Moral Philosophy | Page 9

Is not moderation a virtue, and
contentment wisdom? Yes, moderation is a virtue, but it concerns only
the use of means, not the apprehension of ends. The patient, not to say
the physician, desires medicines in moderation, so much as will do him
good and no more; but, so far as his end is health, he desires all
possible health, perfect health. The last end, then, is to be desired as a

thing to possess without end or measure, fully and without defect.
4. We have then these facts to philosophise on: that all men desire
perfect happiness: that this desire is natural, springing from the rational
soul which sets man above the brute: that on earth man may attain to
contentment, and to some happiness, but not to perfect happiness: that
consequently nature has planted in man a desire for which on earth she
has provided no adequate satisfaction.
5. If the course of events were fitful and wayward, so that effects
started up without causes, and like causes under like conditions
produced unlike effects, and anything might come of anything, there
would be no such thing as that which we call nature. When we speak of
nature, we imply a regular and definite flow of tendencies, this thing
springing from that and leading to that other; nothing from nothing, and
nothing leading nowhere; no random, aimless proceedings; but definite
results led up to by a regular succession of steps, and surely ensuing
unless something occurs on the way to thwart the process. How this is
reconciled with Creation and Freewill, it is not our province to enquire:
suffice it to say that a natural agent is opposed to a free one, and
creation is the starting-point of nature. But to return. Everywhere we
say, "this is for that," wherever there appears an end and consummation
to which the process leads, provided it go on unimpeded. Now every
event that happens is a part of some process or other. Every act is part
of a tendency. There are no loose facts in nature, no things that happen,
or are, otherwise than in consequence of something that has happened,
or been, before, and in view of something else that is to happen, or be,
hereafter. The tendencies of nature often run counter to one another, so
that the result to which this or that was tending is frustrated. But a
tendency is a tendency, although defeated; this was for _that_, although
that for which it was has got perverted to something else. There is no
tendency which of itself fails and comes to naught, apart from
interference. Such a universal and absolute break-down is unknown to
nature.
6. All this appears most clearly in organic beings, plants and animals.
Organisms, except the very lowest, are compounds of a number of

different parts, each fulfilling a special function for the good of the
whole. There is no idle constituent in an organic body, none without its
function. What are called rudimentary organs, even if they serve no
purpose in the individual, have their use in the species, or in some
higher genus. In the animal there is no idle natural craving, or appetite.
True, in the individual, whether plant or animal, there are many
potentialities frustrate and made void. That is neither here nor there in
philosophy. Philosophy deals not with individuals but with species, not
with Bucephalus or Alexander, but with _horse_, man. It is nothing to
philosophy that of a thousand seeds there germinate perhaps not ten.
Enough that one seed ever germinates, and that all normal specimens
are apt to do the like, meeting with proper environment. That alone
shows that seed is not an idle product in this or that class of living
beings.
7. But, it will be said, not everything contained in an organism
ministers to its good. There is refuse material, only good to get rid of:
there are morbid growths; there is that tendency to decay, by which
sooner or later the organism will perish. First, then, a word on diseases.
Diseases are the diseases of the individual; not of the race. The race, as
such, and that is what the philosopher studies, is healthy: all that can be
imputed to the race is liability to disease. That liability, and the
tendency to decay and die, are found in living things, because their
essence is of finite perfection; there cannot be a plant or animal, that
has not these drawbacks in itself, as such. They represent, not the work
of nature, but the failure of nature, and the point beyond which nature
can no further go.
8. On the preceding observations Aristotle formulated the great
maxim--called by Dr. Thomas Browne, _Religio Medici_, p. i., sect. 15,
"the only indisputable axiom in philosophy,"--Nature does nothing in