Discourses: Book 2 10 : 4

Next, if you sit in the town council of some city, remember that you are a councillor; if you are young, remember that you are young; if old, that you are an elder; if a father, that you are a father. For each of these designations, when duly considered, always suggests the acts that are appropriate to it. But if you go off and speak ill of your brother, I say to you, "You have forgotten who you are and what your designation is." Why, if you were a smith and used your hammer amiss, you would have forgotten the smith you were; but if you forget the brother you are, and become an enemy instead of a brother, will you seem to yourself to have exchanged nothing for nothing? And if, instead of being a man, a gentle and social being, you have become a wild beast, a mischievous, treacherous, biting animal, have you lost nothing? What, must you lose a bit of pelf so as to suffer damage, and does the loss of nothing else damage a man? Yet, if you lost your skill in the use of language or in music, you would regard the loss of it as damage; but if you are going to lose self-respect and dignity and gentleness, do you think that does not matter? And yet those former qualities are lost from some external cause that is beyond the power of our will, but these latter are lost through our own fault; and it is neither noble to have nor disgraceful to lose these former qualities, but not to have these latter, or having had them to lose them, is a disgrace and a reproach and a calamity. What is lost by the victim of unnatural lust? His manhood. And by the agent? Beside a good many other things he also loses his manhood no less than the other. What does the adulterer lose? He loses the man of self-respect that was, the man of self-control, the gentleman, the citizen, the neighbour. What does the man lose who is given to anger? Something else. Who is given to fear? Something else. No one is evil without loss and damage. Furthermore, if you look for your loss in pelf, all those whom I have just mentioned suffer neither injury nor loss; nay, if it so chance, they even get gain and profit, when, through some of their deeds just mentioned, they also acquire pelf. But observe that if you make paltry pelf your standard for everything, not even the man who loses his nose will in your eyes have suffered an injury.—"Oh yes, he has," someone says, "for his body is mutilated."—Come now, and does the man who has lost his entire sense of smell lose nothing? Is there, then, no such thing as a faculty of the mind, the possession of which means gain to a man, and the loss, injury?—What faculty do you mean? Have we not a natural sense of self-respect?—We have.—Does not the man who destroys this suffer a loss, is he not deprived of something, does he not lose something that belonged to him? Do we not have a natural sense of fidelity, a natural sense of affection, a natural sense of helpfulness, a natural sense of keeping our hands off one another? Shall, therefore, the man who allows himself to suffer loss in such matters, be regarded as having suffered neither injury nor loss?