The cold courage of a man like Noguchi who, though in failing health, went into one of the unhealthiest parts of Africa to study a deadly disease, could come only from a nature which was overwhelmingly interested in objects outside itself. Noguchi must have known exactly how dangerous it was for him to go to Africa, and exactly how horrible was the disease to which he exposed himself. To have gone anyway is really to have cared for science in a way which very few care for anything so remote and impersonal. But even courage like Lindbergh’s and Noguchi’s is more comprehensible than the kind of courage which anonymous men have displayed. I am thinking of the four soldiers at the Walter Reed Hospital who let themselves be used for the study of typhoid fever. They did not even have Lindbergh’s interest in performing a great feat or Noguchi’s interest in science to buoy them up and carry them past the point where they might have faltered. Their courage was as near to absolute courage as it is possible to imagine, and I who think this cannot even recall their names. To understand the inwardness of courage would be, I [p224] think, to have understood almost all the other important virtues. It is “not only the chiefest virtue and most dignifies the haver,” but it embodies the principle of all virtue, which is to transcend the immediacy of desire and to live for ends which are transpersonal. Virtuous action is conduct which responds to situations that are more extensive, more complicated, and take longer to reach their fulfillment, than the situations to which we instinctively respond. An infant knows neither vice nor virtue because it can respond only to what touches it immediately. A man has virtue insofar as he can respond to a larger situation. He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. He has veracity if he says and believes what he thinks is true though it would be easier to deceive others or himself. He is just if he acknowledges the interests of all concerned in a transaction and not merely his own apparent interest. He is temperate if, in the presence of temptation, he can still prefer Philip sober to Philip drunk. He is magnanimous if, as Aristotle says, he cares “more for truth than for opinion,” speaks and acts openly, will not live at the will of another, except it be a friend, does not recollect injuries, does not care that he should be praised or that others should be blamed, does not complain or ask for help in unavoidable or trifling calamities. For such a man, as the word ‘magnanimous’ itself implies, is “conversant with great matters.”