up to faction.

"The town is full of incense, and at once
Resounds with triumph-songs and bitter wailing."[228]

Such is the state of soul of the continent person owing to his
conflicting condition. On the same grounds they consider incontinence to
be something less than vice, but intemperance to be a complete vice. For
it, having both its appetite and reason depraved, is by the one
carried away to desire disgraceful things,[229] by the other, through
bad judgement consenting to desire, loses even the perception of
wrongdoing. But incontinence keeps its judgement sound through reason,
but is carried away against its judgement by passion which is too strong
for reason, whence it differs from intemperance. For in the one case
reason is mastered by passion, in the other it does not even make a
fight against it, in the one case it opposes its desires even when it
follows them, in the other it is their advocate and even leader, in the
one case it gladly participates in what is wrong, in the other
sorrowfully, in the one case it willingly rushes into what is
disgraceful, in the other it abandons the honourable unwillingly. And as
there is a difference in their deeds, so no less manifest is the
difference in their language. For these are the expressions of the
intemperate. "What grace or pleasure in life is there without golden
Aphrodite? May I die, when I care no longer for these things!" And
another says, "To eat, to drink, to enjoy the gifts of Aphrodite is
everything, for all other things I look upon as supplementary," as if
from the bottom of his soul he gave himself up to pleasures, and was
completely subverted by them. And not less so he who said, "Let me be
ruined, it is best for me," had his judgement diseased through his
passion. But the sayings of incontinence are quite different, as

"My nature forces me against my judgement,"[230]

and

"Alas! it is poor mortals' plague and bane,
To know the good, yet not the good pursue."[231]

And again--

"My anger draws me on, has no control,
'Tis but a sandy hook against a tempest."

Here he compares not badly to a sandy hook, a sorry kind of anchor, the
soul that is unsettled and has no steady reason, but surrenders judgment
through flabbiness and feebleness. And not unlike this image are the
lines,

"As some ship moored and fastened to the shore,
If the wind blows, the cables cannot hold it."

By cables he means the judgement which resist