INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 49 



There is likewise a profound saying of Aristotle s 

 that the individual who otherwise than by accident 

 is not a member of a state is either a brute or a 

 god. But it is generally forgotten that elsewhere 

 Aristotle identified the highest excellence, the chief 

 virtue, with pure thought, and identifying this with 

 the divine, isolated it in lonely grandeur from the 

 life of society. That man, so far as in him lay, 

 should be godlike, meant that he should be non- 

 social, because supra-civic. Plato the idealist had 

 shared the belief that reason is the divine ; but he 

 was also a reformer and a radical and he would 

 have those who attained rational insight descend 

 again into the civic cave, and in its obscurity labor 

 patiently for the enlightenment of its blear-eyed 

 inhabitants. Aristotle, the conservative and the 

 definer of what is, gloried in the exaltation of in 

 telligence in man above civic excellence and social 

 need ; and thereby isolated the life of truest knowl 

 edge from contact with social experience and from 

 responsibility for discrimination of values in the 

 course of life. 



Moral theory, however, accepted from social cus 

 tom more than its cataleptic rigidity, its exclusive 

 area of common good, and its unfructified and irre 

 sponsible reason. The city-state was a superficial 

 layer of cultured citizens, cultured through a par 

 ticipation in affairs made possible by relief from 

 economic pursuits, superimposed upon the dense 



