82 MEMOIR OF ARISTOTLE. 



(as may be truly said of his) that it contains nothing 

 wb'ch a Christian may dispense with, and no pre- 

 cept of life at variance with the Christian virtues. 



In this department, Aristotle has left three prin- 

 cipal treatises, viz. 1st, The Nicomachean Ethics, in 

 ten books, addressed to his son ; 2d, The Magna 

 Moralia, in two books ; 3d, The Eudemian Ethics, 

 in seven books, addressed to Eudemus ; besides a 

 short popular tract on the Virtues and Vices. The 

 first of these exhibits the most formal and complete 

 development of his theory, and is the work on which 

 his fame as a moral philosopher chiefly rests. The 

 other treatises are illustrations of the same subjects, 

 entertaining similar views, and sometimes expressed 

 in the same language. 



In these writings, his primary aim is to investi- 

 gate the law or philosophical principle, according to 

 which human actions attain the good or happiness 

 which is their object ; and which, as being the end 

 really designed in all actions, whatever may be their 

 immediate and particular object, is the great final cause 

 of all. The doctrine of virtue, happiness, pleasure, 

 friendship, justice, temperance, self-love, the affec- 

 tions, the passions, the motives and effects of actions, 

 are the important themes which he discusses. In 

 these inquiries, he takes a safer guide than the 

 fanciful speculations of the Greek schools concern- 

 ing the chief good, which imagined that there was 

 some quality of good, admitting of abstract disquisi- 

 tions into it* nature. Hence the superiority of his 



