Again, in describing the "Meanes," he says--
"Now to begin with Fortitude, they say it is the meane between Cowardise and rash Audacitie; of which twaine the one is a defect, the other an excesse of the yrefull passion: Liberalitie, betweene Nigardise and Prodigalitie: Clemencie and Mildnesse, betweene senselesse Indolence and Crueltie: Justice, the meane of giving more or lesse than due: Temperance, a mediocritie betweene the blockish stupiditie of the minde, moved with _no touch of pleasure_, and all unbrideled loosenes, whereby it is abandoned to all sensualitie."-- _The Philosophie of Plutarch_, fol. 1603.
It really does appear to me that there could not be a happier or more appropriate designation, for a philosophy made up in this way of "meanes" and adjustments, so as to steer between the _plus_ and _minus_, than a system of _checks_--not fixed, or rigid rules, as they are sometimes interpreted to be, but nice allowances of excess or defect, to be discovered, weighed, and determined by individual reason, in the audit of each man's conscience, according to the strength or weakness of the passions he may have to regulate.
I therefore oppose the substitution of _ethics_--
1. Because we have the _primâ facie_ evidence of the text itself, that _checks_ was Shakspeare's word.
2. Because we have internal evidence, in the significance and excellence of the phrase, that it was Shakspeare's word.
_Ethics_ was the patent title by which Aristotle's moral philosophy was universally known; therefore any ignoramus, who never dipped beyond the title, might, _and would_, have used it. But no person, except one well read in the philosophy itself, would think of giving it such a designation as _checks_; which word, nevertheless, is most happily characteristic of it.
3. Because, as before stated, Aristotle's _checks_, being the restrictive and regulating portion of Aristotle's _Ethics_, is necessarily a more diametrical antithesis to Ovid (and his _laxities_).
4. Because I look upon the use of this phrase as one of those nice and scarcely perceptible touches by which Shakspeare was content rather to hint at, than to disclose his knowledge,--one of those effects whereby he makes a single word supply the place of a treatise.