I summon you rather, I rejoined, not as Heracles summoning Iolaus, but
as Iolaus might summon Heracles.

That will do as well, he said. But first let us take care that we avoid
a danger.

Of what nature? I said.

Lest we become misologists, he replied, no worse thing can happen to a
man than this. For as there are misanthropists or haters of men, there
are also misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same
cause, which is ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises out of the
too great confidence of inexperience;--you trust a man and think him
altogether true and sound and faithful, and then in a little while he
turns out to be false and knavish; and then another and another, and
when this has happened several times to a man, especially when it
happens among those whom he deems to be his own most trusted and
familiar friends, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last hates
all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. You must
have observed this trait of character?

I have.

And is not the feeling discreditable? Is it not obvious that such an
one having to deal with other men, was clearly without any experience of
human nature; for experience would have taught him the true state of
the case, that few are the good and few the evil, and that the great
majority are in the interval between them.

What do you mean? I said.

I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and very small,
that nothing is more uncommon than a very large or very small man; and
this applies generally to all extremes, whether of great and small, or
swift and slow, or fair and foul, or black and white: and whether
the instances you select be men or dogs or anything else, few are the
extremes, but many are in the mean between them. Did you never observe
this?

Yes, I said, I have.

And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition in
evil, the worst would be found to be very few?

Yes, that is very likely, I said.

Yes, that is very likely, he replied; although in this respect arguments
are unlike men--there I was led on by you to say more than I had
intended; but the point of comparison was, that when a simple man who
has no skill in dialectics believes an argument to be true which he
afterwards imagines to be false, whether really false or not, and
then another and another, he has no longer any faith left, and great
disputers, as you know, come to think at last that they