Similarly with regard to actions also there is excess, defect,
and the intermediate. Now virtue is concerned with passions and
actions, in which excess is a form of failure, and so is defect, while
the intermediate is praised and is a form of success; and being
praised and being successful are both characteristics of virtue.
Therefore virtue is a kind of mean, since, as we have seen, it aims at
what is intermediate.
Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the
class of the unlimited, as the Pythagoreans conjectured, and good to
that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way
(for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult- to miss
the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then,
excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue;
For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.
Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying
in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a
rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of
practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two
vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on
defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall
short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while
virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.
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