Testing our conclusions by the judgments of common experience, we gather support from them.  Goods external, and goods of the body, are reckoned inferior to goods of the soul, which is recognised as the seat of activities.  The identification of happiness with virtue, however, necessitates the distinction between active virtue and virtuousness.  As conducing to active virtue, the other kinds of goods are elements in happiness.  We must assume it to be not something granted to us, outside our own control, but attainable by effort and education.

Virtues are of two kinds:  of the intellect, acquired by study; and moral, acquired by practice.  The moral virtues are not implanted by nature, but we have the capacity for them by nature, and achieve them by practice, as by practice we acquire excellence in the arts, or control over our passions.  Education, then, is of the utmost importance, since the state or habit of virtue is the outcome of virtue in act.

The manner, the “how” of action, must be in accord with Right Reason, whereof we shall speak elsewhere.  Here we must recognise that we are not laying down universal propositions, but general rules which are modified by circumstances.  Our activities must lie in a mean between the two extremes of excess and defect, and this applies both to the process of generating virtue, and to its manifestation.  The virtues are concerned with pleasure and pain, because these act as inducements or opposing influences; Beauty, Advantage, and Pleasure being the three standing inducements, and Pleasure entering into both the others; so that in one aspect Virtue is the Best action in respect to pleasure.

But it does not lie in the mere act; the act must be born of knowledge and of choice done for its own sake, and persistently—­the first, knowledge, being the least important; to make it the most important is a speculative error.

Now, there are three modes of mind:  feeling or passion, faculty, and habit.  We do not praise or blame passion in itself, or the faculty; therefore virtue can lie in neither, but must be found in habit or condition.  The virtuous habit or condition is what enables that whereof it is the virtue to perform its function, which, in the case of man, is the activity of the soul, preserving always a middle course between excess and deficiency, by choice.

In another sense, however, we must remember that there are qualities in themselves wrong, and that virtue may be presented as not something intermediate, but a consummation.  But when we name each of these virtues—­Courage, Temperance, Liberality, etc.; the social virtues, or good manners; the virtues concerned with the passions—­we can name the corresponding excess or deficiency.  Justice and the intellectual virtues demand a separate analysis.

Each virtue stands in opposition to each of the extremes, and each of these to the other extreme, though in some cases the virtue may be more antagonistic to one extreme than to the other, as courage to cowardice more than to rashness.  In individual cases, it is difficult to avoid being deflected towards one or other of the extremes.