BOOK VII
1. What is vice? A familiar sight enough. So in everything that befalls have the thought ready: This is a familiar sight. Look up, look down, everywhere thou wilt find the same things, whereof histories ancient, medieval, and modern are full; and full of them at this day are cities and houses. There is no new thing under the sun.[1] Everything is stereotyped, everything fleeting.
2. How else can thy axioms be made dead than by the extinction of the ideas that answer to them? And these it lies with thee ever to kindle anew into flame. I am competent to form the true conception of a thing. If so, why am I harassed? What is outside the scope of my mind has absolutely no concern with my mind. Learn this lesson and thou standest erect.
Thou canst begin a new life! See but things afresh as thou usedst to see them; for in this consists the new life.
3. Empty love of pageantry, stage-plays, flocks and herds, sham-fights, a bone thrown to lap-dogs, crumbs cast in a fish-pond, painful travail of ants and their bearing of burdens, skurryings of scared little
- ↑ Eccles. i. 9. cp. also Justin's Apol. i. 57, addressed to Pius and Marcus.
