Kitap 7
1
Now it appears that anger does to some extent hear reason, but hears it wrong, just as hasty servants hurry out of the room before they have heard the whole of what you are saying, and so mistake your order, and as watch-dogs bark at a mere knock at the door, without waiting to see if it is a friend. Similarly anger, owing to the heat and swiftness of its nature, hears, but does not hear the order given, and rushes off to take vengeance. When reason or imagination suggests that an insult or slight has been received, anger flares up at once, but after reasoning as it were that you ought to make war on anybody who insults you. Desire on the other hand, at a mere hint from [the reason orThese words are surely an interpolation.] the senses that a thing is pleasant, rushes off to enjoy it. Hence anger follows reason in a manner, but desire does not. Therefore yielding to desire is more disgraceful than yielding to anger, for he that fails to restrain his anger is in a way controlled by reason, but the otherViz., the man who is unrestrained in the strict sense, i.e., cannot restrain his desires. is controlled not by reason but by desire.
2
Again, when impulses are natural, it is more excusable to follow them, since even with the desires it is more excusable to follow those that are common to all men, and in so far as they are common. But anger and bad temper are more natural than desire for excessive and unnecessary pleasures; witness the man who was had up for beating his father and who said in his defence, “Well, my father used to beat his father, and he used to beat his, and (pointing to his little boy) so will my son here beat me when he grows up; it runs in our family”; and the man who, when his son was throwing him out of the house, used to beg him to stop when he got to the door, because he only used to drag his father as far as that.This story is developed in Robert Browning’s poem Halbert and Hob ; it is said also to occur in a German Volkslied.
