Aristotle's mean is already a demanding balance
the μεσον or balance of Aristotle
The Greek term names the mean or intermediate. The breakfast example has a close counterpart in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: excessive and deficient food both damage health (II.2), and the appropriate ration differs between an experienced athlete and a beginner (II.6). This is a comparison of arguments, not evidence that Chesterton borrowed that example directly. Aristotle, II.2 and II.6.
Aristotle's mean is not an arithmetic midpoint or a command always to feel mildly. It is relative to the agent and circumstances; emotions must answer to their proper objects, occasions, motives and manner. Virtue is intermediate between failures, but extreme in excellence. Nor does every action have an acceptable middle: theft and murder are wrong as such. These qualifications matter when Chesterton proceeds to distinguish a pagan balance from Christian passions retained at full strength. Aristotle already supplies a more exacting account than simple dilution. II.6, especially 1106a26–1107a27.
The present paragraph therefore makes a limited concession: equilibrium remains necessary, while its means of achievement remain open. Read with the following examples, Chesterton's proposed innovation concerns how opposed commitments can coexist, rather than whether there should be limits at all. His named appeal to Aristotle supports the common starting point; it does not establish that every pagan account reduced virtue to lukewarm compromise.
The comparison uses the Internet Classics Archive's W. D. Ross translation of Aristotle's fourth-century-BCE work. Ross's translation first appeared in 1925, after Orthodoxy (1908); it is an explanatory witness, not Chesterton's possible English source. The Wikisource witness inspected for publication details) identifies its impression as 1931 and first edition as 1925.
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