lato addressed
himself in one of his earlier dialogues, already frequently referred
to, the _Meno_, was the teachableness of Virtue; in that dialogue he
comes to the conclusion that Virtue is teachable, but that there are
none capable of teaching it; for the {192} wise men of the time are
guided not by knowledge but by right opinion, or by a divine instinct
which is incommunicable. Plato is thus led to seek a machinery of
education, and it is with a view to this that he constructs his ideal
_Republic_. Aristotle took up this view of the state as educative of
the individual citizens, and brought it under the dynamic formula. In
the child reason is not actual; there is no rational law governing his
acts, these are the immediate result of the strongest impulse. Yet
only when a succession of virtuous acts has formed the virtuous habit
can a man be said to be truly good. How is this process to begin? The
answer is that the reason which is only latent or dynamic in the child
is actual or realised in the parent or teacher, or generally in the
community which educates the child. The law at first then is imposed
on the child from without, it has an appearance of unnaturalness, but
only an appearance. For the law is there in the child, prepared, as he
goes on in obedience, gradually to answer from within to the summons
from without, till along with the virtuous habit there emerges also
into the consciousness of the child, no longer a child but a man, the
apprehension of the law as his own truest nature.

These remarks on education are sufficient to show that in Morals also,
as conceived by Aristotle, there is a law of vital development. It may
be {193} sufficient by way of illustration to quote the introductory
sentences of Aristotle's _Ethics_, in which the question of the nature
of the chief good is, in his usual tentative manner, discussed: "If
there be any end of what we do which we desire for itself, while all
other ends are desired for it, that is, if we do not in every case have
some ulterior end (for if that were so we should go on to infinity, and
our efforts would be vain and useless), this ultimate end desired for
itself will clearly be the chief good and the ultimate best. Now since
every activity, whether of knowing or doing, aims at some good, it is
for us to settle what the good is which the civic activity aims
at,--what, in short, is the ultimate end of all 'goods' connected with
conduct? So far as the