Plutarch on Moral Virtue

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Plutarch, William Watson Goodwin · Living the Life Series · 27 pages

A twenty-seven page compilation setting Plutarch's essay on moral virtue, from the Goodwin edition, inside a frame supplied by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The epigraph is from the Sutra of Forty-two Sections, on the wicked man who reproaches a virtuous one being like one who looks up and spits at the sky, so that the spittle soils not the sky but comes back and defiles his own person.

The framing question is put directly — what is morality? — and answered in terms that belong to the compilation rather than to Plutarch. The effort to assimilate the individual with the universal law is described as what is popularly known as the practice of morality; obedience to that law, once ascertained, is called true religion, with the Buddha's definition quoted as the realization of the True. The fuller definition follows, and it is the passage the title's claim rests on: that morality is a clear perception of the unity of the one energy operating in the manifested cosmos, of the grand ultimate result it is incessantly striving to produce, and of the affinity between the immortal human spirit and that energy. The head-note states what is expected to follow from it — that if morality can force out egotism, it will transform head-learning into soul-wisdom, which is the distinction running through the whole Living the Life series. Plutarch's own essay then supplies the classical treatment, arguing against the Stoic reduction of the passions to errors of judgment and for a moral virtue that consists in the rational part governing an irrational part that is genuinely distinct from it.

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