Page:The academic questions, treatise de finibus, and Tusculan disputations.djvu/251

 a business you are undertaking; to make a man who lives at Circeii believe that this universal world is merely a town for himself to live in. What will be the end of this? Shall he set fire to it? He will rather extinguish it, if he has received it on fire. The next thing said is that list of titles which you briefly enumerated,—king, dictator, rich man, the only wise man; words poured out by you decorously and roundly: they well might be, for you have learnt them from the orators. But how vague and unsubstantial are those speeches about the power of virtue! which they make out to be so great that it can, by itself, secure the happiness of man. They prick us with narrow little bits of questions as with pins; and those who assent to them are not at all changed in their minds, and go away the same as they came: for matters which are perhaps true, and which certainly are important, are not handled as they ought to be, but in a more minute and petty manner.

IV. The next thing is the principle of arguing, and the knowledge of nature. For we will examine the chief good presently, as I said before, and apply the whole discussion to the explanation of it. There was, then, in those two parts nothing which Zeno wished to alter. For the whole thing, in both its divisions, is in an excellent state; for what has been omitted by the ancients in that kind of argument which is of influence in discussion? For they have both given many definitions, and have bequeathed to us titles for defining; and that important addition to definition, I mean the dividing of the subject into parts, is both done by them, and they have also left us rules to enable us to do so too; and I may say the same of contraries; from which they came to genera, and to the forms of genera. Now, they make those things which they call evident, the beginning of an argument concluded by reason: then they follow an orderly arrangement; and the conclusion at last shows what is true in the separate propositions. But what a great variety of arguments, which lead to conclusions according to reason, do they give us, and how dissimilar are they to captious questions! What shall we say of their denouncing, as it were, in many places, that we ought neither entirely to trust our senses when unsupported by reason, nor reason when unsupported by our senses; but that, at the same time, we ought to keep the line between