should hold the office of a magistrate, that I should be in the
condition of a private man, stay there or be an exile, be poor, be
rich? I will make thy defense to men in behalf of all these
conditions. I will show the nature of each thing what it is." You will
not do so; but sit in an ox's belly, and wait for your mamma till
she shall feed you. Who would Hercules have been, if he had sat at
home? He would have been Eurystheus and not Hercules. Well, and in his
travels through the world how many intimates and how many friends
had he? But nothing more dear to him than God. For this reason it
was believed that he was the son of God, and he was. In obedience to
God, then, he went about purging away injustice and lawlessness. But
you are not Hercules and you are not able to purge away the wickedness
of others; nor yet are you Theseus, able to pure away the evil
things of Attica. Clear away your own. From yourself, from your
thoughts cast away, instead of Procrustes and Sciron, sadness, fear,
desire, envy, malevolence, avarice, effeminacy, intemperance. But it
is not possible to eject these things otherwise than by looking to God
only, by fixing your affections on him only, by being consecrated to
his commands. But if you choose anything else, you will with sighs and
groans be compelled to follow what is stronger than yourself, always
seeking tranquillity and never able to find it; for you seek
tranquillity there where it is not, and you neglect to seek it where
it is.

CHAPTER 17

How we must adapt preconceptions to particular cases

What is the first business of him who philosophizes? To throw away
self-conceit. For it is impossible for a man to begin to learn that
which he thinks that he knows. As to things then which ought to be
done and ought not to be done, and good and bad, and beautiful and
ugly, all of us talking of them at random go to the philosophers;
and on these matters we praise, we censure, we accuse, we blame, we
judge and determine about principles honourable and dishonourable. But
why do we go to the philosophers? Because we wish to learn what we
do not think we know. And what is this? Theorems. For we wish to learn
what philosophers say as being something elegant and acute; and some
wish to learn that they may get profit what they learn. It is
ridiculous then to think that a person wishes to learn one thing,
and will learn another; or further, that a man will make proficiency
in that which he does not learn. But the many are deceived by this
which deceived also the rhetorician Theopompus, when he blames even
Plato for wishing everything to be defined. For what does he say? "Did
none of us before you use the words 'good' or 'just,' or do we utter
the sounds in an unmeaning and empty way without understanding what
they severally signify?" Now who tells you, Theopompus, that we had
not natural notions of each of these things and preconceptions? But it
is not possible to adapt preconceptions to their correspondent objects
if we have not distinguished them, and inquired what object must be