d to imagine that the sight,
perceiving those things which are but a little whitish or inclining to
white, should not discern such as are white in perfection; or that the
touch, feeling those things which are but warm or moderately hot, should
be insensible of those that are hot in the highest degree. And yet more
absurd it is, that a man who perceives what is commonly according to
Nature--as are health and good constitution of body--should yet be
ignorant of virtue when it is present, which themselves hold to be most
of all and in the highest degree according to Nature. For how can it
but be against sense, to conceive the difference between health and
sickness, and yet so little to comprehend that between wisdom and folly
as to think the one to be present when it is gone, and possessing the
other to be ignorant that one has it? Now because there is from the
highest progress a change made to felicity and virtue, one of these two
things must of necessity follow; either that this progress is not
vice and infelicity, or that virtue is not far distant from vice, nor
happiness from misery, but that the difference between good and evil is
very small and not to be perceived by sense; for otherwise they who have
the one for the other could not be ignorant of it.

Since, then, they will not depart from any of these contrarieties, but
confess and hold them all,--that those who are proceeding towards virtue
are fools and vicious, that those who are become good and wise perceive
not this change in themselves, and that there is a great difference
between folly and wisdom,--they must assuredly seem to you wonderfully
to preserve an agreement in their doctrines, and yet more so in their
conduct, when affirming all men who are not wise to be equally wicked,
unjust, faithless, and fools, they on the other side abhor and detest
some of them,--nay, sometimes to such a degree that they refuse even to
speak to them when they meet them,--while others of them they trust
with their money, choose to offices, and take for husbands to their
daughters. Now if they say these things in jest, let them smooth their
brows; but if in earnest and as philosophers, it is against the common
notions to reprove and blame all men alike in words, and yet to deal
with some of them as moderate persons and with others as very wicked;
and exceedingly to admire Chrysippus, to deride Alexinus, and yet to
think neither of them more or less mad than the other. "'Tis so,