When someone hurts your body or steals your stuff, you call that real harm. But when someone corrupts their own character — when they become dishonest or shameless — you think that's no big deal. The person who lies or cheats doesn't get a headache. They don't lose an eye or break a hip. They don't lose their house. And we only care about protecting those physical things. We don't care whether our character becomes decent and trustworthy, or rotten and unreliable. We only talk about character in school, just empty words. That's why our real progress stops at those few words. Beyond that, we don't improve at all.
and where the same thing happens to the faculty of the will, there is (you suppose) no harm; for he who has been deceived or he who has done an unjust act neither suffers in the head nor in the eye nor in the hip, nor does he lose his estate; and we wish for nothing else than (security to) these things. But whether we shall have the will modest and faithful or shameless and faithless, we care not the least, except only in the school so far as a few words are concerned. Therefore our proficiency is limited to these few words; but beyond them it does not exist even in the slightest degree.