Pagina 426 di 734

Among the class of Positive are the Opinionated, the Ignorant,

and the Bearish: the first, from the motives of pleasure and

pain: I mean, they have the pleasurable feeling of a kind of

victory in not having their convictions changed, and they are

pained when their decrees, so to speak, are reversed: so that, in

fact, they rather resemble the man of Imperfect Self-Control than

the man of Self-Control.

Again, there are some who depart from their resolutions not by

reason of any Imperfection of Self-Control; take, for instance,

Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes of Sophocles. Here certainly

pleasure was the motive of his departure from his resolution, but

then it was one of a noble sort: for to be truthful was noble in

his eyes and he had been persuaded by Ulysses to lie.

So it is not every one who acts from the motive of pleasure who

is utterly destitute of Self-Control or base or of Imperfect

Self-Control, only he who acts from the impulse of a base

pleasure.

Chapter IX.