13 Therefore the question whether reasoning is absolute master of the emotions. 14 Let’s determine, then, what reasoning is and what emotion is, and how many forms of emotion there are, and whether reasoning rules over all of these. 15 Reasoning is intellect accompanied by a life of righteousness, putting foremost the consideration of wisdom. 16 Wisdom is a knowledge of divine and human things, and of their causes. 17 This is contained in the education of the law, by means of which we learn divine things reverently and human things profitably. 18 The forms of wisdom are self-control, justice, courage, and temperance. 19 The leading one of these is self-control, by whose means, indeed, it’s that reasoning rules over the emotions. 20 Of the emotions, pleasure and pain are the two most comprehensive; and they also by nature refer to the soul. 21 There are many attendant affections surrounding pleasure and pain. 22 Before pleasure is lust; and after pleasure, joy. 23 Before pain is fear; and after pain is sorrow. 24 Anger is an affection, common to pleasure and to pain, if any one will pay attention when it comes on him. 25 There exists in pleasure a malicious disposition, which is the most complex of all the affections. 26 In the soul, it’s arrogance, love of money, thirst for honour, contention, faithlessness, and the evil eye. 27 In the body, it’s greediness, indiscriminate eating, and solitary gluttony.

28 As pleasure and pain are, therefore, two growths out of the body and the soul, so there are many offshoots of these emotions. 29 Reasoning, the universal farmer, purging and pruning each of these, tying up, watering, and transplanting, in every way improves the materials of the morals and affections. 30 Because reasoning is the leader of the virtues, but it’s the sole ruler of the emotions.

Observe then first, through the very things which stand in the way of temperance, that reasoning is absolute ruler of the emotions. 31 Now temperance consists of a command over the lusts. 32 But of the lusts, some belong to the soul and others to the body. Reasoning appears to rule over both. 33 Otherwise, how is it that when urged on to forbidden meats, we reject the gratification which would come from them? Isn’t it because reasoning is able to command the appetites? I believe so. 34 Hence it is, then, that when craving seafood, birds, four-footed animals, and all kinds of food which are forbidden to us by the law, we withhold ourselves through the mastery of reasoning. 35 Because the affections of our appetites are resisted by the temperate understanding, and bent back again, and all the impulses of the body are reined in by reasoning.