Plato, was the health or harmony of the soul; hence
the principle of classification was determined by the fitness of the soul
for its proper task, which was conceived as the attainment of the good or
the morally beautiful. As man has three functions or aspects, a
cognitive, active, and appetitive, so there are three corresponding
virtues. His function of knowing determines the primal virtue of Wisdom;
his active power constitutes the virtue of Courage; while his appetitive
nature calls for the virtue of Temperance or Self-control. These three
virtues have reference to the individual's personal life. But inasmuch
as a man is a part of a social organism, and has relations to others
beyond himself, justice was conceived by Plato as the social virtue, the
virtue which regulated and harmonised all the others. For the Stoics
these four virtues embraced the whole life according to nature. It may
be noticed that Plato and Aristotle did not profess to have created the
virtues. Wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice were, as they
believed, radical principles of the moral nature; and all they professed
to do was to {188} awaken men to the consciousness of their natural
capacities. If a man was to attain to fitness of life, then these were
the fundamental and essential lines on which his rational life must
develop. In every conceivable world these are the basal elements of
goodness. Related as they are to fundamental functions of personality,
they cannot be less or more. They stand for the irreducible principles
of conduct, to omit any one of which is to present a maimed or only
partial character. In every rational conception of life they must remain
the essential and desirable objects of pursuit. It was not wonderful,
therefore, when we remember the influence of Greek thought upon early
Christianity, that the four classical virtues should pass over into
Christian Ethics. But the Church, recognising that these virtues had
reference to man's life in relation to himself and his fellow-men in this
world alone, added to these the three Pauline Graces, Faith, Hope, and
Charity, as expressive of the divine element in man, his relation to God
and the spiritual world. The first four were called natural, the last
three supernatural: or the 'Cardinal' (_cardo_, a hinge) and the
'Theological' virtues. They make in all seven, the mystic perfect
number, and over against these, to complete the symmetry of life, were
placed the