Until these people light upon some nobler principle than any at which they still halt, they must be left where they are and where they choose to be, never understanding what the Good of Life is to those that can make it theirs, never knowing to what kind of beings it is accessible.
What then is happiness? Let us try basing it upon Life.
3.Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything that lives will be capable of happiness, and those will be effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which every living thing is by nature receptive.We could not deny it to the irrational whilst allowing it to the rational.If happiness were inherent in the bare being-alive, the common ground in which the cause of happiness could always take root would be simply life.
Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere living but in the reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that they are not really making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this reasoning faculty, round which they centre happiness, is a property [not the subject of a property]: the subject, to them, must be the Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term that they find the basis of the happiness: so that they are making it consist not in life but in a particular kind of life- not, of course, a species formally opposite but, in terminology, standing as an "earlier" to a "later" in the one Kind.
Now in common use this word "Life" embraces many forms which shade down from primal to secondary and so on, all massed under the common term- life of plant and life of animal- each phase brighter or dimmer than its next: and so it evidently must be with the Good-of-Life.And if thing is ever the image of thing, so every Good must always be the image of a higher Good.
If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all that belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a being that lives fully.
And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme Good if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the Supreme Good can be no other than the authentically living, no other than Life in its greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present as something essential not as something brought from without, a life needing no foreign substance called in from a foreign realm, to establish it in good.
For what could be added to the fullest life to make it the best life? If anyone should answer, "The nature of Good" [The Good, as a Divine Hypostasis], the reply would certainly be near our thought, but we are not seeking the Cause but the main constituent.
It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual Nature beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are incomplete, are phantoms of life, imperfect, not pure, not more truly life than they are its contrary: here let it be said succinctly that since all living things proceed from the one principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle must be the first life and the most complete.
4.If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains happiness: if not, happiness must be made over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.
But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must consider what this perfect life is.The matter may be stated thus:
It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life.
But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign imported into his nature?
No: there exists no single human being that does not either potentially or effectively possess this thing which we hold to constitute happiness.
But are we to think of man as including this form of life, the perfect, after the manner of a partial constituent of his entire nature?
We say, rather, that while in some men it is present as a mere portion of their total being- in those, namely, that have it potentially- there is, too, the man, already in possession of true felicity, who is this perfection realized, who has passed over into actual identification with it.All else is now mere clothing about the man, not to be called part of him since it lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to himself by any act of the will.
To the man in this state, what is the Good?
He himself by what he has and is.
And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode.
The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks nothing else.
What indeed could he be seeking? Certainly none of the less worthy things; and the Best he carries always within him.
He that has such a life as this has all he needs in life.
Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him.Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of this degree.He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.
Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded is stable ever.Suppose death strikes at his household or at his friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too.And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part.
5.But what of sorrows, illnesses and all else that inhibit the native activity?