[Footnote 34: _Ethics_, Book III, ch. ii, p. 61.]
Of course, as Aristotle admits, there is this half truth lying at the
root of the Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge that every
vicious person is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to
abstain from doing in the sense that what he is about to do could
not be defended upon any ground of enlightened self-interest. And
so, while he finds sin sweet and evil pleasant, these are delusive
experiences, which, if he saw life steadily and whole, he would know
as such. But one reason for this ignorance is unwillingness to know.
Good men do evil, and understanding men sin, partly because they are
misled by false ideas, partly, also, because, knowing them false,
they cannot or will not give them up. This is what Goethe very well
understood when he said, "Most men prefer error to truth, because
truth imposes limitations and error does not."
And another reason is that when men do know, they find a deadly and
mysterious, a sort of perverted joy--a sweet and terrible and secret
delight,--in denying their own understanding. Thus right living calls
for a repeated and difficult exercise of the will, what Professor
Babbitt calls "a pulling back of the impulse to the track that
knowledge indicates." Such moral mastery is not identical with moral
perception and most frequently is not its accompaniment, unless
observation and experience are alike fallacious.
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