They are his philosophical steering-marks, his moral guiding-lines, whereby the passions are to be kept in the _via media_; as much removed from total abnegation on the one hand, as from immoderate indulgence on the other.
Virtue, according to Aristotle, consists in checked or _adjusted_ propensities. Our passions are not in themselves evil, except when unchecked by reason. And inasmuch as we may overeat, or underfeed ourselves (the check being temperance), so may we suffer our other propensities to deviate from the _juste milieu_, either in the direction of indulgence or of privation. { 497}
The art of adjusting the passions requires an apprenticeship to virtue. The end to be attained is the establishment of good habits. These good habits, like any other skill, can only be attained by practice. Therefore the practice of virtue is the education of the passions.
_Ethics_ is the doctrine of _habits_; but habits may be good or bad. When good, they constitute virtue; when bad, licentiousness.
The doctrine of _checks_ is that branch of _ethics_ which teaches moral adjustment and restraint.
Therefore _checks_ and _licentiousness_ are in better antithesis to each other, than _ethics_ can be to either, because ethics includes both.
The Aristotelian idea of _adjustment_, rather than _denial_, of the passions, is well illustrated in the following passage from Plutarch's _Morall Vertue_, by Philemon Holland, a contemporary of Shakspeare:
"For neither do they shed and spill the wine upon the floure who are afraide to be drunke, but delay the same with water: nor those who feare the violence of a passion, do take it quite away, but rather temper and qualifie the same: like as folke use to breake horses and oxen from their flinging out with their heeles, their stiffenes and curstnes of the head, and stubburnes in receiving the bridle or the yoke, but do not restraine them of other motions of going about their worke and doing their deede. And even so, verily, reason maketh good use of these passions, when they be well tamed, and, as it were, brought to hand: without overweakening or rooting out cleane that parte of the soule which is made for to second reason and do it good service.... Whereas let passions be rid cleane away (if that were possible to be done), our reason will be found in many things more dull and idle: like as the pilot and master of a ship hath little to do if the winde be laid and no gale at all stirring ... as if to _the discourse of reason_ the gods had adjoined passion as a pricke to incite, and a chariot to set it forward."