true nature should
aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a
harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which
rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and
beautiful.

Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other
creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come
on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with
two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that
one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call
the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That
every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the
whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says
in one passage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought
to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in
women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting
perfection, and thus woman is man _manque_. On these lines of thought it
is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely
valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed
only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers.
This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests,
cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and
the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the
higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he
justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated
merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to
aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.

But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and
truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that
reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that
all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one
harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which
the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present
in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike
power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around
him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters
have a value of their own, unique