n. 'To that end,' she tells us, 'much time is
necessary, many delays of judgment, a cautious gait; repeated
inspection.' And we are not to regard the outward appearance, or the
reputation of wisdom, in any of the [167] speakers; but like the judges
of Areopagus, who try their causes in the darkness of the night, look
only to what they say.

--Philosophy, then, is impossible, or possible only in another life!

--Hermotimus! I grieve to tell you that all this even, may be in truth
insufficient. After all, we may deceive ourselves in the belief that
we have found something:--like the fishermen! Again and again they let
down the net. At last they feel something heavy, and with vast labour
draw up, not a load of fish, but only a pot full of sand, or a great
stone.

--I don't understand what you mean by the net. It is plain that you
have caught me in it.

--Try to get out! You can swim as well as another. We may go to all
philosophers in turn and make trial of them. Still, I, for my part,
hold it by no mean certain that any one of them really possesses what
we seek. The truth may be a thing that not one of them has yet found.
You have twenty beans in your hand, and you bid ten persons guess how
many: one says five, another fifteen; it is possible that one of them
may tell the true number; but it is not impossible that all may be
wrong. So it is with the philosophers. All alike are in search of
Happiness--what kind of thing it is. One says one thing, one another:
it is pleasure; it is virtue;--what not? And Happiness may indeed be
one of those things. But it is possible [168] also that it may be
still something else, different and distinct from them all.

--What is this?--There is something, I know not how, very sad and
disheartening in what you say. We seem to have come round in a circle
to the spot whence we started, and to our first incertitude. Ah!
Lucian, what have you done to me? You have proved my priceless pearl
to be but ashes, and all my past labour to have been in vain.

--Reflect, my friend, that you are not the first person who has thus
failed of the good thing he hoped for. All philosophers, so to speak,
are but fighting about the 'ass's shadow.' To me you seem like one who
should weep, and reproach fortune because he is not able to climb up
into heaven, or go down into the sea by Sicily and come up at Cyprus,
or sail on wings in one day from Greece to India. And the true cause
of his