Perhaps the truest way of conceiving Aristotle's meaning here is to
regard a moral virtue as a form of obedience to a maxim or rule of
conduct accepted by the agent as valid for a class of recurrent
situations in human life. Such obedience requires knowledge of the rule
and acceptance of it _as the rule_ of the agent's own actions, but not
necessarily knowledge of its ground or of its systematic connexion with
other similarly known and similarly accepted rules (It may be remarked
that the Greek word usually translated "reason," means in almost all
cases in the _Ethics_ such a rule, and not the faculty which apprehends,
formulates, considers them).

The "moral virtues and vices" make up what we call character, and the
important questions arise: (1) What is character? and (2) How is it
formed? (for character in this sense is not a natural endowment; it is
formed or produced). Aristotle deals with these questions in the reverse
order. His answers are peculiar and distinctive--not that they are
absolutely novel (for they are anticipated in Plato), but that by him
they are for the first time distinctly and clearly formulated.

(1.) Character, good or bad, is produced by what Aristotle calls
"habituation," that is, it is the result of the repeated doing of acts
which have a similar or common quality. Such repetition acting upon
natural aptitudes or propensities gradually fixes them in one or other
of two opposite directions, giving them a bias towards good or evil.
Hence the several acts which determine goodness or badness of character
must be done in a certain way, and thus the formation of good character
requires discipline and direction from without. Not that the agent
himself contributes nothing to the formation of his character, but that
at first he needs guidance. The point is not so much that the process