But it is not only in the phases of individual character and the experiences of personal life that the validity of the Aristotelian standard of well-being is strongly asserted. In every sphere of existence through the various drama of the cosmos, we find the same principle in operation. And we may, without qualification, broadly pronounce that the world is a κόσμος, an ordered and garnished whole, only in so far as it is held together by the harmonizing law of the mean; otherwise it jerks asunder, and through violent excess bolts into chaos. Take what we call Health, for instance; what is it but the rhythmical medium, of normal pulse between the excess of fever and the defect of feebleness? which two extremes, as the common saying is, necessarily meet; for they are both equally removed from healthy life, and sisters-uterine to death and dissolution. Then, again, what is Beauty? A power which all feel, but few can define; neither shall I attempt to define it now. But one thing at least in reference to it is quite plain, that it is always a medium { 165} betwixt two extremes, or, what comes to the same thing, a marriage of extremes. For by such a marriage, as we see in the commonest processes of chemical action, a mean product is produced of a comparatively mild and innocuous character. The corrosive acid or alkali is annihilated and a neutral salt comes to view. Exactly so in works of nature or art on which the imagination can pleasantly dwell. No extreme is beautiful. The extreme of force overwhelms; the extreme of gentleness enfeebles and enervates. Therefore, to make a handsome man, we must borrow a few tricks of grace from the female; and to make a woman who shall be more than an animated rose or primrose, we must find her infected with a certain dose of firmness and energy from the male. A mere masculine creature, composed altogether of the extreme of strength and force, is disagreeable, and often unbearable; a mere feminine creature in the extreme of delicacy, however finely tinted with the “_dolce mistura di rosa e di ligustro_,” which Ariosto lauds, if she is capable only of a gentle smile and a soft caress, very soon becomes tiresome. She is the extreme of the mere woman, and, like a cooing turtle-dove, soon satiates; and at the apparition of such an unfeathered pigeon we yawn, as from the fully-developed unmitigated male bear we shrink. But it is in the great movements of the social world--in the rise and fall of stock and commercial speculations--no less than in the slow changes and violent revolutions of Churches and States, that the operation of the Aristotelian mean is most strikingly exemplified. Moderation, indeed, both in Church and State, and on ’Change, is the one great condition of safety--no proposition { 166} in Euclid is more certain than this: but though this be the wisdom of government and of trade, it is a wisdom which political, commercial, and ecclesiastical adventurers in all ages have been slow to learn; and in public life we constantly meet with persons who act and speak as if they believed that the triumph of an extreme view is ever the triumph of right, and that the well-being of communities consists in the unlimited sway of one party and the complete annihilation of all others. And it may be said also, that, notwithstanding all the warnings of centuries of bloody experience, the man or the party that takes the strong one-sided violent view has, on critical occasions, the best chance to succeed. Wisdom in the days of Solomon lifted up her voice in the streets, and was not heard. It is even so now. The streets are not the place for wisdom. Wisdom requires calm reflection; but the streets are full of hurry and bustle. Aristotle had a serene contempt for the multitude, and the multitude have an instinctive aversion to Aristotle. When you bring a multitude of men together to be harangued, violent and extreme opinions pronounced in the strongest language are apt to be the most popular. A one-sided view taxes thought less; a one-sided speech flatters an ignorant audience, who are capable only of one idea--at least only of one at a time--and who delight to hug themselves in the fancy that there is no other idea in the universe. And the natural leader of a multitude so affected is not, of course, your man of many thoughts, your Aristotle, your Shakespeare, your Goethe, but your well-packed, self-contained, little man, full of bottled fire impatient to burst forth, who marches from his cradle to his grave capable only { 167} of one aspect of things, and who, if the notion by which he is governed happens to jump with the humour of the time, shall become the demagogue of the hour, or, if circumstances favour, the dictator of the age.