as fear with them, prevailed
over grief, cannot reason and true philosophy have the same effect with
a wise man?

XXVIII. But what is there more effectual to dispel grief than the
discovery that it answers no purpose, and has been undergone to no
account? Therefore, if we can get rid of it, we need never have been
subject to it. It must be acknowledged, then, that men take up grief
wilfully and knowingly; and this appears from the patience of those
who, after they have been exercised in afflictions and are better able
to bear whatever befalls them, suppose themselves hardened against
fortune; as that person in Euripides,

Had this the first essay of fortune been,
And I no storms thro' all my life had seen,
Wild as a colt I'd broke from reason's sway;
But frequent griefs have taught me to obey.[46]

As, then, the frequent bearing of misery makes grief the lighter, we
must necessarily perceive that the cause and original of it does not
lie in the calamity itself. Your principal philosophers, or lovers of
wisdom, though they have not yet arrived at perfect wisdom, are not
they sensible that they are in the greatest evil? For they are foolish,
and foolishness is the greatest of all evils, and yet they lament not.
How shall we account for this? Because opinion is not fixed upon that
kind of evil, it is not our opinion that it is right, meet, and our
duty to be uneasy because we are not all wise men. Whereas this opinion
is strongly affixed to that uneasiness where mourning is concerned,
which is the greatest of all grief. Therefore Aristotle, when he blames
some ancient philosophers for imagining that by their genius they had
brought philosophy to the highest perfection, says, they must be either
extremely foolish or extremely vain; but that he himself could see that
great improvements had been made therein in a few years, and that
philosophy would in a little time arrive at perfection. And
Theophrastus is reported to have reproached nature at his death for
giving to stags and crows so long a life, which was of no use to them,
but allowing only so short a span to men, to whom length of days would
have been of the greatest use; for if the life of man could have been
lengthened, it would have been able to provide itself with all kinds of
learning, and with arts in the greatest perfection. He lamented,
therefore, that he was dying just when he had begun to discover these.
What! does not every grave and dist