Human virtue, then, distributes itself into two grand divisions — 1. The virtue of the rational soul, or Intellectual Virtue. 2. The virtue of the semi-rational soul, or Ethical Virtue.
Perhaps the word Excellence more exactly corresponds to ἀρετὴ, than Virtue.
Intellectual excellence is both generated and augmented by teaching and experience. Ethical excellence by practical training. The excellence is not natural to us: but we are susceptible of being trained, and the training creates it. By training, according as it is either good or bad, all excellence is either created or destroyed: just as a man becomes a good or a bad musician, according as he has been subjected to a good or a bad mode of practice.
It is by doing the same thing many times that we acquire at last the habit of doing it — “For what things we have to learn to do, these we learn by doing� (ii. 1): according as the things we are trained to do are good or bad, we acquire good habits or bad habits. By building we become builders, by playing on the harp we become harpers — good or indifferent, according to the way in which we have practised. All legislators wish and attempt to make their citizens good, by means of certain habits: some succeed in the attempt, others fail: and this is the difference between a good and a bad government. It is by being trained to do acts of justice and courage that we become at last just and courageous — “In one word, habits are generated by (a succession of) like operations: for this reason it is the character of the operations performed which we ought chiefly to attend to: for according to the difference of these will be the habits which ensue. It is therefore not a matter of slight difference whether immediately from our earliest years we are ethised in one way or in another — it makes a prodigious difference — or rather, it makes the whole difference� (ii. 1).
Uniform perseverance in action, then, creates a habit: but of what nature is the required action to be? In every department of our nature, where any good result is to be produced, we may be disappointed of our result by two sorts of error: either an excess or on the side of defect. To work or eat too much, or too little, prevents the good effects of training upon the health and strength: so with regard to temperance, courage and the other virtues — the man who is trained to fear everything and the man who is trained to fear nothing, will alike fail in acquiring the genuine habit of courage. The acquisition of the habit makes the performance of the action easy: by a course of abstinent acts, we acquire the habit of temperance: and having acquired this habit, we can with the greater ease perform the act of abstinence (ii. 2).
The symptom which indicates that the habit has been perfectly acquired, is the facility or satisfaction with which the act comes to be performed (ii. 3). The man who abstains from bodily pleasures, and who performs this contentedly (αὐτῷ τούτῳ χαίρων), is the temperate man: the man who does the same thing but reluctantly and with vexation (ἀχθόνιμος) is intemperate: the like with courage. Ethical excellence, or ethical badness, has reference to our pleasures and pains: whenever we do any thing mean, or shrink from any thing honourable, it is some pleasure or some pain which determines our conduct: for which reason Plato rightly prescribes that the young shall be educated even from the earliest moment so as to give a proper direction to their pleasures and pains (ii. 3). By often pursuing pleasure and pain under circumstances in which we ought not to do so, we contract bad habits, by a law similar to that which under a good education would have imparted to us good habits. Ethical virtue then consists in such a disposition of our pleasures and pains as leads to performance of the best actions. Some persons have defined it to consist in apathy and imperturbability of mind: but this definition is erroneous: the mind ought to be affected under proper circumstances (ii. 3). (This seems to be the same doctrine which was afterwards preached by the Stoic school.)
There are three ingredients which determine our choice, the honourable — the expedient — the agreeable: and as many which occasion our rejection — the base — the inexpedient — the painful or vexatious. In respect to all these three the good man judges rightly, the wicked man wrongly, and especially in regard to the latter. Pleasure and pain are familiar to us from our earliest childhood, and are ineffaceable from human nature: all men measure and classify actions (κανονίζομεν τὰς πράξεις) by pleasure and pain: some men to a greater degree, others to a less degree.
All ethical excellence, and all the political science, turns upon pleasure and pain (ii. 3).
A man becomes just and temperate by doing just and temperate actions, thus by degrees acquiring the habit. But how (it is asked) can this be true? for if a man performs just and temperate actions, he must already start by being just and temperate.
The objection is not well founded. A man may do just and temperate actions, and yet not be just and temperate. If he does them, knowing what he does, intending what he does, and intending to do the acts for their own sake, then indeed he is just and temperate, but not otherwise. The productions of art carry their own merit along with them: a work of art is excellent or defective, whatever be the state of mind of the person who has executed it. But the acts of a man cannot be said to be justly or temperately done, unless there be a certain state of mind accompanying their performance by the doer: they may indeed be called just and temperate acts, meaning thereby that they are such as a just and temperate man would do, but the man who does them does not necessarily deserve these epithets. It is only by frequent doing of acts of this class that a man can acquire the habit of performing them intentionally and for themselves, in which consists the just and temperate character. To know what such acts are, is little or nothing: you must obey the precepts, just as you follow the prescriptions of a physician. Many men think erroneously that philosophy will teach them to be virtuous, without any course of action adopted by themselves (ii. 4).