Impossibility of Cataloguing Virtues.—These last three considerations: (1) the intimate connection of virtues with all sorts of individual capacities and endowments, (2) the change in types of habit required with change of social customs and institutions, (3) the dependence of judgment of vice and virtue upon the character of the one judging,[185] make undesirable and impossible a catalogued list of virtues with an exact definition of each. Virtues are numberless. Every situation, not of a routine order, brings in some special shading, some unique adaptation, of disposition.
Twofold Classification.—We may, however, classify the chief institutions of social life—language, scientific investigation, artistic production, industrial efficiency, family, local community, nation, humanity—and specify the types of mental disposition and interest which are fitted to maintain them flourishingly; or, starting from typical impulsive and instinctive tendencies, we may consider the form they assume when they become intelligently exercised habits. A virtue may be defined, accordingly, either as the settled intelligent identification of an agent's capacity with some aspect of the reasonable or common happiness; or, as a social custom or tendency organized into a personal habit of valuation. From the latter standpoint, truthfulness is the social institution of language maintained at its best pitch of efficiency through the habitual purposes of individuals; from the former, it is an instinctive capacity and tendency to communicate emotions and ideas directed so as to maintain social peace and prosperity. In like fashion, one might catalogue all forms of social custom and institution on one hand; and all the species and varieties of individual equipment on the other, and enumerate a virtue for each. But the performance is so formal as not to amount to much.
Aspects of Virtue.—Any virtuous disposition of character exhibits, however, certain main traits, a consideration of which will serve to review and summarize our analysis of the moral life.
I. The Interest Must be Entire or Whole-hearted.—The whole self, without division or reservation, must go out into the proposed object and find therein its own satisfaction. Virtue is integrity; vice duplicity. Goodness is straight, right; badness is crooked, indirect. Interest that is incomplete is not interest, but (so far as incomplete) indifference and disregard. This totality of interest we call affection, love; and love is the fulfilling of the law. A grudging virtue is next to no virtue at all; thorough heartiness in even a bad cause stirs admiration, and lukewarmness in every direction is always despised as meaning lack of character. Surrender, abandonment, is of the essence of identification of self with an object.
II. The Interest Must be Energetic and Hence Persistent.—One swallow does not make a summer nor a sporadic right act a virtuous habit. Fair-weather character has a proverbially bad name. Endurance through discouragement, through good repute and ill, weal and woe, tests the vigor of interest in the good, and both builds up and expresses a formed character.
III. The Interest Must be Pure or Sincere.—Honesty is, doubtless, the best policy, and it is better a man should be honest from policy than not honest at all. If genuinely honest from considerations of prudence, he is on the road to learn better reasons for honesty. None the less, we are suspicious of a man if we believe that motives of personal profit are the only stay of his honesty. For circumstances might arise in which, in the exceptional case, it would be clear that personal advantage lay in dishonesty. The motive for honesty would hold in most cases, in ordinary and routine circumstances and in the glare of publicity, but not in the dark of secrecy, or in the turmoil of disturbed circumstance. The eye single to the good, the "disinterested interest" of moralists, is required. The motive that has to be coaxed or coerced to its work by some promise or threat is imperfect.
Cardinal or Indispensable Aspects of Virtue.—Bearing in mind that we are not attempting to classify various acts or habits, but only to state traits essential to all morality, we have the "cardinal virtues" of moral theory. As whole-hearted, as complete interest, any habit or attitude of character involves justice and love; as persistently active, it is courage, fortitude, or vigor; as unmixed and single, it is temperance—in its classic sense. And since no habitual interest can be integral, enduring, or sincere, save as it is reasonable, save, that is, as it is rooted in the deliberate habit of viewing the part in the light of the whole, the present in the light of the past and future, interest in the good is also wisdom or conscientiousness:—interest in the discovery of the true good of the situation. Without this interest, all our interest is likely to be perverted and misleading—requiring to be repented of.
Wisdom, or (in modern phrase) conscientiousness, is the nurse of all the virtues. Our most devoted courage is in the will to know the good and the fair by unflinching attention to the painful and disagreeable. Our severest discipline in self-control is that which checks the exorbitant pretensions of an appetite by insisting upon knowing it in its true proportions. The most exacting justice is that of an intelligence which gives due weight to each desire and demand in deliberation before it is allowed to pass into overt action. That affection and wisdom lie close to each other is evidenced by our language; thoughtfulness, regard, consideration for others, recognition of others, attention to others.
§ 1. TEMPERANCE
The English word "temperance" (particularly in its local association with agitation regarding use of intoxicating liquors) is a poor substitute for the Greek sophrosyne which, through the Latin temperantia, it represents. The Athenian Greek was impressed with the fact that just as there are lawless, despotically ruled, and self-governed communities, so there are lawless, and servile, and self-ruled individuals. Whenever there is a self-governed soul, there is a happy blending of the authority of reason with the force of appetite. The individual's diverse nature is tempered into a living harmony of desire and intelligence. Reason governs not as a tyrant from without, but as a guide to which the impulses and emotions are gladly responsive. Such a well-attuned nature, as far from asceticism on one side as from random indulgence on the other, represented the ideal of what was fair and graceful in character, an ideal embodied in the notion of sophrosyne. This was a whole-mindedness which resulted from the happy furtherance of all the elements of human nature under the self-accepted direction of intelligence. It implied an æsthetic view of character; of harmony in structure and rhythm in action. It was the virtue of judgment exercised in the estimate of pleasures:—since it is the agreeable, the pleasant, which gives an end excessive hold upon us.