nward reproaches and contests, from vacillation and
self-torment. Then, with respect to others, to every like-minded
person he will be without disguise; to such as are unlike he will be
patient, mild, gentle, and ready to forgive them, as failing in points
of the greatest importance; but severe to none, being fully convinced
of Plato's doctrine, that the soul is never willingly deprived of
truth. Without all this, you may, in many respects, live as friends
do; and drink and lodge and travel together, and even be born of the
same parents; and so may serpents too; but neither they nor you can
ever be really friends, while your accustomed principles remain brutal
and execrable.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 111: From the "Discourses." Translated by Thomas Wentworth
Higginson. Copyright, 1890, by Little, Brown & Co.]

[Footnote 112: The Getes were a Thracian people who dwelt north of the
Danube, at one time in what is now Bulgaria, and at another in what is
Bessarabia.]

III

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE CROWD[113]

The first difference between one of the crowd and a philosopher is
this: the one says, "I am undone on the account of my child, my
brother, my father"; but the other, if ever he be obliged to say, "I
am undone!" reflects, and adds, "on account of myself." For the Will
can not be restrained or hurt by anything to which the Will does not
extend, but only by itself. If, therefore, we always would incline
this way, and whenever we are unsuccessful, would lay the fault on
ourselves, and remember that there is no cause of perturbation and
inconstancy but wrong principles, I pledge myself to you that we
should make some proficiency. But we set out in a very different way
from the very beginning. In infancy, for example, if we happen to
stumble, our nurse does not chide us, but beats the stone. Why, what
harm has the stone done? Was it to move out of its place for the folly
of your child? Again, if we do not find something to eat when we come
out of the bath, our tutor does not try to moderate our appetite, but
beats the cook. Why, did we appoint you tutor of the cook, man? No;
but of our child. It is he whom you are to correct and improve. By
these means even when we are grown up, we appear children. For an
unmusical person is a child in music; an illiterate person, a child in
learning; and an untaught one, a child in life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 113: From the "Discourses." Translated by Thomas Wentworth
Higgin