Prudence

The meaning of prudentia, significantly called the 'mother' of all other virtues - predentia dicitur genitrix virtutum - is not conveyed by the word prudence as currently used. It signifies the opposite of a small, mean, calculating attitude to life, which refuses to see and value anything that fails to promise an immediate utilitarian advantage.

"The pre-eminence of prudence means that realisation of the good presupposes knowledge and reality. He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is. The pre-eminence of prudence means that so-called 'good intentions' and so-called 'meaning well' by means suffice. Realisation of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation, that is to the concrete realities which form the 'environment' of a concrete human action; and that we therefore take this concrete reality seriously, with clear eyed objectivity."

This clear-eyed objectivity, however cannot be achieved and prudence cannot be perfected except by an attitude of 'silent contemplation' of reality, during which the egocentric interests of man are at least temporarily silenced.
Only on the basis of this magnanimous kind of prudence can we achieve justice, fortitude, and temperantia, which means knowing when enough is enough. "Prudence implies a transformatino of the knowledge of truth into decisions corresponding to reality." What, therefore, could be of greater importance today than the study and cultivation of prudence, which would almost inevitably lead to a real understanding of the three other cardinal virtues, all of which are indispensable for the survival of civilisation.
Justice relates to truth, fortitude to goodness, and temperantia to beauty; while prudence, in a sense, comprises all three. The type of realism which behaves as if the good, the true, and the beautiful were too vague and subjective to be adopted as the highest aims of social or individual life, or werer the automatic spin-off of the successful pursuit of wealth and power, has been aptly called 'crackpot realism'. Everywhere people ask: 'What can I actually do?' The answer is as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the end they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisom of mankind.

- EF SCHUMACHER