h the air; and to do with _might_
whatsoever the hand findeth to do,--could not in anywise be defined as
"habits of choice in moderation." But the Aristotelian quibbles are so
shallow, that I look upon the retention of the book as a confession by
our universities that they consider practice in shallow quibbling one of
the essential disciplines of youth. Take, for instance, the distinction
made between "Envy" and "Rejoicing at Evil" ([Greek: phthonos] and
[Greek: epichairekakia]), in the second book of the Ethics, viz., that
envy is grieved when any one meets with good-fortune; but "the rejoicer
at evil so far misses of grieving, as even to rejoice" (the distinction
between the _good_ and _evil_, as subjects of the emotion, being thus
omitted, and merely the verbal opposition of grief and joy caught at);
and conceive the result, in the minds of most youths, of being forced to
take tricks of words such as this (and there are too many of them in
even the best Greek writers) for subjects of daily study and
admiration; the theory of the Ethics being, besides, so hopelessly
untenable, that even quibbling will not always face it out,--nay, will
not help it in exactly the first and most important example of virtue
which Aristotle has to give, and the very one which we might have
thought his theory would have fitted most neatly; for defining
"temperance" as a mean, and intemperance as one relative extreme, not
being able to find an opposite extreme, he escapes with the apology that
the kind of person who sins in the other extreme "has no precise name;
because, on the whole, he does not exist!"

I know well the common censure by which objections to such futilities of
so-called education are met, by the men who have been ruined by
them,--the common plea that anything does to "exercise the mind upon."
It is an utterly false one. The human soul, in youth, is _not_ a machine
of which you can polish the cogs with any kelp or brickdust near at
hand; and, having got it into working order, and good, empty, and oiled
serviceableness, start your immortal locomotive at twenty-five years old
or thirty, express from the Strait Gate, on the Narrow Road. The whole
period of youth is one essentially of formation, edification,
instruction, I use the words with their weight in them; intaking of
stores, establishment in vital habits, hopes and faiths. There is not an
hour of it but is trembling with destinies,--not a moment of which, once
past, the