Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/232

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GOODNESS AND THE VIRTUES

every emotion: he reflects on alternatives, and thinks over prospective courses of action, and his character is formed by reflection and thoughtfulness. Wisdom is the foundation of all virtue.

§ 7. The Education of the Virtues. How far is the child capable of being educated in virtue? Can the child be trained to be courageous and temperate and just and wise? Most certainly he can. The virtues, as we have seen, are simply different aspects of goodness of character, and goodness of character is acquired by training. A man's character becomes virtuous only by the habitual doing of virtuous actions. He acquires the virtue of temperance only by constantly practising self-control; and he becomes courageous by habitually acting bravely in the difficulties and dangers of life. The possibility of sound moral education depends on the fact that goodness of character is a unity; and the several virtues will develop most naturally and truly if they grow from the character as a whole. Hence the task of moral education is to train character as a whole, rather than to attempt to impose peculiar virtues on it from the outside. The education of character is on precisely the same footing as the education of the mind. It has long been recognised that education does not aim at filling the mind from the outside with knowledge, whether "useful" or "useless." Education insists that its task is to train the mind to develop its own powers by attending to and observing the world, and by assimilating what enters into its experience. Precisely the same thing is true of the education of character. The attempt to instil particular virtues from the outside is foredoomed to