  Aristotle thus took the habits of moral character very seriously—much more so than the theoretical deliberations of the Platonist—an emphasis Crummell seems to share in his admiration of his friend Sidney. He admires him for his naturalness at moral life, requiring no effort to intuit the morally relevant features of a situation. After all, if effort is required, then one does not yet have the habits of virtue, thus coming up short on the Aristotelian metric. If Sidney is thus admirable for lacking any weakness of will, it is easy to suppose that effort-driven reason is a mark of such weakness, and hence something to be avoided (or at best tolerated) until moral excellence is achieved. Crummell's view thus seems less a Platonic ideal of moral excellence than an Aristotelian tolerance of moral failure. This is apt given the compromised agency that any observer would discern in the moral condition of enslaved blacks. What Crummell admired in Sidney is his working out of the two, a kind of excellence in the face of compromised agency.