and abandons the
rest.

And, indeed, if the custom of man could speak, this would be its language.
That its first beginnings were, as it were, beginnings of desire that it
might preserve itself in that nature in which it had been born. For it had
not yet been sufficiently explained what nature desired above all things.
Let it therefore be explained. What else then will be understood but that
no part of nature is to be neglected? And if there is nothing in it
besides reason, then the chief good must be in virtue alone. But if there
is also body, then will that explanation of nature have caused us to
abandon the belief which we held before the explanation. Is it, then,
being in a manner suitable to nature to abandon nature? As some
philosophers do, when having begun with the senses they have seen
something more important and divine, and then abandoned the senses; so,
too, these men, when they had beheld the beauty of virtue developed in its
desire for particular things, abandoned everything which they had seen for
the sake of virtue herself, forgetting that the whole nature of desirable
things was so extensive that it remained from beginning to end; and they
do not understand that they are taking away the very foundations of these
beautiful and admirable things.

XVI. Therefore, all those men appear to me to have made a blunder who have
pronounced the chief good to be to live honourably. But some have erred
more than others,--Pyrrho above all, who, having fixed on virtue as the
chief good, refuses to allow that there is anything else in the world
deserving of being desired; and, next to him, Aristo, who did not, indeed,
venture to leave nothing else to be desired, but who introduced influence,
by which a wise man might be excited, and desire whatever occurred to his
mind, and whatever even appeared so to occur. He was more right than
Pyrrho, inasmuch as he left man some kind of desire; but worse than the
rest, inasmuch as he departed wholly from nature: but the Stoics, because
they place the chief good in virtue alone, resemble these men: but
inasmuch as they seek for a principle of duty, they are superior to
Pyrrho; and as they do not admit the desire of those objects which offer
themselves to the imagination, they are more correct than Aristo; but,
inasmuch as they do not add the things which they admit to be adopted by
nature, and to be worthy of being chosen for their own sakes, to the chief
good, they here desert na