(It is difficult to define) what is virtue, in general or in
particular. To clear up the matter, let us consider one particular
kind of virtue: then it will be easy to determine the common essence
underlying them all.
The above-mentioned homely virtues really render our souls gracious,
and improve them, regulating and moderating our appetites, tempering
our passions, delivering us from false opinions, limiting us within
just bounds, and they themselves must be determined by some kind of
measure. This measure given to our souls resembles the form given to
matter, and the proportion of intelligible things; it is as it were
a trace of what is most perfect above. What is unmeasured, being no
more than formless matter, cannot in any way resemble divinity. The
greater the participation in form, the greater the assimilation to the
formless; and the closer we get to form, the greater the participation
therein. Thus our soul, whose nature is nearer to divinity and more
kindred to it than the body is, thereby participates the more in the
divine, and increases that resemblance enough to make it seem that the
divinity is all that she herself is. Thus arises the deception, which
represents her as the divine divinity, as if her quality constituted
that of the divinity. Thus are men of homely virtues assimilated to the
divinity.