50 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 



mass of serfs, artizans, and laborers. For this di 

 vision, moral philosophy made itself spiritual spon 

 sor, and thus took it up into its own being. Plato 

 wrestled valiantly with the class problem; but his 

 outcome was the necessity of decisive demarcation, 

 after education, of the masses in whom reason was 

 asleep and appetite much awake, from the few who 

 were fit to rule because alertly wise. The most 

 generously imaginative soul of all philosophy could 

 not far outrun the institutional practices of his 

 people and his times. This might have warned his 

 successors of the danger of deserting the sober 

 path of a critical discernment of the better and the 

 worse within contemporary life for the more ex 

 citing adventure of a final determination of abso 

 lute good and evil. It might have taught the prob- 

 &amp;lt; ability that some brute residuum or unrationalized 

 social habit would be erected into an apotheosis of 

 pure reason. But the lesson was not learned. 

 Aristotle promptly yielded to the besetting sin of 

 all philosophers, the idealization of the existent : he 

 declared that the class distinctions of superiority 

 and inferiority as between man and woman, master 

 and slave, liberal-minded and base mechanic, exist 

 and are justified by nature a nature which aims 

 at embodied reason. 



What, finally, is this Nature to which the philos 

 ophy of society and the individual so bound itself? 

 It is the nature which figures in Greek customs. 



