_magnanimity_ between vainglory and pusillanimity; _truthfulness_
between exaggeration and dissimulation; _friendship_ between
complaisance, or flattery, and frowardness,--and so of the rest. The
golden mean must be taken _in relation to ourselves_, because in many
matters of behaviour and the management of the passions the right
amount for one person would be excessive for another, according to
varieties of age, sex, station, and disposition. Thus anger that might
become a layman might be unbefitting in a churchman; and a man might
be thought loquacious if he talked as much as a discreet matron.
[Footnote 5] The golden mean, then, must be _defined by reason_
according to the particular circumstances of each case. But as Reason
herself is to seek where she is not guided by Prudence, the mean of
virtue must be defined, not by the reason of the buffoon Pantolabus,
or of Nomentanus the spendthrift, but _as a prudent man_ would define
it, given an insight into the case.

[Footnote 5: Ar., _Pol_., III., iv., 17, says just the converse, which
marks the altered position of woman in modern society.]

5. The "golden mean," as Horace named it (_Od_., ii., 10), obtains
principally, if not solely, in living things, and in what appertains
to living things, and in objects of art. A lake, as such, has no
natural dimensions: it may be ten miles long, it may be a hundred; but
an elephant or an oak-tree cannot go beyond a certain growth. There is
a vast range between the temperature of a blast-furnace and the
temperature of the ice-pack on the Polar Sea, but very limited is the
range possible in the blood of a living man. Viewed artistically, a
hill may be too low, or a lake want width, for man's eye to rest upon
it with perfect satisfaction. The golden mean, then, is an artistic
conception, and what I may call an _anthropological_ conception: it