distinct moral virtues: courage , temperance , liberality, magnificence , pride, ambition, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, shame, justice. The moral virtues are defined by means of the efficient cause of actions; the intellectual virtues are defined according to their
final cause. Once again as in the case of the moral virtues a triple distinction is made in the soul, this time not of possible efficient causes, but of controlling causes of action and truth.
Of the three, namely, sensation, reason, and desire, the latter two supply the final cause toward which choice operates. "The principle of action-its efficient, not its final cause-is choice, and that of choice is desire and reasoning for the sake of some end". The discussion of the intellectual virtues therefore supplements the discussion of the moral virtues, for every virtue both brings into good condition the thing itself of which it is the virtue and causes the work of that thing to be well done, and the intellectual virtues treat of excellences relative to the action or work by turning attention to the right rule and standard. As the soul itself is divided into two parts, rational and irrational, so the rational part is divided into two parts, one by which we contemplate things whose principles are invariable,
another by which we contemplate variable things. Since moral virtue is a habit concerned with choice and therefore involved in variable things, it depends, like good choice, on the coincidence of true reasoning and right desire: truth in such applications is the object of the calculative part of the soul. Virtue in the scientific part of the soul, since it is not thus involved in variability, coincides with truth. Aristotle offers no general definition
of the intellectual virtues apart from observing that they are ways in which the soul has truth by affirmation and negation