This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[1218b]
[1]
(for
universality might be an attribute of even a small good), and also it
is not practicable; for medical science does not study how to procure
an attribute that belongs to anything, but how to procure health, and
similarly also each of the other practical sciences. But 'good' has many meanings,
and there is a part of it that is beautiful, and one form of it is
practicable but another is not. The sort of good that is practicable
is that which is an object aimed at, but the good in things
unchangeable is not practicable. It is manifest, therefore, that the
Absolute Good we are looking for is not the Form of good, nor yet the
good as universal, for the Form is unchangeable and impracticable, and
the universal good though changeable is not practicable. But the
object aimed at as End is the chief good, and is the cause of the
subordinate goods and first of all; so that the Absolute Good would be this—the
End of the goods practicable for man. And this is the good that comes
under the supreme of all the practical sciences, which is Politics and
Economics and Wisdom; for these states of character differ from the
others in the fact that they are supreme (whether they differ at all
from one another must be discussed later on1). And that the End stands in a causal relation to the
means subordinate to it is shown by the method of teachers; they prove
that the various means are each good by first defining the End,
because the End aimed at is a cause: for example, since to be in
health is so-and-so, what contributes to health must necessarily be
so-and-so;
[20]
the
wholesome is the efficient cause of health, though only the cause of
its existing—it is not the cause of health's being a good.
Furthermore nobody
proves that health is a good (unless he is a sophist and not a
physician—it is sophists that juggle with irrelevant
arguments), any more than he proves any other first
principle.After this we must take
a fresh starting-point2 and consider, in regard to the good as End for
man and in regard to the best of practicable goods, how many senses
there are of the term 'best of all,' since this is best.
1 See Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1141b 21-1142a 11
2 This clause and the last clause of the sentence render words that look like an interpolation patched into the text from the opening sentence of Book 2.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.