if vice were not extant, it should be impossible to have any
understanding of it. For see what these men persuade us who philosophize
against the conceptions,--that by folly indeed we comprehend prudence,
but prudence without folly cannot so much as comprehend folly itself.

And if Nature had absolutely stood in need of the generation of evil,
yet might one or two examples of vice have been sufficient; or if you
will, it might have been requisite that ten, a thousand, or ten thousand
vicious men should be brought forth, and not that the multitude of vices
should be so great as "to exceed in number the sands of the sea, the
dust of the earth, and the feathers of all the various kinds of birds in
the world," and yet that there should not be so much all this while as a
dream of virtue. Those who in Sparta had the charge of the public halls
or eating places called Phiditia were wont to bring forth two or
three Helots drunken and full of wine, that the young men, seeing what
drunkenness was, might learn to keep sobriety. But in human life there
are many such examples of vice. For there is not any one sober to
virtue; but we all stagger up and down, acting shamefully and living
miserably. Thus does reason inebriate us, and with so much trouble and
madness does it fill us, that we fall in nothing short of those dogs of
whom Aesop says, that seeing certain skins swimming in the water, they
endeavored to gulp down the sea, but burst before they could get at
them. For reason also, by which we hope to gain reputation and attain
to virtue, does, ere we can reach to it, corrupt and destroy us, being
before filled with abundance of heady and bitter vice;--if indeed, as
these men say, they who are got even to the uppermost step have no ease,
cessation, or breathing from folly and infelicity.

But let us see what manner of thing he shows vice to be who says that it
was not brought forth unprofitably, and of what use and what a thing
he makes it to be to those who have it, writing in his book of right
conduct, that a wicked man wants nothing, has need of nothing, nothing
is useful to him, nothing proper, nothing fit for him. How then is
vice useful, with which neither health nor abundance of riches nor
advancement in virtue is profitable? Who then does not want these
things, of which some are "preferable" and "acceptable" and therefore
highly useful, and others are "according to Nature," as themselves term
them? But (they affirm) no one