To know what actions are virtuous, and what vicious — in other words, to know what actions tend, on the whole, to happiness, and what to unhappiness — in the case of each and every man, in each and all the conditions in which they may severally be placed, is the profoundest and most complex study to which the greatest human mind ever has been, or ever can be, directed. It is, nevertheless, the constant study to which each and every man — the humblest in intellect as well as the greatest —
is necessarily driven by the desires and necessities of his own existence. It is also the study in which each and every person, from his cradle to his grave, must necessarily form his own conclusions — because no one else knows or feels, or can know or feel, as he knows and feels the desires and necessities, the hopes, and fears, and impulses of his own nature, or the pressure of his own circumstances.
It is not often possible to say of those acts that are called vices, that they really are vices, except in degree. That is, it is difficult to say of any actions, or courses of action, that are called vices, that they really would have been vices,
if they had stopped short of a certain point. The question of virtue or vice, therefore, in all such cases, is a question of quantity and degree, and not of the intrinsic character of any single act, by itself. This fact adds to the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of any one's — except each individual for himself — drawing any accurate line, or anything like any accurate line, between virtue and vice — that is, of telling where virtue ends, and vice begins. And this is another reason why this whole question of virtue and vice
should be left for each person to settle for himself.
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