Kitap 1
15
Accordingly Socrates the seniorA younger Socrates was a pupil of Plato. thought that the End is to get to know virtue, and he pursued an inquiry into the nature of justice and courage and each of the divisions of virtue. And this was a reasonable procedure, since he thought that all the virtues are forms of knowledge, so that knowing justice and being just must go together, for as soon as we have learnt geometry and architecture, we are architects and geometricians; owing to which he used to inquire what virtue is, but not how and from what sources it is produced.
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But although this does happen in the case of the theoretical sciences, inasmuch as astronomy and natural scienceThe Greek term primarily denotes biology, rather than physics in the modern sense (with which contrast the modern limitation of the term physiology, and of physic in the sense of medicine); accordingly it does not here include astronomy. and geometry have no other End except to get to know and to contemplate the nature of the things that are the subjects of the sciences (although it is true that they may quite possibly be useful to us accidentally for many of our necessary requirements),
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yet the End of the productive sciences is something different from science and knowledge, for example the End of medicine is health and that of political science ordered government, or something of that sort, different from mere knowledge of the science.
