Section 2: Contemplative thought and practical thought

There are three things in the soul that are authoritative for action and truth: perception, insight, and desire.

Among these, perception originates no action. This is clear from the fact that the lower animals have perception but no share in action. _[20]

What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are in desire. So that since moral virtue is a disposition concerned with choice, and choice is deliberate desire, therefore both the reasoning must be true and the desire right, if the choice is to be good. And desire must pursue _[25] what reason asserts. Now this is practical thought and practical truth, [i.e., thought and truth concerned with action]. In the case of contemplative thought, which is neither practical nor productive, [neither acts or makes], the good and the bad condition are truth and falsity respectively, since truth and falsity is the work of everything involving thought. Yet in the case of the part that involves practical thought, the good condition is truth in agreement with right _[30] desire.

The origin of action–its efficient, not its final cause–is choice. And the origin of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to a goal. This is why choice cannot exist either without reason and intellect, on the one hand, and without a state of character, on the other. For good action and its opposite cannot exist without a combination of thought and character. Thought _[35] itself, however, moves nothing. But only thought that aims at an end and is practical. _[1139b1] For this is also the origin of thought ordered to making things. After all, everyone who makes something makes it for some goal, and what is made is not a goal in the absolute sense, but only an end in a particular relation, and the goal of a particular operation. Only that which is doable in action is an end in the absolute sense. For good action is the goal, and desire aims at this. Hence choice is either desiderative insight or thoughtful desire. And a human being is such a principle, [that is, a human being is either desiderative insight or thoughtful desire]. _[5]

It should be noted that nothing that is past is an object of choice. For example, no one chooses to have sacked Troy. For no one deliberates about the past, but about what is future and capable of being otherwise. Yet what is past is not capable of not having happened. Hence Agathon is right in saying:

For this alone is lacking even to a god, _[10]
To make undone things that have been done and finished.

The work of both the intellectual parts of the soul, then, is truth. Therefore, the states of character according to which each of these two parts grasp the truth are their virtues.