produced. That product is either useful or artistic; if useful, it
ministers to some further end still; if artistic, it ministers to
contemplation. Happiness, indeed, is no exercise of the practical
understanding whatever. The noblest exercises of practical
understanding are for military purposes and for statesmanship. But war
surely is not an end in itself to any right-minded man. Statecraft,
too, has an end before it, the happiness of the people. It is a labour
in view of happiness. We must follow down the third lane, and say:

6. _Happiness is the act of the speculative understanding
contemplating for contemplation's sake_. This act has all the marks of
happiness. It is the highest act of man's highest power. It is the
most capable of continuance. It is fraught with pleasure, purest and
highest in quality. It is of all acts the most self-sufficient and
independent of environment, provided the object be to the mind's eye
visible. It is welcome for its own sake, not as leading to any further
good. It is a life of ease and leisure: man is busy that he may come
to ease.

7. Aristotle says of this life of continued active contemplation:

"Such a life will be too good for man; for not as he is man will he so
live, but inasmuch as there is a divine element in his composition. As
much as this element excels the compound into which it enters, so much
does the act of the said element excel any act in any other line of
virtue. If, then, the understanding is divine in comparison with man,
the life of the understanding is divine in comparison with human life.
We must not take the advice of those who tell us, that being man, one
should cherish the thoughts of a man, or being mortal, the thoughts of
a mortal, but so far as in us lies, we must play the immortal [Greek: