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  10 in us which is in itself capricious and irregular, but capable of
regulation, viz our instincts and feelings, (2) the former are acquired
by study and instruction, the latter by discipline. The latter
constitute "character," each of them as a "moral virtue" (literally "a
goodness of character"), and upon them primarily depends the realisation
of happiness. This is the case at least for the great majority of men,
and for all men their possession is an indispensable basis of the
best, i e, the most desirable life. They form the chief or central
subject-matter of the Ethics.
Perhaps the truest way of conceiving Aristotle's meaning here is to
regard a moral virtue as a form of obedience to a maxim or rule of
conduct accepted by the agent as valid for a class of recurrent
situations in human life. Such obedience requires knowledge of the rule
and acceptance of it as the rule of the agent's own actions, but not
necessarily knowledge of its ground or of its systematic connexion with
other similarly known and similarly accepted rules (It may be remarked
that the Greek word usually translated "reason," means in almost all
cases in the Ethics such a rule, and not the faculty which apprehends,
formulates, considers them).
The "moral virtues and vices" make up what we call character, and the
important questions arise: (1) What is character? and (2) How is it
formed? (for character in this sense is not a natural endowment; it is
formed or produced). Aristotle deals with these questions in the reverse
order. His answers are peculiar and distinctive--not that they are
absolutely novel (for they are anticipated in Plato), but that by him
they are for the first time distinctly and clearly formulated.
(1.) Character, good or bad, is produced by what Aristotle calls
"habituation," that is, it is the result of the repeated doing of acts
which have a similar or common quality. Such repetition acting upon
natural aptitudes or propensities gradually fixes them in one or other
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