Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/195

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THE SCOPE OF SOCIOLOGY l8l

monstrosities of asceticism. The anchorite is as far as the sybarite from a genuine rendering of life. The concrete goods of life are incommensurable, but they are not incompatible. The just bal- ance of life has not been found by eliminating certain normal elements of human good and exaggerating other elements beyond their proportionate worth. The Greek ideal was not the whole truth, but it contained elements of truth which men have never been able long to ignore. Plato declares that his wish for life is : "To be healthy and beautiful, to become rich honestly, and to be gay and merry with my friends." The first item in his spe- cifications was doubtless his version of a-oxfrpocrvvr). It appears to have meant to the Greek, not all that our rendering " wisdom " connotes to us, but physical reasonableness, moderated and tem- perate sensuousness not quite the "sweet reasonableness" of modern Hellenism, but a fragment of the later conception. If Hawthorne correctly transferred the idea of Praxiteles' Faun to Donatello, that artless creature before his transformation sym- bolized not merely the Greek but the universal norm of one element in human personality. The right man will be a man of exuberant, exultant health. Without generalizing this ideal as a program, every man according to his insight instinctively or systematically reaches after this realization. Right human life will be the life of a race of splendid physical men. The starved, the stunted, the feeble, the sick man advertises arrest or deflec- tion of the life-process. Before and after health becomes a reflective desire it is the primary instinctive desire. Before and after the activities that belong to health are balanced and pro- portioned and regulated they often betray a fierce force that leaps over the limits of good in their own realm and threatens all the other goods of life. Neither the abuses of excessive vitality, however, nor the misfortunes of defective vitality can permanently confuse our inevitable desire for health in its appro- priate form and power. Before and in and through all his other activities the individual is incessant urgency and exercise of the health desire.

Hebrew wisdom placed the half-truth, " All that a man hath will he give for his life," in the mouth of the Father of Lies. It