tence must be supported. It will be necessary for you to hire slaves and to possess a few silver vessels, and to exhibit them in public, if it is possible, though they are often the same, and to attempt to conceal the fact that they are the same, and to have splendid garments, and all other things for display, and to show that you are a man honoured by the great, and to try to sup at their houses, or to be supposed to sup there, and as to your person to employ some mean arts, that you may appear to be more handsome and nobler than you are. These things you must contrive, if you choose to go by the second path in order not to be pitied. But the first way is both impracticable and long, to attempt the very thing which Zeus has not been able to do, to convince all men what things are good and bad.[1] Is this power given to you? This only is given to you, to convince yourself; and you have not convinced yourself. Then I ask you, do you attempt to persuade other men? and who has lived so long with you as you with yourself? and who has so much power of convincing you as you have of convincing yourself; and who is better disposed and nearer to you than you are to yourself? How then have you not yet convinced yourself in order to learn? At present are not things upside down? Is this what you have been earnest about doing,[2] to learn to be free from grief and free from disturbance, and not to be humbled (abject), and to be free? Have you not heard then that there is only one way which leads to this end, to give up (dismiss) the things which do not depend on the will, to withdraw from them, and to admit that they belong to others? For another man then to have an opinion about you, of what kind is it?—It is a thing independent
- ↑ Here it is implied that there are things which God cannot do. Perhaps he means that as God has given man certain powers of will and therefore of action, he cannot at the same time exercise the contradictory powers of forcing man's will and action; for this would be at the same time to give power and to take it away. Butler remarks (Analogy, chap. 5) "the present is so far from proving in event a discipline of virtue to the generality of men that on the contrary they seem to make it a discipline of vice." In fact all men are not convinced and cannot be convinced in the present constitution of things 'what things are good and bad.'
- ↑ Something is perhaps wrong in the text here. See Schweig.'s note.
