87

I think the way to handle that is to say the more sophisti-
cated the science, the more deductive. He at least was able
to contemplate these things 2500 years ago which I find
rather amazing.

This business about the moreal virtues and the mean,
the irrational content. He said the first virtue of manliness
was courage. The first virtue of the military man is courage.
We expect the dispositon of character of a military man to
be primarily courageous, to be committed to duty, to have
endurance, and they didn't go into whether he squared corners
or this or that. I mean they kind of just left that up to
the guy. He would be guided by principles. It was reasonable
to have rules and he would handle them in a sensible way.
Cowardice was a lack of courage. Rashness, foolhardedness,
bravado were false courage on the other side. The Greeks
had models of men, they were paradines of this or that. They
would make this model military man, Aristotle called him the
Magnanimous Man. I always thought magnanimous was some kind
of forgiving sort of guy. That's the third definition in
Webster. The great soul man is the magnanimous man and one
of the ways he differs from the Christian ideal is he has
pride - a decent amount of pride. He thinks it would be poor
form to be a braggard but equally poor form to try to hide
the fact that a man had a certain amount of nobility - noble
spirit I mean. So we find this magnanimous man being very
proud, very self-confident. If vaingloriousness is to the

16