high view of the matter; but apart from it I cannot well explain why
cowardice seems contemptible, and personal courage a noble and sublime
thing; for no lower point of view enables me to see why a finite
individual who is everything to himself--nay, who is himself even
the very fundamental condition of the existence of the rest of the
world--should not put his own preservation above every other aim. It
is, then, an insufficient explanation of Courage to make it rest
only on utility, to give it an empirical and not a transcendental
character. It may have been for some such reason that Calderon once
uttered a sceptical but remarkable opinion in regard to Courage, nay,
actually denied its reality; and put his denial into the mouth of a
wise old minister, addressing his young sovereign. "Although," he
observed, "natural fear is operative in all alike, a man may be brave
in not letting it be seen; and it is this that constitutes Courage":

_Que aunque el natural temor
En todos obra igualmente,
No mostrarle es ser valiente
Y esto es lo que hace el valor_.[1]

[Footnote 1: _La Hija del Aire_, ii., 2.]

In regard to the difference which I have mentioned between the
ancients and the moderns in their estimate of Courage as a virtue,
it must be remembered that by Virtue, _virtus_, [Greek: aretae], the
ancients understood every excellence or quality that was praiseworthy
in itself, it might be moral or intellectual, or possibly only
physical. But when Christianity demonstrated that the fundamental
tendency of life was moral, it was moral superiority alone than
henceforth attached to the notion of Virtue. Meanwhile the earlier