"outside ourselves" and into such an intimate connection with our inborn nature. Western philosophy The early Greek philosophers felt that happiness requires virtue and hence that a happy person must have virtuous traits of character. Socrates identifies happiness with pleasure and explains the various virtues as instrumental means to pleasure. He teaches, however, that pleasure is to be understood in an overarching sense wherein fleeing battle is a momentary pleasure that detracts from the greater pleasure of acting bravely. Plato wrote that to be virtuous, we must both understand what contributes to our overall good and have our spirited and appetitive desires educated properly and guided by the rational part of the soul. The path he prescribes is that a potentially virtuous person should learn when young to love and take pleasure in virtuous actions, but he must wait until late in life to develop the understanding of why what he loves is good. An obvious problem is that this reasoning is circular. Aristotle is perhaps, even today, the most influential of all the early Western philosophers. His view is often summarized as 'moderation in all things'. For example, courage is worthy, for too little of it makes one defenseless. But too much courage can result in foolhardiness in the face of danger. To be clear, Aristotle emphasizes that the moderate state is not an arithmetic mean, but one relative to the situation: sometimes the mean course is to be angry at, say, injustice or mistreatment, at other times anger is wholly inappropriate. Additionally, because people are different, the mean for one person may be bravery, but for another it is recklessness. For Aristotle, the key to finding this balance is to enjoy and recognize the value of developing one's rational powers, and then using this recognition to determine which actions are appropriate in which circumstances. The views of nineteenth-century philosophers were heavily indebted to these early Greeks. Two of them, Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, had a major influence on approaches to developing character. Karl Marx applies Aristotle's conclusions in his understanding of work as a place where workers should be able to express their rational powers. But workers subject to capitalist values are characterized primarily by material self-interest. This makes them distrustful of others, viewing them primarily as competitors. Given these attitudes, workers become prone to a number of vices, including selfishness, cowardice, and intemperance. To correct