The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

saying of
Demodocus about the Milesians, ‘the Milesians are not without
sense, but they do the things that senseless people do’, so too
incontinent people are not criminal, but they will do criminal
acts.
    Now, since the incontinent man is apt to pursue, not on
conviction, bodily pleasures that are excessive and contrary to the
right rule, while the self-indulgent man is convinced because he is
the sort of man to pursue them, it is on the contrary the former
that is easily persuaded to change his mind, while the latter is
not. For virtue and vice respectively preserve and destroy the
first principle, and in actions the final cause is the first
principle, as the hypotheses are in mathematics; neither in that
case is it argument that teaches the first principles, nor is it so
here-virtue either natural or produced by habituation is what
teaches right opinion about the first principle. Such a man as
this, then, is temperate; his contrary is the self-indulgent.
    But there is a sort of man who is carried away as a result of
passion and contrary to the right rule-a man whom passion masters
so that he does not act according to the right rule, but does not
master to the extent of making him ready to believe that he ought
to pursue such pleasures without reserve; this is the incontinent
man, who is better than the self-indulgent man, and not bad without
qualification; for the best thing in him, the first principle, is
preserved. And contrary to him is another kind of man, he who
abides by his convictions and is not carried away, at least as a
result of passion. It is evident from these considerations that the
latter is a good state and the former a bad one.
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9
    Is the man continent who abides by any and every rule and any
and every choice, or the man who abides by the right choice, and is
he incontinent who abandons any and every choice and any and every
rule, or he who abandons the rule that is not false and the choice
that is right; this is how we put it before in our statement of the
problem. Or is it incidentally any and every choice but per se the
true rule and the right choice by which the one abides and the
other does not? If any one chooses or pursues this for the sake of
that, per se he pursues and chooses the latter, but incidentally
the former. But when we speak without qualification we mean what is
per se. Therefore in a sense the one abides by, and the other
abandons, any and every opinion; but without qualification, the
true opinion.
    There are some who are apt to abide by their opinion, who are
called strong-headed, viz. those who are hard to persuade in the
first instance and are not easily persuaded to change; these have
in them something like the continent man, as the prodigal is in a
way like the liberal man and the rash man like the confident man;
but they are different in many respects. For it is to passion and
appetite that the one will not yield, since on occasion the
continent man will be easy to persuade; but it is to argument that
the others refuse to yield, for they do form appetites and many of
them are led by their pleasures. Now the people who are
strong-headed are the opinionated, the ignorant, and the
boorish-the opinionated being influenced by pleasure and pain; for
they delight in the victory they gain if they are not persuaded to
change, and are pained if their decisions become null and void as
decrees sometimes do; so that they are liker the incontinent than
the continent man.
    But there are some who fail to abide by their resolutions, not
as a result of incontinence, e.g. Neoptolemus in Sophocles’
Philoctetes; yet it was for the sake of pleasure that he did not
stand fast-but a noble pleasure; for telling the truth was noble to
him, but he had been persuaded by Odysseus to tell the lie. For not
every one who does anything for the sake of pleasure is either
self-indulgent or bad or incontinent, but he who does it for a
disgraceful pleasure.
    Since there is also a sort of man who takes less delight than he
should in bodily things, and does not abide by the rule, he who is
intermediate between him and the incontinent man is the continent
man; for the incontinent man fails to abide by the rule because he
delights too much in them, and this man because he delights in them
too little; while the continent man abides by the rule and does not
change on either account. Now if continence is good, both the
contrary states must be bad, as they actually appear to