GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

OBJECTIVE INTUITIONISM 223
out, we must in the last resort appeal, even when,
as in the present case, its deliverances appear to be in-
consistent.
The Brave Man and the Insensitive Man. An
example may serve to illustrate the paradox whose two
sides I have tried to present. Courage is a virtue, and a
brave man might be plausibly defined as one who feels no
fear. Hence, the virtue of courage consists in not feeling
afraid; that is the first side of the paradox. But reflection
suggests that a being who never feels fear is lacking in
sensibility. For example, the angry bull who, maddened by
the darts of the picadors, violently hurls himselfagainst any
he does not constitute
object in sight, is without fear, yet
an obvious example of what we mean by bravery; and
he is not, we should say, brave because, whatever his
native sensibility may have been, it has been dulled by
rage. For the same reason we do not accord to the man
who performs feats of reckless courage, when doped by
rum or inflamed by bratndy, die same meed of admiration
as we do to the man who, justly appraising the danger
that confronts him and feeling a natural emotion of fear
for it is, in fact formidable and he is a sensitive man
nevertheless coolly faces and overcomes it. Dutch courage
in fact is inferior to courage tout court. The point of the
example lies in the fact that, while the second man feels fear,
the first does not; yet it is the second man who is brave.
The moral virtue of courage does not, then, consist in
not feeling fear, but in feeling it and overcoming it.
As with courage, so with the other cardinal virtues.
The performance of our duty, the resistance of temptation,
cannot, as I have said, always be easy, even for the best
of us. It must, indeed, often be difficult, if only because,
if it were not difficult, the obligation which we feel to
perform our duty would not require to call upon the
authority of the moral will to implement it. The good
man must, then, b& regarded as one who, fully conscious
of the difficulty of doing right, nevertheless overcomes it