is in these another species of foolishness and a worse.
Cic. Who, then, is wise, if foolish is he who is content, and foolish he who is sad?
Tans. He who is neither merry nor sad.
Cic. Who? He who sleeps? He who is without feeling—who is dead?
Tans. No; but he who is quick, both seeing and hearing, and who, considering evil and good, estimating the one and the other as variable, and consistent in motion, mutation, and vicissitude, in such wise that the end of one opposite is the commencement of another, and the extreme of the one is the beginning of the other; whose spirit is neither depressed nor elated, but is moderate in inclinations and temperate in desires; to him pleasure is not pleasure, having ever present the end of it; equally, pain to him is not pain, because by the force of reasoning he has present the end of that too. So the sage holds all mutable things as things that are not, and affirms that they are no other than vanity and nothingness, because time has to eternity the proportion of the point to the line.
Cic. So that we can never hold the proposition of being contented or discontented, without holding the proposition of our own foolishness, which we
thereby confess; therefore no one who reasons, and consequently no one who participates, can be wise; in short, all men are fools.
Tans. I do not intend to infer that; for I will hold of highest wisdom him who could really say at one time the opposite of what he says at another—never was I less gay than now; or, never was I less sad than at present.
Cic. How? Do you not make two contrary qualities where there are two opposite affections? Why, I say, do you take as two virtues, and not as one vice and one virtue, the being less gay and the being less sad?
Tans. Because both the contraries in excess—that is, in so far as they exceed—are vices, because they pass the line; and the same, in so far as they diminish, come to be virtues, because they are contained within limits.