Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

​He laid down a single end (telos): the exercise of virtue in a complete life. And he also said that happiness is a composite realization made up of three kinds of goods: those of the soul, which he indeed calls primary in potentiality; second, those of the body, namely health, strength, beauty, and the like; and third, external goods, namely wealth, noble birth, reputation, and the like. He held that virtue is not self-sufficient for happiness; for it requires in addition both the bodily and the external goods, on the ground that the wise man would be unhappy if he should be in distress or in poverty and the like. Vice, however, is self-sufficient for unhappiness, even if external and bodily goods are present to it in the highest possible degree.

​He also said that the virtues do not mutually imply one another; for it is possible that someone who is prudent and similarly just may be intemperate and incontinent. And he said that the wise man is not impassive (apathes), but moderate in passion (metriopathes). He defined friendship as the equality of reciprocal goodwill; and of this, one kind is familial, another romantic, and another based on hospitality. He held also that erotic love (eros) is not only for sexual union, but also for philosophy. And the wise man will fall in love, engage in politics, marry, and live together with a king. There being three lives—the theoretical, the practical, and the pleasure-seeking—he preferred the theoretical. And the general disciplines of study are also very useful for the acquisition of virtue.

​In matters of natural science he was the most causal investigator of all, so as to assign causes even for the slightest things; wherefore he also composed not a few books of physical treatises. He declared God to be incorporeal, just as Plato did. His providence extends as far as the heavenly bodies and he himself is unmoved; while earthly affairs are ordered according to their affinity (sympatheia) with these heavenly things. There is, besides the four elements, also another fifth element, out of which the ethereal things are composed. Its motion is of a different kind, for it is circular. And the soul is also incorporeal, being the first actuality (entelecheia) of a natural and organic body possessing life potentially.

​He speaks of actuality (entelecheia), of which there is an incorporeal form; and this is twofold according to him. The one is in potentiality, as the statue of Hermes is in the wax that has the aptitude to receive the features, and the statue in the bronze; but that of the completed Hermes or statue is called an actuality in the sense of a state (hexis). By natural body he meant this, since of bodies some are made by human hand, as things produced by craftsmen, such as a tower or a ship, while others are by nature, such as plants and the bodies of animals. And he said organic, that is to say, fashioned toward some end, as vision is for seeing and hearing is for listening; and possessing life potentially, as having it within itself.

​Potentiality is also twofold, either as a state (hexis) or as an activity (energeia); as an activity, just as the waking person is said to have a soul, and as a state, just as the sleeping person. In order, then, that this sleeping person too may fall under the definition, he added potentially. He also made many other declarations on many subjects, which it would be tedious to enumerate. For in everything he was most industrious and most inventive, as is clear from the aforementioned treatises, which in number come close to four hundred, at least so many as are undisputed; for many other treatises and maxims of his, felicitous strokes of unwritten utterance, are also attributed to him.

​There have been eight men named Aristotle: the first, this man himself; the second, the statesman at Athens, of whom elegant forensic speeches are extant; the third, one who composed a work on the Iliad; the fourth, a Sicilian rhetorician, who wrote a reply to the Panegyric of Isocrates; the fifth, surnamed Myth, a disciple of Aeschines the Socratic; the sixth, a Cyrenaean, who wrote on poetics; the seventh, an athletic trainer, whom Aristoxenus mentions in his Life of Plato; the eighth, an obscure grammarian, whose treatise On Pleonasm is extant. Now of this Stagirite there were many disciples, but by far the most distinguished was Theophrastus, of whom we must speak.