance, it was led to conceive the general idea of straightness by actual experience of straight lines. It then, perhaps, occurred to him that one and the same object could not produce two such profoundly different impressions as a sensation and a thought; that mind was opposed to external realities by the attribute of self-consciousness; and that a form inherent in matter could not directly impress itself on an immaterial substance. The idea of a creative Nous was, we think, devised in order to escape from these perplexities. The ideal forms of things are carried into the mind, together with the sensations, and in passing through the imagination, become purified from the matter previously associated with them. Thus they may be conceived as part of the mind��in, though not yet of it��and as acting on its highest faculty, the passive Nous. And, by a kind of anticipation, they are called by the name of what they become completely identified with in cognition. As forms of things they are eternal; as thoughts they are self-conscious; while, in both capacities, they are creative, and their creative activity is an essentially immaterial process. Here we have the old confusion between form and function; the old inability to reconcile the claims of the universal and the particular in knowledge and existence. After all, Aristotle is obliged to extract an actuality from the meeting of two possibilities, instead of from the meeting of an actuality and a possibility. Probably the weakness of his own theory did not escape him, for he never subsequently recurs to it.259