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And so
with Courage: we become brave by training ourselves to despise and endure terrors, and we
shall be best able to endure terrors when we have become brave.3.
An index of our dispositions is afforded by the pleasure or pain that accompanies our
actions. A man is temperate if he abstains from bodily pleasures and finds this abstinence
itself enjoyable, profligate if he feels it irksome; he is brave if he faces danger with
pleasure or at all events without pain, cowardly if he does so with pain.
In fact pleasures and pains are the things with which moral virtue is concerned.
For （1） pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain cause us to
abstain from doing noble actions. 3.
[2]
Hence the importance, as Plato points out, of having been definitely
trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things; this is what good education
means.3.
[3]
（2）Again, if the virtues have to do with actions and feelings, and
every action is attended with pleasure or pain, this too shows that virtue has to do with
pleasure and pain.3.
[4]
（3） Another indication is the fact that pain is the medium of
punishment; for punishment is a sort of medicine, and the nature of medicine to work by
means of opposites.1
3.
[5]
（4）Again, as we said before, every formed disposition of the soul
realizes its full nature2
Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 19, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1934.
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