Q. What is vice according to the law of nature?

A. It is the practice of actions prejudicial to the individual and to society.

Q. Have not virtue and vice an object purely spiritual and abstracted from the senses?

A. No; it is always to a physical end that they finally relate, and that end is always to destroy or preserve the body.

Q. Have vice and virtue degrees of strength and intensity?

A. Yes:  according to the importance of the faculties, which they attack or which they favor; and according to the number of persons in whom those faculties are favored or injured.

Q. Give me some examples?

A. The action of saving a man’s life is more virtuous than that of saving his property; the action of saving the lives of ten men, than that of saving only the life of one, and an action useful to the whole human race is more virtuous than an action that is only useful to one single nation.

Q. How does the law of nature prescribe the practice of good and virtue, and forbid that of evil and vice?

A. By the advantages resulting from the practice of good and virtue for the preservation of our body, and by the losses which result to our existence from the practice of evil and vice.

Q. Its precepts are then in action?

A. Yes:  they are action itself, considered in its present effect and in its future consequences.

Q. How do you divide the virtues?

A. We divide them in three classes, first, individual virtues, as relative to man alone; secondly, domestic virtues, as relative to a family; thirdly, social virtues, as relative to society.

CHAPTER V.

Of individual virtues.

Q. Which are the individual virtues?

A. There are five principal ones, to wit:  first, science, which comprises prudence and wisdom; secondly, temperance, comprising sobriety and chastity; thirdly, courage, or strength of body and mind; fourthly, activity, that is to say, love of labor and employment of time; fifthly, and finally, cleanliness, or purity of body, as well in dress as in habitation.

Q. How does the law of nature prescribe science?

A. Because the man acquainted with the causes and effects of things attends in a careful and sure manner to his preservation, and to the development of his faculties.  Science is to him the eye and the light, which enable him to discern clearly and accurately all the objects with which he is conversant, and hence by an enlightened man is meant a learned and well-informed man.  With science and instruction a man never wants for resources and means of subsistence; and upon this principle a philosopher, who had been shipwrecked, said to his companions, that were inconsolable for the loss of their wealth:  “For my part, I carry all my wealth within me.”

Q. Which is the vice contrary to science?