ot be an appearance of beauty, if indeed (as is
said) the wickedness of the disposition fills the face with deformity.
And secondly, it is absolutely against all common experience for the
deformed to be worthy of love because he one day will be fair and
expects to have beauty, but that when he has got it and is become fair
and good, he is to be beloved of none.

LAMPRIAS. Love, they say, is a certain hunting after a young person
who is as yet indeed undeveloped, but naturally well disposed towards
virtue.

DIADUMENUS. And what do we now else, O my best friend, but demonstrate
that their sect perverts and destroys all our common conceptions with
improbable things and unusual expressions? For none would hinder the
solicitude of these wise men towards young persons, if it were free
from all passionate affection, from being named hunting or love
of instruction; but they ought to call love what all men and women
understand and call by this name, like that which Penelope's suitors in
Homer seem to acknowledge,

Who all desired to lie with her;
("Odyssey," i. 366)

or as Jupiter in another place says to Juno,

For neither goddess yet nor mortal dame
E'er kindled in my heart so great a flame.
("Iliad." xiv. 315.)

Thus casting moral philosophy into these matters, in which all is

A mazy whirl, with nothing sound, and all perplexed,
(Euripides, "Andromache," 448.)

they contemn and deride it, as if boasting themselves to be the only
men who observe nature and custom as it ought to be, and who at the
same time adapted reason to each man by means of aversions, desires,
appetites, pursuits, and impulses. But custom has received no good from
their logic, but, like the ear diseased by vain sounds, is filled
with difficulty and obscurity,--of which, if you think good, we will
elsewhere begin a new discourse. But now we will run through the chief
and principal heads of their natural philosophy, which no less confounds
the common conceptions than that other concerning ends. =============
First, this is altogether absurd and against sense, to say that is which
is not, and things which are not are. But above all that is most
absurd which they say of the universe. For, putting round about the
circumference of the world an infinite vacuum, they say that the
universe is neither a body nor bodiless. It follows then from this that
the universe has no being, since with them body only has a being.
S