Discourses - Book II   

allows himself to be damaged in these matters, can he be free from
harm and uninjured? "What then? shall I not hurt him, who has hurt
me?" In the first place consider what hurt is, and remember what you
have heard from the philosophers. For if the good consists in the
will, and the evil also in the will, see if what you say is not
this: "What then, since that man has hurt himself by doing an unjust
act to me, shall I not hurt myself by doing some unjust act to him?"
Why do we not imagine to something of this kind? But where there is
any detriment to the body or to our possession, there is harm there;
and where the same thing happens to the faculty of the will, there
is no harm; for he who has been deceived or he who has done an
unjust act neither suffers in the head nor in the eye nor in the
hip, nor does he lose his estate; and we wish for nothing else than
these things. But whether we shall have the will modest and faithful
or shameless and faithless, we care not the least, except only in
the school so far as a few words are concerned. Therefore our
proficiency is limited to these few words; but beyond them it does not
exist even in the slightest degree.

CHAPTER 11

What the beginning of philosophy is

The beginning of philosophy to him at least who enters on it in
the right way and by the door, is a consciousness of his own
weakness and inability about necessary things. For we come into the
world with no natural notion of a right-angled triangle, or of a
diesis, or of a half tone; but we learn each of these things by a
certain transmission according to art; and for this reason those who
do not know them, do not think that they know them. But as to good and
evil, and beautiful and ugly, and becoming and unbecoming, and
happiness and misfortune, and proper and improper, and what we ought
to do and what we ought not to do, whoever came into the world without
having an innate idea of them? Wherefore we all use these names, and
we endeavor to fit the preconceptions to the several cases thus: "He
has done well, he has not done well; he has done as he ought, not as
he ought; he has been unfortunate, he has been fortunate; he is
unjust, he is just": who does not use these names? who among us defers
the use of them till he has learned them, as he defers the use of
the words about lines or sounds? And the cause of this is that we come
into the world already taught as it were by nature some things on this
matter, and proceeding from these we have added to them
self-conceit. "For why," a man says, "do I not know the beautiful
and the ugly? Have I not the notion of it?" You have. "Do I not
adapt it to particulars?" You do. "Do I not then adapt it properly?"
In that lies the whole question; and conceit is added here. For,
beginning from these things which are admitted, men proceed to that
which is matter of dispute by means of unsuitable adaptation; for if
they possessed this power of adaptation in addition to those things,
what would hinder them from being perfect? But now since you think