7
Whenever, then, by thus setting the advantages of virtue over against merely external advantages, you have succeeded in dispelling all envy and jealousy and the things that vex and depress many beginners in philosophy, you are thus again making clear to yourself in a significant way the reality of your progress. Of no slight significance either is the change which occurs in one’s discourse. For practically all beginners in philosophy are more inclined to pursue those forms of discourse which make for repute; some of these beginners, like birds, are led by their flightiness and ambition to alight on the resplendent heights of the Natural Sciences; while others, like puppies, delighting to pull and tear, as Plato puts it, Republic, 539 B. go in for the disputations, knotty problems, and quibbles; but the majority enter a course in Logic and Argumentation, where they straightway stock themselves up for the practice of sophistry; while a few go about making a collection of apophthegms and anecdotes, but, as Anacharsis said of the Greeks that he never saw them put their money to any use save to count it, so these persons are for ever foolishly taking account and inventory of their literary stock, but they lay up nothing else which would be to their own profit. Quite in place here is Antiphanes’ Cf. the elaboration of this idea by Addison in the Tatler, No. 254 (Nov. 23, 1710), and by Rabelais in Pantagruel, iv. 55 and 56, as well as the postilion’s horn in Baron Munchausen’s Adventures, chap. vi. story, which somebody has recounted and applied to Plato’s close acquaintances. Antiphanes said humorously that in a certain city words congealed with the cold the moment they were spoken, and later, as they thawed out, people heard in the summer what they had said to one another in the winter; it was the same way, he asserted, with what was said by Plato to men still in their youth; not until long afterwards, if ever, did most of them come to perceive the meaning, when they had become old men. And this is the general experience with philosophy as a whole until the judgement acquires a healthy stability, and begins to find itself in accord with principles productive of character and breadth of mind, and to look for the kind of discourse whose footprints, in the words of Aesop, In Lion and Fox, No. 137 in the Fables passing as Aesop’s. are turned toward us rather than away from us. For as Sophocles said, that only after handling with a light touch the turgidity of Aeschylus and next his harshness and artificiality in composition, did he, as a third step, change the character of the language, which has the most to do with moral character and goodness, so, in the same way, when students of philosophy pass from the ostentatious and artificial to the kind of discourse which deals with character and feeling they begin to make real and unaffected progress.
