Your soul is a scout.

It can guide you through the wilderness of self-persuasion.

This is my little brother and me. (Sorry, John, Photoshop removed your mouth when it cleaned up the scratches. I swear I didn’t do it on purpose.) Our dad took this photo in 1960, when I was four and John was two, long before we learned the term “cultural appropriation.” Why did boys dress up as Indians back then? Because we weren’t just Indians. We were Indian scouts, pure-souled denizens of the wilderness. Like beavers with weird diaper loincloths.

My previous post had to do with Aristotle’s concept of the soul. His book, On the Soul, arguably qualifies as the first self-help manual, and for good reason. Think of your soul as the you your daily you rarely lives up to. It’s the higher you, the one that restrains itself from finishing a quart of Cherry Garcia ice cream before bed. This admirable soul of yours does not have to be sweet-smelling and beautiful. Even Aristotle, who set very high soul standards, described the best kind of soul as a sort of ancient Boy Scout. (So much for sweet-smelling.) A good soul, he said, is:

Just, treating others fairly.

Courageous, occupying the perfect middle ground between cowardice and foolhardiness.

Restrained; naturally self-disciplined. One glass of wine is enough, thank you. The perfect soul never exceeds its budget.

Magnanimous, generous toward the deserving.

Liberal, being open to those souls that are unlike its own, and looking benignly if skeptically at novelty or change.

Prudent, making the right choices to suit every occasion, without getting all emotional about it.

And, best of all, Wise. It is large. It contains multitudes of knowledge and judgement.

Such a soul may not sound like much fun at a party, let alone easy to live with. But Aristotle recognized that the actions of real human beings never perfectly reflect their souls. The characters he admired most were the tragic heroes immortalized in plays; and even these good-looking, brave types were not relatable unless they came with some serious flaws.

I hope you acquire the rhetorical frame of mind that boosts your self-liking and self-trust. Your noble soul deserves this. It’s why I wrote my next book.

My own soul happens to be…Well, this only seems like bragging, but my soul is pretty awesome. So, by definition, is yours. But the contrast between our souls and our daily actions can seem like an abyss. My soul has all the traits of a Boy Scout: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, more or less obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, fairly clean and, when it isn’t making irreverent jokes, reverent. Plus fit, athletic, good-looking, witty, brilliantly articulate, impressively knowledgeable, and ambitious for all the right reasons.

That’s my soul. As for my daily self…sigh. It’s grouchy, timid, too lazy to shave, could lose a few pounds, and uses Thesaurus.com like an addict. So much for cheerful, brave, clean, athletic, and articulate. And don’t get me started on the rest. My soul is light years ahead of what I am from day to day. But that is the very purpose of having a soul and becoming aware of it.

Oh, sure, my soul has flaws of its own. It tends to be overly optimistic, too trusting of people, too much in love with its own ideas. And it can be pretty darn judgmental toward the mortal, regular, daily me. There are times that I want to get my soul drunk and make it say something embarrassing in front of respectable people. I’m not alone in this feeling. In Homer’s Odyssey, the great Odysseus stages frequent debates between his tricky, selfish, daily character and his nobler self—his soul, as Aristotle would say later. Not even heroes get along with their souls all the time.

One trait of a noble soul can take us through our own stormy odysseys. According to the ancient Roman rhetorician and Aristotle fanboy Marcus Tullius Cicero, our ability to bear injustice and bad fortune is our saving grace.

Our souls can stand a great deal. If Cicero had been next to Hamlet while he debated whether to be or not to be, the Roman would have had a ready answer. The melancholy Dane asks which is nobler: “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” or “to take arms against a sea of troubles.” Suffer, Cicero would say. Definitely suffer. He meant that as a kind of skill—not a state of agony but a knack for withstanding it.

Leaving aside the fact that carrying a sword into the sea hardly reveals a rational soul, Cicero would be making an important point. The ancients believed that our own inherited flaws and the horrible luck flung at us by outrageous fortune can serve as opportunities to demonstrate our souls’ superior nobility.

That nobility was what Aristotle called arete, or virtue, a quality that, besides making others look up to you, can help you produce “many and signal good works.”

Like, say, beavers.