MEMOIR OF ARISTOTLE. 
85 
undue influence, but an equal regard is shewn to the 
claims of freedom, wealth, and virtue. He admits, 
however, that the public welfare may be promoted 
under other forms — a monarchy or an aristocracy — 
as well as under a “ polity but the latter he pre- 
fers, as tending to maintain a due equality of rights 
and relations among the membors of the community. 
One excellence of his system is, that it admits only 
the general pursuit of the common weal, which, like 
the private happiness sketched in his Ethics, is not 
to be made a distinct object under any particular 
form, but must be the universal aim of the whole 
organization of the society, as individual happiness 
is the result of the general regulation of all the mo- 
ral principles. It is true that he supposes a society 
to constitute itself in order to its own moral happi- 
ness, and herein is the defect of his scheme ; but 
this selfish principle must be considered as a neces- 
sary substitute in his system for a divine providence, 
the operation of which not being admitted or under- 
stood, he was obliged to have recourse to the agency 
of nature. 
Aristotle appears the only political theorist among 
the ancients who never lost sight of the moral nature 
of man in his speculations. While moBt others, not 
excepting Plato himself, treated human society mere- 
ly as a physical mass, capable of being moulded into 
particular forms by the mechanism of external cir- 
cumstances, he ascribes the formation of the best so- 
cial constitution to the force of custom, philosophy, 
