The curious result of mingling the teaching of Plato and Aristotle and Christ with the teaching of all their derivatives, of attempting to psychologize the teachings of all these alike on the basis of Hippocrates and Galen and their derivatives again is nowhere more clearly evident than in the treatment of virtue and happiness. The clear-cut thinking of Thomas Aquinas was gone, but the effect of his intricate analysis of the relation of the passions to sin was apparent in most of the Renaissance discussions of virtue. The whole treatment of virtue was chaotic, mere echoes of earlier and often discordant thinking. But there was always an insistent moral note in the discussion of passion and a determined habit of applying moral judgment to all matters.

The fundamental division of virtue in the sixteenth century seems to have been persistently Aristotelian, virtue being both intellectual and moral, or as the facts were stated in The French Academie: