Page:Margoliouth-BookAppleAscribed-1892.pdf/45

Rh the advice of the physician, and will employ no drug but the scent of an apple; which will keep me alive till I have given you the lecture to which you have a right. Why should I not speak, when the best thing I hope to obtain from the drugs is the power to speak? Come now, tell me, Do you grant the excellence of wisdom or not? They answered: Our only reason for honouring wisdom is the fact that we know it to excel other things. — said: Is its excellence in this world or in the next? — They said: We do not deny the excellence of wisdom, and necessity forces us to place its excellence and value in the next world. — : Then why do you abhor death and adhere to the notion that some detriment will accrue to you therefrom, when you ought to perceive that death, horrible as it is to the vulgar, is nevertheless nothing but the freeing of the soul from its bodily case? — : How so? Let us know more. — : Does the knowledge which you have acquired make you glad or not? And does the knowledge which has escaped you make you sorry or not? — : The former is true in both cases. — : Through which then do you acquire knowledge — through the body, which is a blind, deaf, impotent, and useless mass when the spirit departs from it, or by the spirit whereby a man is continually rendered capable of learning, seeing, knowing and speaking, so long as it is with him? — spirit knowledge is acquired, and by the dullness of the body it is kept out of it. — : Since then it is clear that knowledge is a product of the spirit, and that the dullness of the body keeps it out, and that by the acquisition of knowledge you become glad, whereas by being precluded from it you become sorry, evidently you must prefer the separation of the spirit from the body to the persistence of the spirit in the body; and separation from the body must be better for the spirit than abiding in the body. Do you not see that the desires and delights of the body such as women and children and wealth and eating and drinking still more impede the search after wisdom? and that when you abandon
 * Doubtless through the vitality and goodness of the