The other pronounces that the virtue of a shoemaker is to make good
shoes. This may also serve to explain why it is that in the ancient
scheme of ethics virtues and vices are mentioned which find no place
in ours.
As the place of Courage amongst the virtues is a matter of doubt,
so is that of Avarice amongst the vices. It must not, however, be
confounded with greed, which is the most immediate meaning of the
Latin word _avaritia_. Let us then draw up and examine the arguments
_pro et contra_ in regard to Avarice, and leave the final judgment to
be formed by every man for himself.
On the one hand it is argued that it is not Avarice which is a vice,
but extravagance, its opposite. Extravagance springs from a brutish
limitation to the present moment, in comparison with which the future,
existing as it does only in thought, is as nothing. It rests upon the
illusion that sensual pleasures possess a positive or real value.
Accordingly, future need and misery is the price at which the
spendthrift purchases pleasures that are empty, fleeting, and often no
more than imaginary; or else feeds his vain, stupid self-conceit on
the bows and scrapes of parasites who laugh at him in secret, or on
the gaze of the mob and those who envy his magnificence. We should,
therefore, shun the spendthrift as though he had the plague, and on
discovering his vice break with him betimes, in order that later on,
when the consequences of his extravagance ensue, we may neither have
to help to bear them, nor, on the other hand, have to play the part of
the friends of Timon of Athens.
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