profit of its species.

The second, represented by the second blind man, proceeds from some
troubled affection, as in the question of Love and Jealousy, the which
is like a moth, which has the same subject, enemy and father, that is,
it consumes the cloth or wood from which, it is generated.

MIN. This does not seem to me to take place with heroic love.

SEV. True, according to the same reason which is seen in the lower kind
of love; but I mean according to another reason similar to that which
happens to those who love truth and goodness, which shows itself when
they are angry against those who adulterate it, spoil it, or corrupt it,
or who in other ways would treat it with indignity, as has been the case
with those who have brought themselves to suffer death and pains, and to
being ignominiously treated by ignorant peoples and vulgar sects.

MIN. Certainly no one truly loves the truth and the good who is not
angry against the multitude; as no one loves in the ordinary way who is
not jealous and fearful about the thing loved.

SEV. And so he comes to be really blind in many things, and according to
the common opinion he is quite infatuated and mad.

MIN. I have noted a place which says that all those are infatuated and
mad, who have sense beyond and outside of the general sense of other
men. But such extravagance is of two kinds, according as one goes beyond
and ascends up higher than the greater number rise or can rise, and
these are they who are inspired with Divine enthusiasm; or by going
down lower where those are found who have greater defect of sense and
of reason than the many, and the ordinary; but in that kind of madness,
insensibility and blindness, will not be found the jealous hero.

SEV. Although he is told that much learning makes him mad, yet no one
can really abuse him. The third, represented by the third blind man,
proceeds from this: that Divine Truth according to supernatural
reasoning, called metaphysics, manifests itself to those few to whom it
shows itself, and does not proceed with measure of movement and time as
occurs in the physical sciences, that is, those which are acquired by
natural light, the which, in discoursing of a thing known to reason by
means of the senses, proceed to the knowledge of another thing, unknown,
the which discourse is called argument; but immediately and suddenly,
according to the method which belongs to such efficiency.[AD] Whence a
divine has said: "Attenuati su