160 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



selves into Hedonism!' l " Conscience may act as 

 human before it is discovered to be divine" 2 But 

 if we seek for an explanation at all, we must 

 ultimately choose between some form of theology 

 or some form of Hedonism. u The attempts to con- 

 struct intermediate theories have only shown by 

 their instability, the irresistible logical tendency to 

 the single line of cleavage, which puts religious 

 thought on the one side, arid the eudaemonist on the 

 other" (p. 26). 



There is no discussion of these questions in 

 Aristotle. The moral faculty is reason, and reason 

 is divine, but it is rather an immanent principle in 

 man, leading him to know his own good, realized 

 in the political community, and it is assumed that 

 to know is to obey. 



Moral evil. This brings Aristotle to the question 

 of moral evil, so far as the question was known to 

 the Greek world. Aristotle, like Plato, might have 

 said of reason as Bishop Butler says of conscience, 

 that " if it had might as it has right, it would govern 

 the world." But it doesn't govern the world. 

 Why is this ? What is the explanation of aKpaata ? 

 Socrates and Plato denied the existence of such a 

 state, Stt'vov -yap tTnar^uije vou<rrj aAAo TL Kparelv. 

 Aristotle admits aKpacrta, but, in explaining it, re- 

 solves it into a condition which is not aKpaaia. 

 The a/cparrjc is the man who knows right and yet 



1 Study, p. 26. 2 Ibid., p. 22. 



