tion of this state, and explained it by his doctrine of “habits.” By observing the various arts—as, for instance, harp-playing, and the like—he saw that “practice makes perfect;” and concluded that as by playing the harp a man became a harp-player, so by doing just things a man would become just, by doing brave things he would become brave; and, in short, that actions have a tendency to reproduce themselves, and thus to produce habits or states of the will. All this is trite enough now, but it was formulated for the first time by Aristotle.
In laying down his famous doctrine that it is the characteristic of virtue to preserve “the mean,” Aristotle was not entirely original. In this, as in many other cases, he only fixed into scientific form a conception which had been previously floating in the mind of Greece. Hesiod, the Seven Sages, the unknown authors of ‘Maxims,’ the Gnomic poets, Pindar, and the Tragedians, had all preached the doctrine of moderation—a doctrine most congenial to the natural good taste of the Hellenic people, who instinctively despised excess in any form as unintellectual and barbarous. What had hitherto been a universal popular dictum, Plato raised into philosophy, by pointing out (‘Philebus,’ p. 23-27) that in all things the law of “limit” is the cause of good, while th e unlimited, the unregulated, the chaotic—is evil. Thus, in the human body, the unlimited is the tendency to extremes, to disorder, to disease; but the introduction of the limit produces a balance of the constitution and good health. In sounds you have the infinite degrees
