Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 | Page 5

that they who have
found any meaning in checks, have done so only because, through
ignorance, they could find no meaning in ethics.
Hence it becomes necessary for those who do find a meaning in checks,
to defend that meaning; and hence I undertake to answer MR.
COLLIER'S question.
Aristotle's checks are those moral adjustments that form the
distinguishing feature of his philosophy.
They are the eyes of reason, whereby he would teach man to avoid
divergence from the straight path of happiness.
They are his moderators, his mediocrities, his metriopathics.
They are his philosophical steering-marks, his moral guiding-lines,
whereby the passions are to be kept in the via media; as much removed
from total abnegation on the one hand, as from immoderate indulgence
on the other.
Virtue, according to Aristotle, consists in checked or adjusted
propensities. Our passions are not in themselves evil, except when
unchecked by reason. And inasmuch as we may overeat, or underfeed
ourselves (the check being temperance), so may we suffer our other
propensities to deviate from the juste milieu, either in the direction of
indulgence or of privation. {497}
The art of adjusting the passions requires an apprenticeship to virtue.
The end to be attained is the establishment of good habits. These good
habits, like any other skill, can only be attained by practice. Therefore
the practice of virtue is the education of the passions.
Ethics is the doctrine of habits; but habits may be good or bad. When
good, they constitute virtue; when bad, licentiousness.

The doctrine of checks is that branch of ethics which teaches moral
adjustment and restraint.
Therefore checks and licentiousness are in better antithesis to each
other, than ethics can be to either, because ethics includes both.
The Aristotelian idea of adjustment, rather than denial, of the passions,
is well illustrated in the following passage from Plutarch's Morall
Vertue, by Philemon Holland, a contemporary of Shakspeare:
"For neither do they shed and spill the wine upon the floure who are
afraide to be drunke, but delay the same with water: nor those who
feare the violence of a passion, do take it quite away, but rather temper
and qualifie the same: like as folke use to breake horses and oxen from
their flinging out with their heeles, their stiffenes and curstnes of the
head, and stubburnes in receiving the bridle or the yoke, but do not
restraine them of other motions of going about their worke and doing
their deede. And even so, verily, reason maketh good use of these
passions, when they be well tamed, and, as it were, brought to hand:
without overweakening or rooting out cleane that parte of the soule
which is made for to second reason and do it good service.... Whereas
let passions be rid cleane away (if that were possible to be done), our
reason will be found in many things more dull and idle: like as the pilot
and master of a ship hath little to do if the winde be laid and no gale at
all stirring ... as if to the discourse of reason the gods had adjoined
passion as a pricke to incite, and a chariot to set it forward."
Again, in describing the "Meanes," he says--
"Now to begin with Fortitude, they say it is the meane between
Cowardise and rash Audacitie; of which twaine the one is a defect, the
other an excesse of the yrefull passion: Liberalitie, betweene Nigardise
and Prodigalitie: Clemencie and Mildnesse, betweene senselesse
Indolence and Crueltie: Justice, the meane of giving more or lesse than
due: Temperance, a mediocritie betweene the blockish stupiditie of the
minde, moved with no touch of pleasure, and all unbrideled loosenes,
whereby it is abandoned to all sensualitie."-- The Philosophie of
Plutarch, fol. 1603.

It really does appear to me that there could not be a happier or more
appropriate designation, for a philosophy made up in this way of
"meanes" and adjustments, so as to steer between the plus and minus,
than a system of checks--not fixed, or rigid rules, as they are sometimes
interpreted to be, but nice allowances of excess or defect, to be
discovered, weighed, and determined by individual reason, in the audit
of each man's conscience, according to the strength or weakness of the
passions he may have to regulate.
I therefore oppose the substitution of ethics--
1. Because we have the primâ facie evidence of the text itself, that
checks was Shakspeare's word.
2. Because we have internal evidence, in the significance and
excellence of the phrase, that it was Shakspeare's word.
Ethics was the patent title by which Aristotle's moral philosophy was
universally known; therefore any ignoramus, who never dipped beyond
the title, might, and would, have used it. But no person, except one well
read in the philosophy itself, would think