"When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing,--then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing."[194:10] It is plain that the man Socrates cared little for the pleasurable or painful consequences of his acts, provided they were worthy of the high calling of human nature. A man's virtue would now seem to possess an intrinsic nobility. If knowledge be virtue, then on this basis it must be because knowledge is itself excellent. Virtue as knowledge contributes to the good by constituting it. We meet here with the _rationalistic_ strain in ethics. It praises conduct for the _inherent worth which it may possess if it express that reason_ which the Stoics called "_the ruling part_." The riches of wisdom consist for the hedonist in their purchase of pleasure. For the rationalist, on the other hand, wisdom is not coin, but itself the very substance of value. [Sidenote: Eudæmonism and Pietism. Rigorism and Intuitionism.] § 83. Rationalism has undergone modifications even more significant than those of hedonism, and involving at least one radically new group of conceptions. Among the Greeks rationalism and hedonism alike are _eudæmonistic_. They aim to portray _the fulness of life_ that makes "the happy man." In the ethics of Aristotle, whose synthetic mind weaves together these different strands, the Greek ideal finds its most complete expression as "the high-minded man," with all his powers and trappings. But the great spiritual transformation which accompanied the decline of Greek culture and the rise of Christianity, brought with it a new moral sensibility, which finds in man no virtue of himself, but only through the grace of God. "And the virtues themselves," says St. Augustine, "if they bear no relation to God, are in truth vices rather than virtues; for although they are regarded by many as truly moral when they are desired as ends in themselves and not for the sake of something else, they are, nevertheless, inflated and arrogant, and therefore not to be viewed as virtues but as vices."[195:11]