My dear Nicander, |37 C|
This is an article upon ‘The Attitude of the Student’, which I have written and am sending to you. Its purpose is to teach you the right attitude towards your philosophic teacher, now that you are a grown-up man and are no longer obliged merely to obey orders.
Some young men are so ill-informed as to suppose that absence of restraint is the same thing as freedom, whereas, by unchaining |D| the passions, it makes them slaves to a set of masters more tyrannical than all the teachers and mentors of childhood. Herodotus says that when women take off the tunic they also take off shame. It is the same with some young men. In laying aside the garb of childhood they also lay aside shame and fear. No sooner do they unloose the cloak which controlled their conduct than they indulge in the utmost misbehaviour. With you it should be otherwise. You have been told over and over again that to ‘follow God’ and to ‘obey reason’ are the same thing. Understand, therefore, that with right-minded persons a coming of age does not mean rejection of rule, but change of ruler. For the hired or purchased[[44]] director of conduct they |E| substitute one that is divine—namely, reason. Only those who follow reason deserve to be considered free; for they alone live as they choose, because they alone have learned to make the right choice, whereas ignorant and irrational desires and actions give small and paltry scope to the will, but great scope to repentance.
Note what happens in the case of naturalized citizens. Entire |F| foreigners from another country will often grumble irritably at their experiences, whereas those who have previously been denizens of the state, and have therefore lived in intimate touch with the laws, will accept their obligations with cheerful readiness. So with yourself. For a long time you have been growing up in the company of philosophy. From the first you have been accustomed to a taste of philosophic reason in everything that you have been taught or told as a child. It should therefore be in a well-disposed and congenial spirit that you come to Philosophy, who alone can adorn a youth with that finish of manhood which genuinely and rationally deserves the name.
You will not, I believe, object to a prefatory remark upon |38| the sense of hearing. Theophrastus asserts that it is the most susceptible of all the senses, inasmuch as nothing that can be seen, tasted, or touched, is the cause of such strong emotional disturbance and excitement as takes hold upon the mind when certain sounds of beating, clashing, or ringing fall upon the ear. It is, however, more rational, rather than more emotional, than the other senses. Vice can find many places and parts of the body open for it to enter and seize upon the soul. But the only hold that virtue can take is upon pure young ears |B| which have at all times been protected from the corruptions of flattery or the touch of low communications. Hence the advice of Xenocrates, that ear-guards should be worn by boys more than by athletes, inasmuch as the latter merely have their ears disfigured by blows, while the former have their characters disfigured by words. Not that he would wed us to inattention or deafness. It is but a warning to beware of wrong communications, and to see that others of the right nature have first been fostered in our character by philosophy and have mounted guard in that quarter which is most open to influence and persuasion.
Bias, the ancient sage, was once bidden by Amasis to send him that piece of meat from a sacrificial victim which was at the same time the best and the worst. He replied by taking out and sending the tongue, on the ground that speech can do both the greatest harm and the greatest good. It is a general practice in fondling little children to take them by the ears, and to bid |C| them do the same to us—an indirect and playful way of suggesting that we should be especially fond of those who make our ears the instruments to our advantage.
It is, of course, obvious that a youth cannot be debarred from any or every kind of hearing, or from tasting any discourse at all. Otherwise not only will he remain entirely without fruit or growth in the way of virtue; he will actually be perverted in the direction of vice, his mind being an idle and uncultivated patch producing a plentiful crop of weeds. Propensity to pleasure and dislike of labour—the springs of innumerable forms of trouble and disease—are not of external origin, nor imported |D| from teaching, but they well up naturally from the soil. If therefore they are left free to take their natural course; if they are not done away with, or turned aside, by sound instruction; if nature is not thus brought under control, man will prove more unreclaimed than any brute beast.
The hearing of lectures, then, may be of great profit, but at the same time of great danger, to a young man. This being so, I believe it a good thing to make the matter one of constant discussion, both with oneself and with others. In most cases |E| we may notice a false procedure—that of cultivating the art of speaking before being trained to the art of listening. It is thought that, while speaking requires instruction and practice, any kind of listening is attended with profit. But not so. Whereas in ball-play one learns simultaneously how to throw and how to catch, in the business of speech the right taking in is prior to the giving out, just as conception is prior to parturition. We are told that in the case of a hen laying a wind-egg her labour and travail end in nothing but an abortive and lifeless piece of refuse. So when a young man lacks the ability to listen, |F| or the training to gather profit through the ear, the speech which he lets fall is wind-begotten indeed:
Sans all regard and sans note it is lost in the clouds and dispersèd.
He will take a vessel and tilt it in the right direction for receiving anything to be poured into it, and so ensure a real ‘in-pouring’ instead of a pouring to waste. But he does not learn to lend his own attention to a speaker and meet the lecture half-way, so as to miss no valuable point. On the contrary, his behaviour is in the last degree ridiculous. If he happens upon a person |39| describing a dinner, a procession, a dream, or a brawling-match in which he has been engaged, he listens in silence and is eager for more. But if a teacher to whom he has attached himself tries to impart something useful, or to urge him to some duty, to admonish him when wrong, or to soothe him when angry, he is out of all patience. If possible, he shows fight, and is ambitious to get the best of the argument. Otherwise he is off and away to discourses of a different and a rubbishy kind, filling his ears—the poor leaky vessels—with anything rather than the thing they need.