The first step towards understanding what goodness of character is is to consider the way in which it is actually produced. We are not born with this goodness of tempers and feelings ready made, nor yet do we obtain it by theoretical instruction; it is a result of a training and discipline of the feelings and impulses. The possibility of such a training is due to the fact that feelings and impulses are rational capacities, and a rational capacity can be developed into either of two contrasted activities according to the training it receives. You cannot train stones to fall upwards, but you can train a hot temper to display itself either in the form of righteous resentment of wrong-doing or in that of violent defiance of all authority. Our natural emotions and impulses are in themselves neither good nor bad; they are the raw material out of which training makes good or bad character according to the direction it gives to them. The effect of training is to convert the indeterminate tendency into a fixed habit. We may say, then, that moral goodness is a fixed state of the soul produced by habituation. By being trained in habits of endurance, self-mastery, and fair dealing, we acquire the kind of character to which it is pleasing to act bravely, continently, and fairly, and disagreeable to act unfairly, profligately, or like a coward. When habituation has brought about this result the moral excellences in question have become part of our inmost self and we are in full possession of goodness of character. In a word, it is by repeated doing of right acts that we acquire the right kind of character.