Schools of Hellas : an essay on the practice and theory of ancient Greek education from 600 to 300 B.C.

help thinking that if Mr. Marshall had given consideration to the fresh light in which Professor Burnet often places a well-known passage, many of his observations would have fallen out otherwise. Deficiencies of this kind are not however so serious in a work with the aims of Mr. Marshall's as in one intended for strictly academic use. Aristotle's ethical system, by the very lack of schematic precision, which in this field he held it an error to seek, was able to embody and represent the mass of feelings and judgments on ethical questions operative in the world of his contemporaries better than a doctrinaire theory. And it is because these general feelings differ less from one age to another than the constructions of philosophers that Aristotle's Ethics is still a book of fresh interest for the ordinary man to-day. Mr. Marshall's work has the essential qualities of a healthy sense of actuality and an agreeable style. His judgment is sane and well informed. I t is impossible, of course, for anyone who expounds a philosophical theory to keep his own philosophical proclivities in abeyance. And where Mr. Marshall's run counter to those of some particular reader, Mr. Marshall will inevitably appear wrong and such reader will probably be inclined to read Aristotle in a somewhat different sense. This is not the place to note particular passages where Mr. Marshall's rendering appears to us questionable, but serious exception can surely be taken to his view that the ethical standard, in Aristotle's view, is derived merely from the general sense of the community in which the agent lives. If this were so, it would be impossible to arrange the communities themselves in an ethical scale. Mr. Marshall seems hardly to realize the unexpressed presuppositions upon which the Aristotelian ethieal theory rests, presuppositions which perhaps justify Mr. Stewart in saying tha t ' in all creatures there is a 6t16u TI which directs their efforts towards that which is naturallv good.'