Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 13.djvu/144

132 business, never does it: nor this, that be who brings about great revolutions, is always idle: nor this, that he who expresses indifference to power, and contempt of honours, is jealous of one, and fond of the others.

Proceed we now, dear doctor, to the application. A man in business, and a man who is out of it, may equally talk of philosophy; that is certain. The question is, whether the man in business may not practise it, as well as the man out of business? I think he may, in this sense, as easily; but sure I am, he may, in this sense, as usefully. If we look into the world, our part of it I mean, we shall find, I believe, few philosophers in business, or out of business. The greatest part of the men I have seen in business, perhaps all of them, have been so far from acting on philosophical principles, that is, on principles of reason and virtue, that they have not acted even on the highest principles of vice. I have not known a man of real ambition; a man who sacrificed all his passions, or made them all subservient to that one; but I have known many, whose vanity and whose avarice mimicked ambition. The greatest part of the men I have seen out of business, have been so far from practising philosophy, that they have lived in the world errant triflers; or retiring from it, have fallen into stupid indolence, and deserved such an inscription as Seneca mentions, in one of his letters to Lucilius, to have been put over the door of one Vattia. Hic situs est Vattia. But, for all this, I think that a man in business may practise philosophy as austerely to himself, and more beneficially to mankind, than a man out of it. The stoicks were an affected, pedantical sect; but I have always