Any restraint which is prudential and preventive, but immoral, comes under the head of vice, for every action may be so called which has “a general tendency to produce misery,” however innocuous its immediate effects.[146] We find, therefore, that the positive and the preventive checks are all resolvable into vice, misery, and moral restraint, or sin, pain, and self-control, a threefold division that makes the second essay “differ in principle” from the first.[147] We have here a twofold alongside of a threefold division of the checks to population. The one is made from an objective, the other from a subjective point of view. The division of checks (1) into positive and preventive has regard simply to the outward facts; a population is in those two ways kept down to the food. The division of them (2) into vice, misery, and moral restraint has regard to the human agent and his inward condition, the state of his feelings and of his will. For example, the positive check viewed subjectively, or from the human being’s point of view, is the feeling of pain; the will is not directly concerned with it. The preventive, from the same point of view, is of a less simple character. First of all, moral restraint involves a temporary misery or pain in the thwarting of a desire; “considered as a restraint upon an inclination otherwise innocent and always natural, it must be allowed to produce a certain degree of temporary unhappiness, but evidently slight compared with the evils which result from any of the other checks to population,”[148] and “merely[149] of the same nature as many other sacrifices of temporary to permanent gratification which it is the business of a moral agent continually to make.” The reverse is true of vicious excesses and passions; in their immediate gratification they are pleasant, but their permanent effects are misery. From the point of view of the will the case is clear, for the state of the will would be described by Malthus, if he ever used such terms, as in the one case good, and in the other case evil, pure and simple. Of course in treating the matter historically we may neglect the subjective point of view, not because it is not necessary for proper knowledge of the facts, but because it leads to a psychological inquiry, the results of which are independent of dates. Malthus goes on to say that, in all cases where there is the need for checks at all, it is the sum total of all the preventive and positive checks that forms the check to population in any given country at any given time,[150] and his endeavour will be to show in what relative proportions and in what degree they prevail in various countries known to us. He assumes further that the preventive and the positive checks will “vary inversely as each other.” In countries where the mortality is great the influence of the preventive check will be small; and, where the preventive check prevails much, the positive check, or in brief the mortality, will be small.[151]