The profligate, as we said,¹ does not feel remorse, for he abides by his choice; the unrestrained man on the other hand invariably repents his excesses afterwards. Hence the objection that we stated² does not hold good; on the contrary, it is the profligate who cannot be cured, whereas the unrestrained man can; for Vice resembles diseases like dropsy and consumption, whereas Unrestraint is like epilepsy, Vice being a chronic, Unrestraint an intermittent evil. Indeed Unrestraint and Vice are entirely different in kind, for Vice is unconscious, whereas the unrestrained man is aware of his infirmity. 1151aAmong the unrestrained themselves, the impulsive³ sort are better than those who know the right principle but do not keep to it; for these succumb to smaller temptations, and they do not yield without deliberation, as do the impulsive; the unrestrained⁴ man is like people who get drunk quickly, and with a small amount of wine, or with less than most men. That Unrestraint is not strictly a vice (though it is perhaps vice in a sense), is clear; for Unrestraint acts against deliberate choice, Vice in accordance with it. But nevertheless in the actions that result from it it resembles Vice: just as Demodocus wrote of the people of Miletus— Milesians are no fools, ’tis true But yet they act as fools would do. Similarly the unrestrained are not unjust, but they do unjust things. Again,⁵ the unrestrained man is so constituted as to pursue bodily pleasures that are excessive and contrary to right principle without any belief that he ought to do so, whereas the profligate, because he is so constituted as to pursue them, is convinced that he ought to pursue them. Therefore the former can easily be persuaded to change,⁶ but the latter cannot. For virtue preserves the fundamental principle,⁷ vice destroys it, and the first principle or starting-point in matters of conduct is the end proposed, which corresponds to the hypotheses⁸ of mathematics; hence no more in ethics than in mathematics are the first principles imparted by process of reasoning, but by virtue, whether natural or acquired by training in right opinion as to the first principle. The man of principle therefore is temperate, the man who has lost all principle, profligate. But there is a person who abandons his choice, against right principle, under the influence of passion, who is mastered by passion sufficiently for him not to act in accordance with right principle, but not so completely as to be of such a character as to believe that the reckless pursuit of pleasure is right. This is the unrestrained man: he is better than the profligate, and not absolutely bad, for in him the highest part of man, the fundamental principle, is still preserved. Opposed to the unrestrained man is another, who stands firm by his choice, and does not abandon it under the mere impulse of passion. It is clear then from these considerations that Self-restraint is a good quality and Unrestraint a bad one.

Is then a man self-restrained if he stands by a principle or choice of any sort, or must it be the right choice? and is a man unrestrained if he fails to stand by a choice or principle of any sort, or only if he fails to stand by the true principle and the right choice? This difficulty was raised before.⁹ Perhaps the answer is, that though accidentally it may be any principle or choice, essentially it is the true principle and the right choice that the one stands by and the other does not; in the sense that if a man chooses or pursues b as a means to a, 1151ba is essentially, b only accidentally, his object and his choice. And by “essentially” we mean “absolutely” ; hence while in a sense it is any sort of opinion, speaking absolutely it is the true opinion that the one stands by and the other abandons. But there are some persons who stand by their opinion whom we call “obstinate,” meaning that they are hard to convince, and not easily persuaded to change their convictions. These bear some resemblance to the self-restrained man, as the prodigal does to the liberal, and the reckless to the brave; but they are really different in many respects. The self-restrained man stands firm against passion and desire: he will be ready on occasion to yield to persuasion; but the obstinate stand firm against reason: they are not proof against desire, and are often led by pleasure. Types of obstinacy are the opinionated, the stupid, and the boorish. The motives of the opinionated are pleasure and pain: the agreeable sense of victory in not being persuaded to change their minds, and the annoyance of having the decrees of their sovereign will and pleasure annulled. Hence they really resemble the unrestrained more than the restrained. And there are some who fail to abide by their resolves from some other cause than lack of self-restraint, for instance, Neoptolemus¹⁰ in thePhiIoctetesof Sophocles. It is true that his motive for changing was pleasure, though a noble pleasure, since it was pleasant¹¹ for him to speak the truth, and he had only told a lie at the instigation of Odysseus. In fact, not everyone whose conduct is guided by pleasure is either profligate and base, or unrestrained, but only those who yield to disgraceful pleasures. There is also a character¹² that takes less than the proper amount of pleasure in the things of the body, and that fails to stand by principle in that sense. The self-restrained man therefore is really intermediate between the unrestrained man and the type described. The unrestrained man departs from principle because he enjoys bodily pleasures too much, the person described does so because he enjoys them too little; while the self-restrained man stands by principle and does not change from either cause. And inasmuch as Self-restraint is good, it follows that both the dispositions opposed to it are bad, as indeed they appear to be; but because one of the two is found only in a few people, and is rarely displayed, Unrestraint is thought to be the sole opposite of Self-restraint, just as Profligacy is thought to be the sole opposite of Temperance. Many terms are used in an analogical sense, and so we have come to speak by analogy of the “self-restraint” of the temperate man, because the temperate man, as well as the self-restrained, is so constituted as never to be led by the pleasures of the body to act against principle. 1152aBut whereas the self-restrained man has evil desires,¹³ the temperate man has none; he is so constituted as to take no pleasure in things that are contrary to principle, whereas the self-restrained man does feel pleasure in such things, but does not yield to it. There is also a resemblance between the unrestrained man and the profligate, though they are really distinct: both pursue bodily pleasures, but the profligate thinks it right to do so, the man who lacks self-restraint does not.

Again, the same person cannot be at once unrestrained and prudent, for it has been shown¹⁴ that Prudence is inseparable from Moral Virtue. Also, Prudence does not consist only in knowing what is right, but also in doing it; but the unrestrained man does not do the right.¹⁵ (Cleverness on the other hand is not incompatible with Unrestraint—which is why it is sometimes thought that some people are prudent and yet unrestrained—because Cleverness differs from Prudence in the manner explained in our first discourse¹⁶: as being intellectual faculties¹⁷ they are closely akin, but they differ in that Prudence involves deliberate choice.) Nor indeed does the unrestrained man even know the right in the sense of one who consciously exercises his knowledge, but only as a man asleep or drunk can be said to know something. Also, although he errs willingly (for he knows in a sense both what he is doing and what end he is aiming at) , yet he is not wicked, for his moral choice is sound, so that he is only half-wicked. And he is not unjust, for he does not deliberately design to do harm,¹⁸ since the one type of unrestrained person does not keep to the resolve he has formed after deliberation, and the other, the excitable type, does not deliberate at all. In fact the unrestrained man resembles a state which passes all the proper enactments, and has good laws, but which never keeps its laws: the condition of things satirized by Anaxandrides— The state, that recks not of the laws, would fain . . whereas the bad man is like a state which keeps its laws but whose laws are bad. Both Self-restraint and Unrestraint are a matter of extremes as compared with the character of the mass of mankind; the restrained man shows more and the unrestrained man less steadfastness than most men are capable of. Reformation is more possible with that type of Unrestraint which is displayed by persons of an excitable temperament than it is with those who deliberate as to what they ought to do, but do not keep to the resolution they form. And those who have become unrestrained through habit are more easily cured than those who are unrestrained by nature, since habit is easier to change than nature; for even habit is hard to change, precisely because it is a sort of nature, as Evenus says: Mark me, my friend, ’tisi.e., habit is : the subject of ἔμεναι seems to have been ἔθος in the preceding verse. long-continued training, And training in the end becomes men’s nature. We have now discussed the nature of Self-restraint and Unrestraint, and of Endurance and Softness, and have shown how these dispositions are related to one another.