Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/377

 ARISTOTLE'S THEORY OF INCONTINENCE. 361 amination. Plato, 1 in his Republic, has explained, once and for all, the nature and origin of Moral Virtue and Vice in their ordinary forms. It is a question of training. By continually doing right things we get a habit of right-doing. Virtue is not ' born in us,' it arises from constant habitua- tion (e#eo-i /cat do-fcrfo-ecri) from infancy upwards, by which is gradually produced a ' power of preservation,' of ' holding to ' that which we know to be right, which, when fully developed, it is beyond the capacity of any ' Chalestrsean lye,' whether in the shape of pleasure or pain, fear or stress, to dissolve out of us. Conversely, absence of this training, or positive training of a different kind, makes us prone to wrong-doing, exactly as the doing of unhealthy things produces a diseased 'habit of body'. So far the matter is intelligible and straightforward. The disease admits of easy diagnosis and the remedy is not far to seek. Both Plato in his unpractical dreaming and Lycurgus in sober fact have manifested the true method of dealing with it, viz. : a proper, thorough system of State education, of State training. We must avoid the errors into which they fell and work strictly upon the lines human nature affords us not crediting it with an impossible un- selfishness on the one hand, nor unduly limiting it by a merely ' physical ' training on the other. The one takes us from solid earth into regions of empty fancy, the other reduces us almost to the level of the brute. Let us give full recognition to the true epyov rov avQpanrov, to all the ele- ments which make up the nature of this very ' composite ' creature man ; let us formulate our results into a definite body of Law, which shall be taught by a ' State education,' enforced by the impersonal but irresistible State power, and Vice will practically disappear from among us. But how are we to deal with the man whom no ' Edu- cation ' can teach, better than he already knows, that a given action is wrong, in whom no training seems able to produce a ' Habit ' which will resist any, beyond the slightest, temptation, and whom no power short of physical compulsion at the moment can, apparently, keep in the straight path? There are such men. They are common 1 It is most curious to note how commentators have overlooked Aristotle's indebtedness to Plato here. Misled probably (but surely unpardonably ?) by a few words of Aristotle himself, they generally re- presented him as the inventor of the ' Theory of Habit ' (ei-is) in Ethics as of the Syllogism hi Logic. The latter point is indisputable, but the ' Theory of Habit ' is identical verbatim with that found in the Republic. Cf., e.g., 51 SD, 444c, 429c, etc., etc.