But a more or less natural quality, which in ordinary speech is called a virtue, is one thing, virtue in the really ethical sense is another. The middle quality between prodigality and avarice is not the ethical virtue of liberality, out the quality of rational economy. The middle quality between rashness and cowardice is not the ethical virtue of courage, but the quality of rational prudence. The combination of two qualities only produces a single one. But virtue, in the ethical sense, means a quality guiding itself by an ideal of self-perfection, and being serviceable for some object which looks towards the universal. Liberality as an ethical virtue means a process of spending which serves some object recognized by the person practising it as valuable in principle, and in such a way that any natural tendency to prodigality, should there be such in the giver, plays no part, while the tendency to avarice is paralysed. Devotion of one’s property or one’s life to an object which is valuable in principle is under all circumstances ethical, while prodigality and avarice, rashness and cowardice as simple qualities not inspired by any higher aim have never any ethical character; they are merely something natural. Whether the devotion of one’s property or of one’s life for an object valuable in principle is made more completely than need be or exactly to the extent required by the circumstances, does not alter in any way the ethical character of the decision and the action. Such excess or defect only shows how much or how little the ethical will has allowed [pg 046] itself to be at the same time influenced by considerations of prudence. Aristotle’s representation, then, rests on the fact that he allows virtue in ordinary speech and virtue in the ethical sense to get mixed up. He smuggles in the really ethical, and then offers it as the resultant of two natural qualities, each of which is an extreme. In the chapter on temperance—_Ethics_, Bk. III., 10—he has to allow that the theory which makes the ethical a mean between two extremes cannot be carried through completely. The love of beauty, he says plainly, however strong it becomes, remains what it is; there can never be any question of excess. He throws out this admission without seeing that he thereby undermines his feeble definition of the ethical as the appropriate relative mean, and, like Socrates and Plato, acknowledges that there can be something which its content allows to be reckoned as good in itself.