Abstract

Chapter 5 offers a psychophysical account of how habituation changes the bodies and souls of men and makes them virtuous, by building on Aristotle’s discussion of habituation as a form of perfection in _Physics_ VII 3, which is the only extended natural scientific treatment of the processes of habituation in the corpus. Character virtue, then, is a proportionate, unified, and stable relation that exists among the capacities that are constitutive of the perceptive part of the soul, have all individually undergone qualitative changes so that each is in the best condition possible, _and_ are suitably obedient to the rational part of the soul, which is practically wise. The perfection that brings about this kind of psychological relation is very hard to achieve because it involves the alteration of many psychological capacities, each of which requires its own particular kind of training from infancy onward.