Principles of western civilisation

174 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

sciousness in its outward expressions was related to activities bounded in their aim by the horizon of the existing political organisation. The sum of individual and social energy was, as it were, caught in the sweep of a process of which the culminating expression was a type of society in which every form of human activity tended to be raised to its highest expression in terms of the present.

The existing political State embraced, accordingly, the whole aim, meaning, responsibility, and interest in the life of the individual. In the writings of the Greek philosophers, and in most of the works of the Roman political writers, we encounter this conception at every turn. As we follow Aristotle through the pages of the two of his works which, of all the products of the Greek mind, have probably exercised the widest influence on the modern philosophy of society, namely, the “ Politics” and the “ Ethics,” we may perceive that we are everywhere in the presence of a fundamental idea. It is that the goal of all human effort is in the attainment of the most perfect possible life in the existing political organisation. It is the State which is made the theatre of all the ends to which consciousness is related. It is out of this conception that there proceeds the scheme of individual ethics, on the one hand, and of political theory, on the other, throughout the ancient world. In all the discussions, for instance, which Aristotle is conducting as to the nature of virtue, we always come in sight, in the last analysis, of the fact, curiously strange at first to our minds, that virtue is conceived as a form of folztzcal activity. Similarly, in all theories of the State in the ancient world, we always come into view of that fundamental