The following considerations may also serve to set this in a clear
light. There are principally three things moving us to choice and three
to avoidance, the honourable, the expedient, the pleasant; and their
three contraries, the dishonourable, the hurtful, and the painful: now
the good man is apt to go right, and the bad man wrong, with respect to
all these of course, but most specially with respect to pleasure:
because not only is this common to him with all animals but also it is
a concomitant of all those things which move to choice, since both the
honourable and the expedient give an impression of pleasure.
Again, it grows up with us all from infancy, and so it is a hard matter
to remove from ourselves this feeling, engrained as it is into our very
life.
Again, we adopt pleasure and pain (some of us more, and some less) as
the measure even of actions: for this cause then our whole business
must be with them, since to receive right or wrong impressions of
pleasure and pain is a thing of no little importance in respect of the
actions. Once more; it is harder, as Heraclitus says, to fight against
pleasure than against anger: now it is about that which is more than
commonly difficult that art comes into being, and virtue too, because
in that which is difficult the good is of a higher order: and so for
this reason too both virtue and moral philosophy generally must wholly
busy themselves respecting pleasures and pains, because he that uses
these well will be good, he that does so ill will be bad.
Let us then be understood to have stated, that Virtue has for its
object-matter pleasures and pains, and that it is either increased or
marred by the same circumstances (differently used) by which it is
originally generated, and that it exerts itself on the same
circumstances out of which it was generated.
Chapter III.
Now I can conceive a person perplexed as to the meaning of our
statement, that men must do just actions to become just, and those of
self-mastery to acquire the habit of self-mastery; “for,” he would say,
“if men are doing the actions they have the respective virtues already,
just as men are grammarians or musicians when they do the actions of
either art.” May we not reply by saying that it is not so even in the
case of the arts referred to: because a man may produce something
grammatical either by chance or the suggestion of another; but then
only will he be a grammarian when he not only produces something
grammatical but does so grammarian-wise, _i.e._ in virtue of the
grammatical knowledge he himself possesses.