Let us next begin a fresh part of the subject by laying down that the states of moral character to be avoided are of three kinds—Vice, Unrestraint, and Bestiality.¹ The opposite dispositions in the case of two of the three are obvious: one we call Virtue, the other Self-restraint. As the opposite of Bestiality it will be most suitable to speak of Superhuman Virtue, or goodness on a heroic or divine scale; just as Homer² has represented Priam as saying of Hector, on account of his surpassing valor— nor seemed to be The son of mortal man, but of a god. Hence if, as men say, surpassing virtue changes men into gods, the disposition opposed to Bestiality will clearly be some quality more than human; for there is no such thing as Virtue in the case of a god, any more than there is Vice or Virtue in the case of a beast: divine goodness is something more exalted than Virtue, and bestial badness is different in kind from Vice. And inasmuch as it is rare for a man to be divine, in the sense in which that word is commonly used by the Lacedaemonians as a term of extreme admiration—“Yon mon’s divine,”they say—, so a bestial character is rare among human beings; it is found most frequently among barbarians, and some cases also occur as a result of disease or arrested development. We sometimes also use “bestial” as a term of opprobrium for a surpassing degree of human vice.³ But the nature of the bestial disposition will have to be touched on later; and of Vice we have spoken already. We must however discuss Unrestraint and Softness or Luxury, and also Self-restraint and Endurance. 1145bNeither of these two classes of character is to be conceived as identical with Virtue and Vice, nor yet as different in kind from them. Our proper course with this subject as with others will be to present the various views about it, and then, after first reviewing the difficulties they involve, finally to establish if possible all or, if not all, the greater part and the most important of the opinions generally held with respect to these states of mind; since if the discrepancies can be solved, and a residuum of current opinion left standing, the true view will have been sufficiently established.⁴ Now the following opinions are held: (a) that Self-restraint and Endurance are good and praiseworthy dispositions, Unrestraint and Softness bad and blameworthy; (b) that the self-restrained man is the man who abides by the results of his calculations, the unrestrained, one who readily abandons the conclusion he has reached; (c) that the unrestrained man does things that he knows to be evil, under the influence of passion, whereas the self-restrained man, knowing that his desires are evil, refuses to follow them on principle; (d) that the temperate man is always self-restrained and enduring; but that the converse is invariably the case some deny, although others affirm it: the latter identify the unrestrained with the profligate and the profligate with the unrestrained promiscuously, the former distinguish between them. (e) Sometimes it is said that the prudent man cannot be unrestrained, sometimes that some prudent and clever men are unrestrained. (f)Again, men are spoken of as unrestrained in anger, and in the pursuit of honor and of gain. These then are the opinions advanced.

The difficulties that may be raised are the following. (c) How can a man fail in self-restraint when believing correctly that what he does is wrong? Some people say that he cannot do so when he knows the act to be wrong; since, as Socrates held, it would be strange if, when a man possessed Knowledge, some other thing should overpower it, and “drag it about like a slave.”⁵ In fact Socrates used to combat the view⁶ altogether, implying that there is no such thing as Unrestraint, since no one, he held, acts contrary to what is best, believing what he does to be bad, but only through ignorance. Now this theory is manifestly at variance with plain facts; and we ought to investigate the state of mind in question more closely. If failure of self-restraint is caused by ignorance, we must examine what sort of ignorance it is. For it is clear that the man who fails in self-restraint does not think the action right before he comes under the influence of passion.— But some thinkers accept the doctrine in a modified form. They allow that nothing is more powerful than knowledge, but they do not allow that no one acts contrary to what he opines to be the better course; and they therefore maintain that the unrestrained man when he succumbs to the temptations of pleasure possesses not Knowledge but only Opinion. And yet if it is really Opinion and not Knowledge—not a strong belief 1146athat offers resistance but only a weak one (like that of persons in two minds about something)—, we could forgive a man for not keeping to his opinions in opposition to strong desires; but we do not forgive vice, nor any other blameworthy quality.—(e) Is it then when desire is opposed by Prudence that we blame a man for yielding? for Prudence is extremely strong. But this is strange, for it means that the same person can be at once prudent and unrestrained; yet no one could possibly maintain that the prudent man is capable of doing voluntarily the basest actions. And furthermore it has already been shown⁷ that Prudence displays itself in action (for it is concerned with ultimate particulars), and implies the possession of the other Virtues as well. Again (d) if Self-restraint implies having strong and evil desires, the temperate man cannot be self-restrained, nor the self-restrained man temperate; for the temperate man does not have excessive or evil desires. But a self-restrained man must necessarily have strong and evil desires; since if a man’s desires are good, the disposition that prevents him from obeying them will be evil, and so Self-restraint will not always be good; while if his desires are weak and not evil, there is nothing to be proud of in resisting them; nor is it anything remarkable if they are evil and weak. Again (a, b) if Self-restraint makes a man steadfast in all his opinions, it may be bad, namely, if it makes him persist even in a false opinion. And if Unrestraint makes him liable to abandon any opinion, in some cases Unrestraint will be good. Take the instance of Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes⁸ of Sophocles. Neoptolemus abandons a resolution that he has been persuaded by Odysseus to adopt, because of the pain that it gives him to tell a lie: in this case inconstancy is praiseworthy. Again (a, c) there is the difficulty raised by the argument of the sophists. The sophists wish to show their cleverness by entrapping their adversary into a paradox, and when they are successful, the resultant chain of reasoning ends in a deadlock: the mind is fettered, being unwilling to stand still because it cannot approve the conclusion reached, yet unable to go forward because it cannot untie the knot of the argument. Now one of their arguments proves that Folly combined with Unrestraint is a virtue. It runs as follows: if a man is foolish and also unrestrained, owing to his unrestraint he does the opposite of what he believes that he ought to do; but he believes⁹ that good things are bad, and that he ought not to do them; therefore he will do good things and not bad ones. Again (b, d) one who does and pursues what is pleasant from conviction and choice,¹⁰ might be held to be a better man than one who acts in the same way not from calculation but from unrestraint, because he is more easy to cure, since he may be persuaded to alter his conviction; whereas the unrestrained man comes under the proverb that says “when water chokes you, what are you to drink to wash it down?” Had he been convinced that what he does is right, 1146ba change of conviction might have caused him to desist; but as it is he is convinced that he ought to do one thing and nevertheless does another thing.¹¹ Again (f) if Self-restraint and Unrestraint can be displayed with reference to anything, what is the meaning of the epithet “unrestrained” without qualification? No one has every form of unrestraint, yet we speak of some men as simply “unrestrained.” Such, more or less, are the difficulties that arise. Part of the conflicting opinions we have to clear out of the way, but part to leave standing; for to solve a difficulty is to find the answer to a problem.¹²

We have then to consider, first (i) whether men fail in self-restraint knowing what they do is wrong, or not knowing, and if knowing, knowing in what sense; and next (ii) what are to be set down as the objects with which Self-restraint and Unrestraint are concerned: I mean, are they concerned with pleasure and pain of all sorts, or only with certain special pleasures and pains? and (iii) is Self-restraint the same as Endurance or distinct from it? and so on with (iv) the other questions akin to this subject. A starting-point for our investigation is to ask¹³ whether the differentia¹⁴ of the self-restrained man and the unrestrained is constituted by their objects, or by their dispositions: I mean, whether a man is called unrestrained solely because he fails to restrain himself with reference to certain things, or rather because he has a certain disposition, or rather for both reasons combined. A second question is, can Self-restraint and Unrestraint be displayed in regard to everything, or not? When a man is said to be “unrestrained” without further qualification, it does not mean that he is so in relation to everything, but to those things in regard to which a man can be profligate; and also it does not mean merely that he is concerned with these things (for in that case Unrestraint would be the same thing as Profligacy), but that he is concerned with them in a particular manner. The profligate yields to his appetites from choice, considering it right always to pursue the pleasure that offers, whereas the man of defective self-restraint does not think so, but pursues it all the same. (i) Now the suggestion that it is not Knowledge, but True Opinion, against which unrestrained men act, is of no importance for our argument. Some men hold their opinions with absolute certainty, and take them for positive knowledge; so that if weakness of conviction be the criterion for deciding that men who act against their conception of what is right must be said to opine rather than to know the right, there will really be no difference in this respect between Opinion and Knowledge; since some men are just as firmly convinced of what they opine as others are of what they know: witness Heracleitus.¹⁵ (1) But the word know is used in two senses. A man who has knowledge but is not exercising it is said to know, and so is a man who is actually exercising his knowledge. It will make a difference whether a man does wrong having the knowledge that it is wrong but not consciously thinking of his knowledge, or with the knowledge consciously present to his mind. The latter would be felt to be surprising; but it is not surprising that a man should do what he knows to be wrong if he is not conscious of the knowledge at the time. 1147a(2) Again, reasoning on matters of conduct employs premises of two forms.¹⁶ Now it is quite possible for a man to act against knowledge when he knows both premises but is only exercising his knowledge of the universal premise and not of the particular; for action has to do with particular things. Moreover, there is a distinction as regards the universal term: one universal is predicated of the man himself, the other of the thing; for example, he may know and be conscious of the knowledge that dry food is good for every man and that he himself is a man, or even that food of a certain kind is dry, but either not possess or not be actualizing the knowledge whether the particular food before him is food of that kind. Now clearly the distinction between these two ways of knowing will make all the difference in the world. It will not seem at all strange that the unrestrained man should “know” in one way, but it would be astonishing if he knew in another way. (3) Again, it is possible for men to “have knowledge” in yet another way besides those just discussed; for even in the state of having knowledge without exercising it we can observe a distinction: a man may in a sense both have it and not have it; for instance, when he is asleep, or mad, or drunk. But persons under the influence of passion are in the same condition; for it is evident that anger, sexual desire, and certain other passions, actually alter the state of the body, and in some cases even cause madness. It is clear therefore that we must pronounce the unrestrained to “have knowledge” only in the same way as men who are asleep or mad or drunk. Their using the language of knowledge¹⁷ is no proof that they possess it. Persons in the states mentioned¹⁸ repeat propositions of geometry and verses of Empedocles; students who have just begun a subject reel off its formulae, though they do not yet know their meaning, for knowledge has to become part of the tissue of the mind, and this takes time. Hence we must conceive that men who fail in self-restraint talk in the same way as actors speaking a part. (4) Again, one may also study the cause of Unrestraint scientifically,¹⁹ thus: In a practical syllogism, the major premise is an opinion, while the minor premise deals with particular things, which are the province of perception. Now when the two premises are combined, just as in theoretic reasoning the mind is compelled to affirm the resulting conclusion, so in the case of practical premises you are forced at once to do it. For example, given the premises “All sweet things ought to be tasted” and “Yonder thing is sweet”—a particular instance of the general class—, you are bound, if able and not prevented, immediately to taste the thing. When therefore there is present in the mind on the one hand a universal judgement forbidding you to taste and on the other hand a universal judgement saying “All sweet things are pleasant,” and a minor premise “Yonder thing is sweet” (and it is this minor premise that is active²⁰) , and when desire is present at the same time, then, though the former universal judgement says “Avoid that thing,” the desire leads you to it (since desire can put the various parts of the body in motion). 1147bThus it comes about that when men fail in self-restraint, they act in a sense under the influence of a principle or opinion, but an opinion not in itself but only accidentally opposed to the right principle (for it is the desire, and not the opinion, that is really opposed). Hence the lower animals cannot be called unrestrained, if only for the reason that they have no power of forming universal concepts, but only mental images and memories of particular things. If we ask how the unrestrained man’s ignorance is dissipated and he returns to a state of knowledge, the explanation is the same as in the case of drunkenness and sleep, and is not peculiar to failure of self-restraint. We must go for it to physiology. But inasmuch as the last premise, which originates action, is an opinion as to some object of sense, and it is this opinion which the unrestrained man when under the influence of passion either does not possess, or only possesses in a way which as we saw does not amount to knowing it but only makes him repeat it as the drunken man repeats the maxims of Empedocles, and since the ultimate term is not a universal, and is not deemed to be an object of Scientific Knowledge in the same way as a universal term is, we do seem to be led to the conclusion²¹ which Socrates sought to establish. For the knowledge which is present when failure of self-restraint²² occurs is not what is held to be Knowledge in the true sense, nor is it true Knowledge which is dragged about by passion, but knowledge derived from sense-perception. So much for the question whether failure of self-restraint can go with knowledge or not, and with knowledge in what sense.