Only with the first of these are temperance and
self-indulgence concerned; this is why we call the lower animals
neither temperate nor self-indulgent except by a metaphor, and only if
some one race of animals exceeds another as a whole in wantonness,
destructiveness, and omnivorous greed; these have no power of choice
or calculation, but they are departures from the natural norm, as,
among men, madmen are. Now brutishness is a less evil than vice,
though more alarming; for it is not that the better part has been
perverted, as in man,-they have no better part. Thus it is like
comparing a lifeless thing with a living in respect of badness; for
the badness of that which has no originative source of movement is
always less hurtful, and reason is an originative source. Thus it is
like comparing injustice in the abstract with an unjust man. Each is
in some sense worse; for a bad man will do ten thousand times as
much evil as a brute.
7
With regard to the pleasures and pains and appetites and aversions
arising through touch and taste, to which both self-indulgence and
temperance were formerly narrowed down, it possible to be in such a
state as to be defeated even by those of them which most people
master, or to master even those by which most people are defeated;
among these possibilities, those relating to pleasures are
incontinence and continence, those relating to pains softness and
endurance.
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