Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
H. Rackham, Ed.

do not fall within the limits of Vice, nor yet does Bestiality; and to conquer or yield to them does not constitute Unrestraint¹ in the strict sense, but only the state so called by analogy; just as a man who cannot control his anger must be described as ‘unrestrained in’ that passion, not ‘unrestrained.’

（Indeed folly, cowardice, profligacy, and ill-temper, whenever they run to excess, are either bestial or morbid conditions. [6] One so constituted by nature as to be frightened by everything, even the sound of a mouse, shows the cowardice of a lower animal; the man who was afraid of a weasel was a case of disease. So with folly: people irrational by nature and living solely by sensation, like certain remote tribes of barbarians, belong to the bestial class; those who lose their reason owing to some disease, such as epilepsy, or through insanity, to the morbid.） [7]

With these unnatural propensities it is possible in some cases merely to have the disposition and not to yield to it: I mean, for instance, Phalaris² might have had the desire to eat a child, or to practise unnatural vice, and refrained; or it is possible not merely to possess but to yield to the propensity. [8] As therefore with Vice, that natural to man is called simply vice, whereas the other kind³ is termed not simply vice, but vice with the qualifying epithet bestial or morbid, similarly with Unrestraint, it is clear that the bestial and morbid kinds are distinct from unrestraint proper, and that the name without qualification belongs only to that kind of unrestraint which is co-extensive with Profligacy of the human sort. [9]

It is clear then that Self-restraint and Unrestraint relate only to the objects to which Temperance and Profligacy are related, and that unrestraint in relation to anything else is of another kind, which is only so called metaphorically and with a qualification.

Let us now consider the point that Unrestraint in anger⁴ is less disgraceful than Unrestraint in the desires.

Now it appears that anger does to some extent hear reason, but hears it wrong, just as hasty servants hurry out of the room before they have heard the whole of what you are saying, and so mistake your order, and as watch-dogs bark at a mere knock at the door, without waiting to see if it is a friend. Similarly anger, owing to the heat and swiftness of its nature, hears, but does not hear the order given, and rushes off to take vengeance. When reason or imagination suggests that an insult or slight has been received, anger flares up at once, but after reasoning as it were that you ought to make war on anybody who insults you. Desire on the other hand, at a mere hint from [the reason or⁵] the senses that a thing is pleasant, rushes off to enjoy it.