justice, self-restraint, and so on, are not easily dislodged or
dismissed, so as to give place to vice.

By a disposition, on the other hand, we mean a condition that is easily
changed and quickly gives place to its opposite. Thus, heat, cold,
disease, health, and so on are dispositions. For a man is disposed in
one way or another with reference to these, but quickly changes,
becoming cold instead of warm, ill instead of well. So it is with all
other dispositions also, unless through lapse of time a disposition has
itself become inveterate and almost impossible to dislodge: in which
case we should perhaps go so far as to call it a habit.

It is evident that men incline to call those conditions habits which
are of a more or less permanent type and difficult to displace; for
those who are not retentive of knowledge, but volatile, are not said to
have such and such a 'habit' as regards knowledge, yet they are
disposed, we may say, either better or worse, towards knowledge. Thus
habit differs from disposition in this, that while the latter in
ephemeral, the former is permanent and difficult to alter.

Habits are at the same time dispositions, but dispositions are not
necessarily habits. For those who have some specific habit may be said
also, in virtue of that habit, to be thus or thus disposed; but those
who are disposed in some specific way have not in all cases the
corresponding habit.

Another sort of quality is that in virtue of which, for example, we
call men good boxers or runners, or healthy or sickly: in fact it
includes all those terms which refer to inborn capacity or incapacity.
Such things are not predicated of a person in virtue of his
disposition, but in virtue of his inborn capacity or incapacity to do
something with ease or to avoid defeat of any kind. Persons are called
good boxers or good runners, not in virtue of such and such a
disposition, but in virtue of an inborn capacity to accomplish
something with ease. Men are called healthy in virtue of the inborn
capacity of easy resistance to those unhealthy influences that may
ordinarily arise; unhealthy, in virtue of the lack of this capacity.
Similarly with regard to softness and hardness. Hardness is predicated
of a thing because it has that capacity of resistance which enables it
to withstand disintegration; softness, again, is predicated of a thing
by reason of the lack of that capacity.

A third class within this category is that of affective qua