life. Thus medical skill ministers to the particular end of healing:
while the moral habit of temperance serves the general end, which is
final happiness and perfection. So to give a wrong prescription
through sheer antecedent ignorance, is to fail as a doctor: but to get
drunk wittingly and knowingly is to fail as a man.

3. The grand distinction between intellectual and moral habits seems
to be this, that moral habits reside in powers which may act against
the dictate of the understanding,--the error of Socrates, noticed
above (c. v., s. ii., n. 2, p. 70), lay in supposing that they could
not so act: whereas the power which is the seat of the intellectual
habits, the understanding, cannot possibly act against itself. Habits
dispose the subject to elicit acts of the power wherein they reside.
Moral habits induce acts of will and sensitive appetite: intellectual
habits, acts of intellect. Will and appetite may act against what the
agent knows to be best: but intellect cannot contradict intellect. It
cannot judge that to be true and beautiful which it knows to be false
and foul. If a musician strikes discords on purpose, or a grammarian
makes solecisms wilfully, he is not therein contradicting the
intellectual habit within him, for it is the office of such a habit to
aid the intellect to judge correctly, and the intellect here does
correctly judge the effect produced. On the other hand, if the
musician or grammarian blunders, the intellect within him has not been
contradicted, seeing that he knew no better: the habit of grammar or
music has not been violated, but has failed to cover the case.
Therefore the intellectual habit is not a safeguard to keep a man from
going against his intelligent self. No such safeguard is needed: the
thing is impossible, in the region of pure intellect. In a region
where no temptation could enter, intellectual habits would suffice
alone of themselves to make a perfectly virtuous man. To avoid evil