| INTRODUCTION |
| ARISTOTLE’S ETHICS |
| BOOK I |
| BOOK II |
| BOOK III |
| BOOK IV |
| BOOK V |
| BOOK VI |
| BOOK VII |
| BOOK VIII |
| BOOK IX |
| BOOK X |
| NOTES |
The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which hisPolitics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject.This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the “philosophy ofhuman affairs;” but more frequently Political or Social Science. In thetwo works taken together we have their author’s whole theory of humanconduct or practical activity, that is, of all human activity which is notdirected merely to knowledge or truth. The two parts of this treatise aremutually complementary, but in a literary sense each is independent andself-contained. The proem to the Ethics is an introduction to the wholesubject, not merely to the first part; the last chapter of the Ethicspoints forward to the Politics, and sketches for that part of thetreatise the order of enquiry to be pursued (an order which in the actualtreatise is not adhered to).
The principle of distribution of the subject-matter between the two works isfar from obvious, and has been much debated. Not much can be gathered fromtheir titles, which in any case were not given to them by their author. Nor dothese titles suggest any very compact unity in the works to which they areapplied: the plural forms, which survive so oddly in English (Ethics,Politics), were intended to indicate the treatment within a single workof a group of connected questions. The unity of the first group arisesfrom their centring round the topic of character, that of the second from theirconnection with the existence and life of the city or state. We have thus toregard the Ethics as dealing with one group of problems and thePolitics with a second, both falling within the wide compass ofPolitical Science. Each of these groups falls into sub-groups which roughlycorrespond to the several books in each work. The tendency to take up one byone the various problems which had suggested themselves in the wide fieldobscures both the unity of the subject-matter and its proper articulation. Butit is to be remembered that what is offered us is avowedly rather an enquirythan an exposition of hard and fast doctrine.
Nevertheless each work aims at a relative completeness, and it is important toobserve the relation of each to the other. The distinction is not that the onetreats of Moral and the other of Political Philosophy, nor again that the onedeals with the moral activity of the individual and the other with that of theState, nor once more that the one gives us the theory of human conduct, whilethe other discusses its application in practice, though not all of thes