Of Moderation

Reason directs that we should always go the same way, but not always at the same pace. And though the body of a man be not able to hold out in every kind of excess, yet the mind may; or at least it should endeavour to moderate and govern itself, and not suffer itself to run into excesses. Virtue itself, if carried beyond measure, becomes vice: the very same quality that, held in proportion, adorns a man, held in excess deforms him.

The Stoics said that even wisdom, pressed too hard, tips into folly. The courageous man is separated from the reckless by a thin line; the just man from the harsh man by another. The pious man, pursued past his frontier, becomes a fanatic. The temperate man is not the man who feels nothing — for that is a stone — but the man who feels proportionately, who desires in season, who holds his appetites at the length of reason’s arm.

“There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, nor any science so arduous as to know how to live this life well and according to nature.”

Even our pleasures, if we do not moderate them, suffocate us. Men who pursue any single good to the exclusion of all balance find that the good they pursue turns against them. The scholar who reads without rest makes himself unfit to understand what he reads. The soldier who seeks glory in every encounter exhausts the courage he was trying to employ. The man who gorges on a delicacy destroys his capacity to taste it.

This is what I mean by moderation — not timidity, not the refusal of pleasure or passion, but the wisdom to give each thing its proper proportion. I have no quarrel with strong feeling; I have a quarrel with feeling that has broken its harness and runs where it will. We are all, perhaps, somewhat given to excess in one direction or another; the honest aim is to know our own tendency and to hold something in reserve against it.