s what is disgraceful,
though sometimes it gives way under a tremendous storm of passion. For
indeed it is with full sail that the intemperate man is borne on to
pleasure by his desires, and surrenders himself to them, and even plays
the part of pilot to the vessel; whereas the incontinent man is dragged
sidelong into the disgraceful, and is its victim, as it were, while he
desires eagerly to resist and overcome his passion, as Timon bantered
Anaxarchus: "The recklessness and frantic energy of Anaxarchus to rush
anywhere seemed like a dog's courage, but he being aware of it was
miserable, so people said, but his voluptuous nature ever plunged him
into excesses again, nature which even most sophists are afraid of."
For neither is the wise man continent but temperate, nor the fool
incontinent but intemperate; for the one delights in what is good, and
the other is not vexed at what is bad. Incontinence, therefore, is a
mark of a sophistical soul, endued with reason which cannot abide by
what it knows to be right.

Sec. VII. Such, then, are the differences between incontinence and
intemperance, and continence and temperance have their counterpart and
analogous differences; for remorse and trouble and annoyance are
companions of continence, whereas in the soul of the temperate person
there is everywhere such equability and calm and soundness, by which the
unreasoning is adjusted and harmonized to reason, being adorned with
obedience and wonderful mildness, that looking at it you would say with
the poet, "At once the wind was laid, and a wondrous calm ensued, for
the god allayed the fury of the waves,"[232] reason having extinguished
the vehement and furious and frantic motions of the desires, and making
those which nature necessarily requires sympathetic and obedient and
friendly and co-operative in carrying purposes out in action, so that
they do not outrun or come short of reason, or behave disorderly and
disobediently, but that every appetite is tractable, "as sucking foal
runs by the side of its dam."[233] And this confirms the saying of
Xenocrates about true philosophers, that they alone do willingly what
all others do unwillingly at the compulsion of the law, as dogs are
turned away from their pleasures by a blow, or cats by a noise, looking
at nothing but their danger. It is clear then that there is in the soul
a perception of such a generic and specific difference in relation to
the desires, as of something fighting