feats, they fall, quickly and vehemently, into an utter
disbelief of their former sentiments: and thereby both they and
the whole cause of philosophy have been prejudiced in the eyes
of the world." (Plato: _Republic_, Golden Treasury edition,
p. 267.)]

THE INADEQUACY OF THEORY IN MORAL LIFE. Reflection upon
morals, even when it goes beyond the stage of criticism and
proceeds to the reconstruction of habits and customs upon a
more reasonable basis, is yet inadequate. However logically
convincing a code of morals may be, it is not efficacious simply
as logic. In Aristotle's still relevant words:

It may fairly be said then that a just man becomes just by doing
what is just and a temperate man becomes temperate by doing what
is temperate, and if a man did not so act, he would not have so much
as a chance of becoming good. But most people, instead of doing
such actions, take refuge in theorizing; they imagine that they are
philosophers and that philosophy will make them virtuous; in fact
they behave like people who listen attentively to their doctors, but
never do anything that their doctors tell them. But it is as improbable
that a healthy state of the soul will be produced by this kind of
philosophizing as that a healthy state of the body will be produced
by this kind of medical treatment.[1]

[Footnote 1: Aristotle: _Ethics_, book II, chap. III,
pp. 42-43 (Weldon translation).]

Moral standards, in order to be effective, must have emotional
support and be constantly applied. Men must be in
love with the good, if good is to be their habitual practice.
And only when the good is an habitual practice, can men be
said to be living a moral life instead of merely subscribing
verbally to a set of moral ideals. Justice, honesty, charity,
mercy, benevolence, these are names for types of behavior,
and are real in so far as they do describe men's actions. As
Aristotle says, in another connection: "A person must be
utterly senseless if he does not know that moral states are
formed by the exercise of the powers in one way or another."
The virtues are not static or frozen; they are names we give
to varieties of action, and are exhibited, as they exist, _only_ in
action.[2]

[Footnote 2: "But the virtues we acquire by first exercising them,
as is the case with all the arts, for it is by doing what we ought
to do when we have learned the arts, that we learn the arts
themselves; we become, _e.g._ builders by building, and harpis