Not that any habit
necessitates volition. Habits do not necessitate, but they facilitate
the act of the will. (s. i., nn. 1, 2, 8, pp. 64, 68.)
[Footnote 4: By _doing good_ St. Thomas means the determination of the
appetite, rational or sensitive, to good. He says that intellectual
virtue does not prompt this determination of the appetite. Of course
it does not: it prompts only the act of the power wherein it resides:
now it resides in the intellect, not in the appetite; and it prompts
the act of the intellect, which however is cot always followed by an
act of appetite in accordance with it.]
2. Another distinction may be gathered from St. Thomas (1a 2a, q. 21,
art. 2, ad 2), that the special intellectual habit called _art_
disposes a man to act correctly towards some particular end, but a
moral habit towards the common end, scope and purpose of all human
life. Thus medical skill ministers to the particular end of healing:
while the moral habit of temperance serves the general end, which is
final happiness and perfection. So to give a wrong prescription
through sheer antecedent ignorance, is to fail as a doctor: but to get
drunk wittingly and knowingly is to fail as a man.
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