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BOOK I, CHAPTER XXVI
215

and disagreeable precepts and idle and bloodless words, in which there is nothing to catch hold of, nothing that awakens the mind.[1] In this other method the mind finds a place to browse and to pasture on. This fruit is incomparably greater, and yet it will be sooner ripe.

It is a remarkable fact that things have come to such a pass in our time that philosophy is, even to persons of intelligence, a vain and chimerical thing, of no use and no value, (c) both in appearance and in reality. (a) I think that these quibblings[2] which have blocked the approach to her[3] are the cause. It is a great mistake to describe her as inaccessible to children and of a lowering and frowning and terrifying aspect. Who has disguised her with that wan and hideous mask? There is nothing gayer, more jocund, more blithe, and, I might almost say, sportive. She exhorts always to holidaying and merry-making; a sad and spiritless air shows that not there is her abode. Demetrius the grammarian, finding a party of philosophers sitting together in the temple at Delphi, said to them: "Unless I am mistaken, seeing you so placid and gay in deportment, there is not very serious talk among you." To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarian, replied: "It is for them who seek to learn whether the future tense of βάλλω has the double λ, or who seek the derivation of the comparatives χεῖρον and βέλτιον, and of the superlatives χεῖριστον and βέλτιστον, to knit the brows while talking of their kind of knowledge; but, as for the discussions of philosophy, they are accustomed to enliven and exhilarate those who engage in them, and not to depress and sadden them."[4]

(b) Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in ægro
Corpore, deprendas et guadia: sumit utrumque
Inde habitum facies.[5]

(a) The mind that harbours philosophy should by virtue of

  1. ↑ The earlier editions, including 1588, add; rien qui vous chatouille.
  2. ↑ Ergotismes.
  3. ↑ That is, to philosophy.
  4. ↑ See Plutarch, Of oracles that have ceased to speak.
  5. ↑ You may detect, hidden in a suffering body, mental pain, and likewise you may detect gladness; from both the face assumes an expression. — Juvenal, Satires, IX, 18.
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