meaning by describing its content as "the service and vision of God"),
it is clear that he identified it with the life of the philosopher, as
he understood it, a life of ceaseless intellectual activity in which at
least at times all the distractions and disturbances inseparable from
practical life seemed to disappear and become as nothing. This ideal was
partly an inheritance from the more ardent idealism of his master Plato,
but partly it was the expression of personal experience.

The nobility of this ideal cannot be questioned; the conception of the
end of man or a life lived for truth--of a life blissfully absorbed in
the vision of truth--is a lofty and inspiring one. But we cannot resist
certain criticisms upon its presentation by Aristotle: (1) the relation
of it to the lower ideal of practice is left somewhat obscure; (2) it is
described in such a way as renders its realisation possible only to a
gifted few, and under exceptional circumstances; (3) it seems in various
ways, as regards its content, to be unnecessarily and unjustifiably
limited. But it must be borne in mind that this is a first endeavour to
determine its principle, and that similar failures have attended the
attempts to describe the "religious" or the "spiritual" ideals of
life, which have continually been suggested by the apparently inherent
limitations of the "practical" or "moral" life, which is the subject of
Moral Philosophy.

The Moral Ideal to those who have most deeply reflected on it leads
to the thought of an Ideal beyond and above it, which alone gives it
meaning, but which seems to escape from definite conception by man.
The richness and variety of this Ideal ceaselessly invite, but as
ceaselessly defy, our attempts to imprison it in a definite formula or
portray it in detailed imagination. Yet the thought of it is and remains
inexpungable from our minds.