The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy
Religion
The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy
Philosophy; Religion
Liberality is concerned with money matters, and lies between
extravagance and meanness. Really it means the right treatment of money,
both in spending and receiving it--the former rather than the latter. A
man is not really liberal who lavishes money for baser purposes, or
takes it whence he should not, or fails to take due care of his
property. The liberal man tends to err in the direction of lavishness.
Extravagance is curable, but is frequently accompanied by carelessness
as to the objects on which the money is spent and the sources from which
it is obtained. The habit of meanness is apt to be ineradicable, and is
displayed both in the acquisition and in the hoarding of money.
Munificence is a virtue concerned only with expenditure on a large
scale, and it implies liberality. It lies between vulgar ostentation and
niggardliness. It is possible only for the wealthy, and is concerned
mainly with public works, but also with private occasions of ceremony.
The error of vulgar ostentation is misdirection of expenditure, not
excess. Niggardliness abstains from a proper expenditure.
Magnanimity is the virtue of the aristocrat; its excess is
self-glorification, its deficiency self-depreciation. The magnanimous
man will bate nothing of his claim to honour, power and wealth, not as
caring greatly for them, but as demanding what he knows to be his due.
This character involves the possession of the virtues; the man must act
in the grand manner and on the grand scale. He knows his own
superiority, does not conceal it, and acts up to it. Self-glorification
overrates its own capacities; self-depreciation underrates them and
shuns its responsibilities, being the more reprehensible of the two.
There is a nameless virtue which stands to magnanimity in the same
relation as that of liberality to munificence; these being concerned
with honours, as those with money. The excess is ambition, the
deficiency is the lack of it; but here terminology fails us.
Good temper is a mean between ill-temper--whether of the irascible, the
sulky, or the cantankerous kind--and something for which we have no name
(poor-spiritedness). Friendliness comes between the excessive desire to
please and boorishness. It is a social virtue which might be defined as
goodwill _plus_ tact. Sincerity [there is no English term quite
corresponding to the Greek] is the quality opposed on the one side to
boastfulness, and on the other to mock-modesty; it is displayed by the
man who acknowledges, but who never exaggerates his own merits. In the
social display of wit and humour, there is a marked mean between the
buffoon and the dullard or prig. Shame is a term implying a feeling
rather than a habit; like fear, it has a physical effect, producing
blushes, and seems, in fact, to be fear of disrepute. To the young, it
is a safeguard against vice; the virtuous man need never feel it; to be
unable to feel it implies the habit of vice. Continence is not properly
in the category of moral virtues.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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