On Moral Virtue (9)

But my opponents, though forced to concede in a manner these arguments because of their obvious truth, yet persist in calling shame modesty, [*] pleasure joy, and fears precautions. No one would blame them for this euphemism if they would but call these same emotions by these soft names when they attach themselves to reason, and call them by those harsher names when the emotions oppose and offer violence to reason. But when, convicted by their tears and tremblings and changes of colour, in place of grief and fear they call these emotions compunctions and perplexities and gloss over the desires with the term eagernesses, they seem to be devising casuistic, not philosophic, shifts and escapes from reality through the medium of fancy names.

And yet these very men,[*] to cite another instance, call those joys, volitions, and precautions of

theirs right sensibilities to emotion, not insensibilities, in this case using the terms correctly. For a right sensibility arises when reason does not destroy the emotion, but composes and sets it in order in the souls of temperate persons. But what it is that happens in the case of evil and incontinent persons when, though their judgement tells them to love father and mother in place of a favourite or mistress, they cannot do this; yet when their judgement bids them to love courtesan and flatterer, they immediately do that very thing? For if emotion and judgement were one, love and hate would follow upon our judgement of what we ought to love and hate; but as it is, the contrary happens: with some judgements the emotion joins forces, others it disregards. Therefore even these very men[*] affirm, since the evidence forces them to do so, that not every judgement is an emotion, but only that which sets in motion a violent and excessive impulse, thereby acknowledging that in us the faculty of judging and the faculty of feeling emotion are different, in the sense that the one is that which sets in motion, the other that which is moved. And Chrysippus himself in many places, by defining endurance and continence as states which follow the convictions of reason, is obviously forced by the evidence to acknowledge that that within us which follows is different from that which it follows when persuaded, or, on the other hand, fights against when it is not persuaded.