That is, you must allow for the recoil. “Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret.”

This illustration sets in so clear a light the doctrines entertained respectively by Aristotle, Eudoxus, and the Stoics regarding pleasure, that it is worth while to go into it fully. The reference is to Iliad iii. 154-160. The old counsellors, as Helen comes upon the city wall, acknowledge her surpassing beauty, and have no difficulty in understanding how both nations should have incurred such suffering for her sake still, fair as she is, home she must go, that she bring not ruin on themselves and their posterity. This exactly represents Aristotle’s relation to Pleasure he does not, with Eudoxus and his followers, exalt it into the Summum Bonum (as Paris would risk all for Helen), nor does he the the Stoics call it wholly evil, as Hector might have said that the woes Helen had caused had “banished all the beauty from her cheek,” but, with the aged counsellors, admits its charms, but aware of their dangerousness resolves to deny himself, he “feels her sweetness, yet defies her thrall.”

Αἴσθησις is here used as an analogous noun, to denote the faculty which, in respect of moral matters, discharges the same function that bodily sense does in respect of physical objects. It is worth while to notice how in our colloquial language we carry out the same analogy. We say of a transaction, that it “looks ugly,” “sounds oddly,” is a “nasty job,” “stinks in our nostrils,” is a “hard dealing.”