Book 7
5
It is clear therefore that unrestraint in one’s desires is more disgraceful than unrestraint in anger, and that it is in relation to bodily desires and pleasures that Self-restraint and Unrestraint are really manifested.
6
But we must distinguish among the bodily desires and pleasures themselves. As was said at the beginning,See 5.1, and also 1.3. some of these are human and natural both in kind and degree, some bestial, and some due to arrested development or disease. Now it is only with the first class that Temperance and Profligacy are concerned; hence we do not use the terms temperate or profligate of the lower animals, except metaphorically, of certain entire species distinguished from the rest by their exceptionally lascivious, mischievous, or omnivorous habits; for animals have neither the faculty of choice nor of calculation: they are aberrations from nature,The writer here seems to regard all animals as unnatural, in the sense of imperfectly developed, because irrational. The order precludes our taking this clause of the exceptional species (asses, wild boars, and pigs according to Greek zoology) just alluded to; moreover, as the excessive appetites of these are analogous to Profligacy in men, they are not aberrations from animal nature any more than profligates are from human nature. like men who are insane.
