"As some ship moored and fastened to the shore, If the wind blows, the cables cannot hold it."
By cables he means the judgement which resists what is disgraceful, though sometimes it gives way under a tremendous storm of passion. For indeed it is with full sail that the intemperate man is borne on to pleasure by his desires, and surrenders himself to them, and even plays the part of pilot to the vessel; whereas the incontinent man is dragged sidelong into the disgraceful, and is its victim, as it were, while he desires eagerly to resist and overcome his passion, as Timon bantered Anaxarchus: "The recklessness and frantic energy of Anaxarchus to rush anywhere seemed like a dog's courage, but he being aware of it was miserable, so people said, but his voluptuous nature ever plunged him into excesses again, nature which even most sophists are afraid of." For neither is the wise man continent but temperate, nor the fool incontinent but intemperate; for the one delights in what is good, and the other is not vexed at what is bad. Incontinence, therefore, is a mark of a sophistical soul, endued with reason which cannot abide by what it knows to be right.
§ VII. Such, then, are the differences between incontinence and intemperance, and continence and temperance have their counterpart and analogous differences; for remorse and trouble and annoyance are companions of continence, whereas in the soul of the temperate person there is everywhere such equability and calm and soundness, by which the unreasoning is adjusted and harmonized to reason, being adorned with obedience and wonderful mildness, that looking at it you would say with the poet, "At once the wind was laid, and a wondrous calm ensued, for the god allayed the fury of the waves,"[232] reason having extinguished the vehement and furious and frantic motions of the desires, and making those which nature necessarily requires sympathetic and obedient and friendly and co-operative in carrying purposes out in action, so that they do not outrun or come short of reason, or behave disorderly and disobediently, but that every appetite is tractable, "as sucking foal runs by the side of its dam."[233] And this confirms the saying of Xenocrates about true philosophers, that they alone do willingly what all others do unwillingly at the compulsion of the law, as dogs are turned away from their pleasures by a blow, or cats by a noise, looking at nothing but their danger. It is clear then that there is in the soul a perception of such a generic and specific difference in relation to the desires, as of something fighting against and opposing them. But some say that there is no radical distinction difference or variance between reason and passion, but that there is a shifting of one and the same reason from one to the other, which escapes our notice owing to the sharpness and quickness of the change, so that we do not see at a glance that desire and repentance, anger and fear, giving way to what is disgraceful through passion, and recovery from the same, are the same natural property of the soul. For desire and fear and anger and the like they consider only depraved opinions and judgements, not in one portion of the soul only but in all its leading principles, inclinations and yieldings, and assents and impulses, and generally speaking in its energies soon changed, like the sallies of children, whose fury and excessive violence is unstable by reason of their weakness. But these views are, in the first place, contrary to evidence and observation; for no one observes in himself a change from passion to judgement, and from judgement back to passion; nor does anyone cease from loving when he reflects that it would be well to break the affair off and strive with all his might against it; nor again, does he put on one side reflection and judgement, when he gives way and is overcome by desire. Moreover, when he resists passion by reason, he does not escape passion altogether; nor again, when he is mastered by passion does he fail to discern his fault through reason: so that neither by passion does he abolish reason, nor does he by reason get rid of passion, but is tossed about to and fro alternately between passion and reason. And those who suppose that the leading principle in the soul is at one time desire, and at another time reason in opposition to desire, are not unlike people who would make the hunter and the animal he hunts one and the same person, but alternately changing from hunter to animal, from animal to hunter. As their eyesight is plainly deficient, so these are faulty in regard to their perceptions, seeing that they must perceive in themselves not a change of one and the same thing, but a difference and struggle between two opposing elements.