Beginning of Essay
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is an analysis of character and intelligence as they relate to happiness. Here, Aristotle distinguished two kinds of "virtue," or human excellence: moral and intellectual. Moral virtue is an expression of character, formed by habits ....

Middle of Essay
.... in actual cases. He thus approved the contemporary institution of slavery but tempered his acceptance by insisting that masters should not abuse their authority, since the interests of master and slave are the same. It seemed to Aristotle that the individual's freedom of choice made an absolutely accurate analysis of human affairs impossible. "Practical science," then, such as politics or ethics, was called science only by courtesy and analogy. The inherent limitations on practical science are made clear in Aristotle's concepts of human nature and self-realization. Human nature certainly involves, for everyone, a capacity for forming habits; ....