to a reward than we will when further from it. Weakness of will Richard Holton (1999), argues that weakness of the will involves revising one's resolutions too easily. Under this view, it is possible to act against one's better judgment (that is, be akratic), but without being weak-willed. Suppose, for example, Sarah judges that taking revenge upon a murderer is not the best course of action, but makes the resolution to take revenge anyway and sticks to that resolution. According to Holton, Sarah behaves akratically but does not show weakness of will. Legacy In the structural division of Dante's Inferno, incontinence is the sin punished in the second through fifth circles. The mutual incontinence of lust was for Dante the lightest of the deadly sins, even if its lack of self-control would open the road to deeper layers of Hell. Akrasia appeared later as a character in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, representing the incontinence of lust, followed in the next canto by a study of that of anger; and as late as Jane Austen the sensibility of such figures as Marianne Dashwood would be treated as a form of (spiritual) incontinence. With the triumph of Romanticism, however, the incontinent choice of feeling over reason became increasingly valorised in Western culture. Blake wrote that "those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained". Encouraged by Rousseau, there was a rise of what Arnold J. Toynbee would describe as "an abandon (ακρατεια)...a state of mind in which antinomianism is accepted – consciously or unconsciously, in theory or in practice – as a substitute for creativeness". A peak of such acrasia was perhaps reached in the 1960s cult of letting it all hang out – of breakdown, acting out and emotional self-indulgence and drama. Partly in reaction, the proponents of emotional intelligence would look back to Aristotle in the search for impulse control and delayed gratification – to his dictum that "a person is called continent or incontinent according as his reason is or is not in control". Incontinence ("a want of continence or self-restraint") is often used to translate the Greek term. See also Notes References Further reading Dahl, N.O. 1984. Practical Reason, Aristotle, and the Weakness of Will. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wedin, M. 1988. Mind and Imagination in Aristotle. New Haven: Yale University Press. External links "Akrasia" by Seth J. Chandler, The Wolfram Demonstrations