e-juice, and this purple robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood
of a shell-fish: such then are these impressions, and they reach the
things themselves and penetrate them, and so we see what kind of things
they are. Just in the same way ought we to act all through life, and
where there are things which appear most worthy of our approbation, we
ought to lay them bare and look at their worthlessness and strip them of
all the words by which they are exalted. For outward show is a wonderful
perverter of the reason, and when thou art most sure that thou art
employed about things worth thy pains, it is then that it cheats thee
most. Consider then what Crates says of Xenocrates himself.

14. Most of the things which the multitude admire are referred to
objects of the most general kind, those which are held together by
cohesion or natural organization, such as stones, wood, fig-trees,
vines, olives. But those which are admired by men, who are a little more
reasonable, are referred to the things which are held together by a
living principle, as flocks, herds. Those which are admired by men who
are still more instructed are the things which are held together by a
rational soul, not however a universal soul, but rational so far as it
is a soul skilled in some art, or expert in some other way, or simply
rational so far as it possesses a number of slaves. But he who values a
rational soul, a soul universal and fitted for political life, regards
nothing else except this; and above all things he keeps his soul in a
condition and in an activity conformable to reason and social life, and
he co-operates to this end with those who are of the same kind as
himself.

15. Some things are hurrying into existence, and others are hurrying out
of it; and of that which is coming into existence part is already
extinguished. Motions and changes are continually renewing the world,
just as the uninterrupted course of time is always renewing the infinite
duration of ages. In this flowing stream then, on which there is no
abiding, what is there of the things which hurry by on which a man would
set a high price? It would be just as if a man should fall in love with
one of the sparrows which fly by, but it has already passed out of
sight. Something of this kind is the very life of every man, like the
exhalation of the blood and the respiration of the air. For such as it
is to have once drawn in the air and to have given it back, which we do
every mome