Likewise, a man of lofty soul counts hunger and thirst as paltry so long as he can preserve his honor, and he treats the horror of death and the sudden prospect of doom as insignificant when crossing swords with champions. One lone fighter may even hurl himself against a dense host, riding the very back of danger for the pleasure he expects from the praise that will follow—praise he imagines will reach him even after he has died.
It is clear, then, that inward delights tower above bodily ones. This is true not only of rational creatures but even of speechless animals. Among hunting dogs, for example, there are those that capture their prey while hungry, yet hold it for their master and sometimes even carry it to him. Nursing animals prefer their offspring to themselves and will risk their lives defending them more readily than they would in defense of their own selves.
If such inner pleasures are greater than outward, though they are not intellectual, what will you say of pleasures that are purely intellectual?
Thus one says to the objector: All of this refutes your claim that appreciating what is fair and condemning what is foul is grasped by neither sense, intellect, nor imagination. You yourself have admitted that human beings—and even animals—take greater pleasure in praise and commendation, in victory, in beneficence, generosity, and mercy than they do in eating and drinking. The delight of food and drink is known through the external senses, whereas these inward delights are grasped by the inner sense and by imagination. How, then, can you contend that neither sense, imagination, nor intellect can discern the beauty of the beautiful and the ugliness of the ugly? The cases you cited—of a person rejoicing in altruism and forgoing delicious food out of regard for propriety—occur only because he deems the one act ugly and the other fair, and he experiences a palpable inner pleasure when performing the fair act. How, then, can it be claimed that good and evil are not reached by any faculty of the soul, and that people assent to them merely because of public acclaim, with no sensory, imaginative, or rational basis at all?