s what enables that whereof
it is the virtue to perform its function, which, in the case of man, is
the activity of the soul, preserving always a middle course between
excess and deficiency, by choice.

In another sense, however, we must remember that there are qualities in
themselves wrong, and that virtue may be presented as not something
intermediate, but a consummation. But when we name each of these
virtues--Courage, Temperance, Liberality, etc.; the social virtues, or
good manners; the virtues concerned with the passions--we can name the
corresponding excess or deficiency. Justice and the intellectual virtues
demand a separate analysis.

Each virtue stands in opposition to each of the extremes, and each of
these to the other extreme, though in some cases the virtue may be more
antagonistic to one extreme than to the other, as courage to cowardice
more than to rashness. In individual cases, it is difficult to avoid
being deflected towards one or other of the extremes.

Before proceeding with this analysis, we must examine the question of
choice. To be praiseworthy, an act must be voluntary. An act is not
voluntary if it is the outcome of external compulsion. Where there is a
margin of choice, an act must still, on the whole, be regarded as
voluntary, though done "against our will." Of properly involuntary acts,
we must distinguish between the unintentional and the unwilling, meaning
by the latter, in effect, what the agent would not have done if he had
known.

Choice is not the same thing as a voluntary act; nor is it desire, or
emotion, or exactly "wish," since we may wish for, but cannot make
choice of, the unattainable. Nor is it Deliberation--rather, it is the
act of decision following deliberation. If man has the power to say yes,
he has equally the power to say no, and is master of his own action. If
we make a wrong choice through ignorance for which we are ourselves
responsible, the ignorance itself is culpable, and cannot excuse the
wrong choice; and so, when the choice is the outcome of a judgment
disordered by bad habits, men cannot escape by saying they were made
so--they made themselves so. To say they "could not help" doing wrong
things is only an evasion.

_II.--THE MORAL VIRTUES EXAMINED_

Virtues, then, are habits, issuing in acts corresponding to those by
which the habit was established, directed by Right Reason, every such
act being voluntary, and the whole process a voluntary process.