THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

ARISTOTLE 61
tween secrecy and loquacity, honesty; between moroseness and buffoonery,
good humor; between quarrelsomeness and flattery, friendship; between
Hamlet's indecisiveness and Quixote's impulsiveness is self-control. 49
"Right," then, in ethics or conduct, is not different from "right"
matics or engineering; it means correct, fit,
result.
what works best to the best
The golden mean, however, is not, like the mathematical mean, an
in mathe-
fcxact average of two precisely calculable extremes; it fluctuates with the
collateral circumstances of each situation, and discovers itself only to
mature and flexible reason. Excellence is an art won by training and
habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence,
but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; "these virtues
are formed in man by his doing the actions"; 60 we are what we repeatedly
do. Excellence, then, is not .an act but a habit: "the good of man is a
working of the soul in the way of excellence in 'a' complete life; ... for
as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not
one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy." 51
Youth is the age of extremes: "if the young commit a fault it is always
on the side of excess and exaggeration." The great difficulty of youth
(and of many of youth's elders) is to get put of one extreme.. without falling
into its opposite. Fpr^one extreme easily passes into the other, whether
dirough "over-correction*' or" else^iserfhsin