Nor is it a matter of no consequence that, under the influence of this training, certain passions became moderated and certain dispositions implanted which made it easier to follow the true moral law in the same direction. Catiline’s courage was assuredly not the true virtue of courage if Aristotle is right when he says that they only have such who go to danger and to death “τοῦ καλοῦ ἔνεκα,” “for the sake of the morally beautiful.”[71] Augustine might have made use of this instance when he said: “virtutes ethnicorum splendida vitia.” But who will deny that if such a man as Catiline had been converted, the dispositions he had acquired earlier would have made it easier for him to venture to extremes in the service of the good too? In this way, the ground was made receptive for the admission of truly ethical impulses and therein lay a powerful encouragement to the propagation of truth on the part of those who were foremost in the discovery of ethical knowledge, and first to hear the voice of a natural sanction. It is in this sense that Aristotle observed that it is not every one who can study ethics. He who is to hear about law and morality, must be already well conducted by dint of habit. In the case of others, he thinks, it is but a waste of pains.[72] Indeed, still more may be said in praise of the services rendered to the recognition of natural law and morality by these pre-ethical, though not pre-historical, times. The legal ordinances and customs formed in this time, owing to the reasons previously assigned, approached so closely to what ethics demands, that this peculiar kind of mimicry blinded many to the absence of a more thorough going affinity. What, in the one case, a blind impulse and in the other, knowledge of the good exalts into a law, is often completely the same in substance. The legislative moral authority found therefore in these already codified laws and customs the rough drafts, as it were, of laws, which with a few changes, it could sanction without more ado. These were the more valuable because, as seems required from a utilitarian point of view, they were adapted to the special circumstances of the people. A comparison of the one constitution with the other made this noticeable, and early helped to lead to the important knowledge of the real relativity of natural right and of natural morality. Who knows whether otherwise, it would have been possible, even for an Aristotle, to succeed to the degree in which he did in steering clear of all cut and dried doctrinaire theories? So much, therefore, concerning the pre-ethical times, in order that these may not be denied the acknowledgment which they deserve.