in the scale, which being perfectly in
tune avoids the sharpness of the one and the flatness of the other; so
virtue, being a motion and power in the unreasoning part of the soul,
takes away the remissness and strain, and generally speaking the excess
and defect of the appetite, by reducing each of the passions to a state
of mean and rectitude. For example, they tell us that bravery is the
mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, whereof the former is a
defect, the latter an excess of anger: and that liberality is the mean
between stinginess and prodigality: and that meekness is the mean
between insensibility and savageness: and so of temperance and justice,
that the latter, being concerned with contracts, is to assign neither
too much nor too little to litigants, and that the former ever reduces
the passions to the proper mean between apathy (or insensibility) and
gross intemperance. This last illustration serves excellently to show us
the radical difference between the unreasoning and reasoning parts of
the soul, and to prove to us that passion and reason are wide as the
poles asunder. For the difference would not be discernible between
temperance and continence, nor between intemperance and incontinence, in
pleasure and desires, if the appetite and judgement were in the same
portion of the soul. Now temperance is a state, wherein reason holds the
reins, and manages the passions as a quiet and well-broken-in animal,
finding them obedient and submissive to the reins and masters over their
desires.[227] Continence on the other hand is not driven by reason
without some trouble, not being docile but jibbing and kicking, like an
animal compelled by bit and bridle and whip and backing, being in itself
full of struggles and commotion. Plato explains this by his simile of
the chariot-horses of the soul, the worse one of which ever kicking
against the other and disturbing the charioteer, he is obliged ever to
hold them in with all his might, and to tighten the reins, lest, to
borrow the language of Simonides, "he should drop from his hands the
purple reins." And so they do not consider continence to be an absolute
virtue, but something less than a virtue; for no mean arises from the
concord of the worse with the better, nor is the excess of the passion
curtailed, nor does the appetite obey or act in unison with reason, but
it both gives and suffers trouble, and is constrained by force, and is
as it were an enemy in a town given