Principles of western civilisation

VI THE ASCENDENCY OF THE PRESENT 181

In the scheme of a well-governed State which Aristotle has in view in the /odzfzcs, it was accordingly asserted that “none of the citizens should be permitted to exercise any mechanic employment or to follow merchandise ;”* and yet further, ‘‘if choice could be exercised, the husbandmen should by all means be slaves.”* The reason given for these ideals reveals at once the vastness of the interval which separates us from the author. It is that all these classes must be excluded from the possibility of being “virtuous.”® They have no part, that is to say, in the principles which are assumed to uphold the privileged life of the select body of persons constituting the exclusive State. It is the practice of these principles, by those whose interests they exclusively concern, that constitutes virtue.

In all the discussions by the Greek writers as to the highest good, alike in politics, in ethics, and in religion, the one fact which we have continually to note is the prevailing absence of the conceptions which spring from that sense of relationship to the universal and to the infinite which so profoundly affects the higher thought and action of the modern world. In Plato's Repubic the ideal State and the individual, exclusive and privileged, are only multiples or reflections of the qualities of each other. The horizon of desires related to the ascendant present is the horizon of the ideal life of each. The fact, which may be distinguished in any of the characteristic conceptions of the Republic (as, for example, those in the fifth Book) is that the meaning attached to all qualities and institutions —to individual virtue, social morality, the sexual

1 Politics, vii. ix. 2 [bid., vii. x. 2 Tbid., vii. ix.