and choose good, it would be enough to know the one and the other. But
in this world seductive reasonings sway the will, and fits of passion
the sensitive appetite, prompting the one and the other to rise up and
break away from what the intellect knows all along to be the true good
of man. Unless moral virtue be there to hold these powers to their
allegiance, they will frequently disobey the understanding. Such
disobedience is more irrational than any mere intellectual error. In
an error purely intellectual, where the will has no part, the
objective truth indeed is missed, but the intelligence that dwells
within the man is not flouted and gain-sayed. It takes two to make a
contradiction as to make a quarrel. But an intellectual error has only
one side. The intellect utters some false pronouncement, and there is
nothing within the man that says otherwise. In the moral error there
is a contradiction within, an intestine quarrel. The intellect
pronounces a thing not good, not to be taken, and the sensitive
appetite will throw a veil over the face of intellect, and seize upon
the thing. That amounts to a contradiction of a man's own intelligent
self.

4. It appears that, absolutely speaking, intellectual virtue is the
greater perfection of a man: indeed in the act of that virtue, as we
have seen, his crowning perfection and happiness lies. But moral
virtue is the greater safeguard. The breach of moral virtue is the
direr evil. Sin is worse than ignorance, and more against reason,
because it is against the doer's own reason. Moral virtue then is more
necessary than intellectual in a world where evil is rife, as it is a
more vital thing to escape grievous disease than to attain the highest
development of strength and beauty. And as disease spoils strength and
beauty, not indeed always taking them away, but rendering them
valueless, so evil moral habits subvert intellectual virtue, and turn