ustice, and gave
to private malice and public ingratitude a legal right to do wrong. Other
nations are blamed for tolerating vice, but the Athenians alone would not
tolerate virtue.

_Pericles_.--The friends to the ostracism say that too eminent virtue
destroys that equality which is the safeguard of freedom.

_Cosmo_.--No State is well modelled if it cannot preserve itself from the
danger of tyranny without a grievous violation of natural justice; nor
would a friend to true freedom, which consists in being governed not by
men but by laws, desire to live in a country where a Cleon bore rule, and
where an Aristides was not suffered to remain. But, instead of remedying
this evil, you made it worse. You rendered the people more intractable,
more adverse to virtue, less subject to the laws, and more to impressions
from mischievous demagogues, than they had been before your time.

_Pericles_.--In truth, I did so; and therefore my place in Elysium,
notwithstanding the integrity of my whole public conduct, and the great
virtues I excited, is much below the rank of those who have governed
commonwealths or limited monarchies, not merely with a concern for their
present advantage, but also with a prudent regard to that balance of
power on which their permanent happiness must necessarily depend.

DIALOGUE XXIV.

LOCKE--BAYLE.

_Bayle_.--Yes, we both were philosophers; but my philosophy was the
deepest. You dogmatised; I doubted.

_Locke_.--Do you make doubting a proof of depth in philosophy? It may be
a good beginning of it, but it is a bad end.

_Bayle_.--No; the more profound our searches are into the nature of
things, the more uncertainty we shall find; and the most subtle minds see
objections and difficulties in every system which are overlooked or
undiscoverable by ordinary understandings.

_Locke_.--It would be better, then, to be no philosopher, and to continue
in the vulgar herd of mankind, that one may have the convenience of
thinking that one knows something. I find that the eyes which Nature has
given me see many things very clearly, though some are out of their
reach, or discerned but dimly. What opinion ought I to have of a
physician who should offer me an eye-water, the use of which would at
first so sharpen my sight as to carry it farther than ordinary vision,
but would in the end put them out? Your philosophy, Monsieur Bayle, is
to the eyes of the mind what I have supposed the doctor's nostr