activities which pass in the opinions of some for virtues and
happiness, friendship too is comparable in many respects to virtue
and particularly to justice, to such an extent indeed that it
may be analogized to furnish as schematics for all communities,
constitutions, and associations. If friendship shares the ambivalence
of justice as a personal habit and a bond of associations,
however, pleasure and pain retrace the stages of the ascent of
dialectic, for on the first level pleasure and pain are matters
with which moral virtues are concerned; again they themselves
are comparable to virtue and vice, continence and incontinence,
in being good and evil; and finally as an activity pleasure
is comparable with happiness itself and it is an ingredient
of happiness. The sprawling mass of moral problems is
treated between two extremes determined by the "natures" of
men, for the powers of man furnish, on the one hand, the materials
of ethics and, on the other, the rational rules of action
which are at once the product of human activity and its approximation
to the truths and processes of science. The "matter"
of morality in the actions and passions of men is oriented to its
ends in the moral virtues; the "forms" of morality in those virtues
are related to the means for their accomplishment; the
"end" of moral action is in happiness; but the intermediate
region in which actions and passions are regulated, precepts
applied, and happiness sought, is vast and indeterminate except
as repeated actions have sketched lines which may be
checked against the determinations of the prudent man.
Ethics is a part of the science of politics, or more precisely it
is the selection and treatment of those aspects of the problems
of conduct which are pertinent to determination by the virtues
and susceptible of control and judgment in the individual man.
The same or similar problems can be treated in terms of the
external associations and influences of men.