must be something in it, he soon
is made to perceive that the Stoic budge is altogether shoddy.

The fifth and last book, De Finibus, is supposed to recount a dialogue
held at Athens, or, rather, gives the circumstances of a discourse
pretended to have been delivered there by Pupius Piso to the two
Ciceros, and to their cousin Lucius, on the merits of the old Academy
and the Aristotelian Peripatetics; for Plato's philosophy had got itself
split into two. There was the old and the new, and we may perhaps doubt
to which Cicero devoted himself. He certainly was not an Epicurean, and
he certainly was not a Stoic. He delighted to speak of himself as a
lover of Plato. But in some matters he seems to have followed Aristotle,
who had diverged from Plato, and he seems also to have clung to
Carneades, who had become master of the new Academy. But, in truth, to
ascertain the special doctrine of such a man on such a subject is vain.
As we read these works we lose ourselves in admiration of his memory; we
are astonished at the industry which he exhibits; we are delighted by
his perspicuity; and feel ourselves relieved amid the crowd of names and
theories by flashes of his wit; but there comes home to us, as a result,
the singular fact of a man playing with these theories as the most
interesting sport the world had produced, but not believing the least in
any of them. It was not that he disbelieved; and perhaps among them all
the tenets of the new Academy were those which reconciled themselves the
best to his common-sense. But they were all nothing to him but an
amusement.

In this book there are some exquisite bits. He says, speaking of Athens,
that, "Go where you will through the city, you place your footsteps on
the vestiges of history."[287] He says of a certain Demetrius, whom he
describes as writing books without readers in Egypt, "that this culture
of his mind was to him, as it were, the food by which his humanity was
kept alive."[288] And then he falls into the praise of our love for our
neighbors, and introduces us to that true philosophy which was the real
guide of his life. "Among things which are honest," he says, "there is
nothing which shines so brightly and so widely as that brotherhood
between men, that agreement as to what may be useful to all, and that
general love for the human race. It comes from our original condition,
in which children are loved by their parents; and then binding together
the family, it spreads