11. It may be suggested that Vice is feebleness in the Soul.
We shall be reminded that the Vicious Soul is unstable, swept along from every ill to every other, quickly stirred by appetites, headlong to anger, as hasty to compromises, yielding at once to obscure imaginations, as weak, in fact, as the weakest thing made by man or nature, blown about by every breeze, burned away by every heat.
Still the question must be faced what constitutes this weakness in the Soul, whence it comes.
For weakness in the body is not like that in the Soul: the word weakness, which covers the incapacity for work and the lack of resistance in the body, is applied to the Soul merely by analogy — unless, indeed, in the one case as in the other, the cause of the weakness is Matter.
But we must go more thoroughly into the source of this weakness, as we call it, in the Soul, which is certainly not made weak as the result of any density or rarity, or by any thickening or thinning or anything like a disease, like a fever.
Now this weakness must be seated either in Souls utterly disengaged or in Souls bound to Matter or in both.
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