And as with the excellence of the body, so with that of the soul, the conception that dominated the mind of the Greeks was primarily aesthetic. In speaking of their religion we have already remarked that they had no sense of sin; and we may now add that they had no sense of duty. Moral virtue they conceived not as obedience to an external law, a sacrifice of the natural man to a power that in a sense is alien to himself, but rather as the tempering into due proportion of the elements of which human nature is composed. The good man was the man who was beautiful--beautiful in soul. "Virtue," says Plato, "will be a kind of health and beauty and good habit of the soul; and vice will be a disease and deformity and sickness of it." [Footnote: Plato, Rep. 444,-- Translated by Davies and Vaughan.] It follows that it is as natural to seek virtue and to avoid vice as to seek health and to avoid disease. There is no question of a struggle between opposite principles; the distinction of good and evil is one of order or confusion, among elements which in themselves are neither good nor bad. This conception of virtue we find expressed in many forms, but always with the same underlying idea. A favourite watch-word with the Greeks is the "middle" or "mean", the exact point of rightness between two extremes. "Nothing in excess," was a motto inscribed over the temple of Delphi; and none could be more characteristic of the ideal of these lovers of proportion. Aristotle, indeed, has made it the basis of his whole theory of ethics. In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice the excess lying on either side--courage, for example, the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, temperance, between incontinence and insensibility, generosity, between extravagance and meanness. The various phases of feeling and the various kinds of action he analyses minutely on this principle, understanding always by "the mean" that which adapts itself in the due proportion to the circumstances and requirements of every case.