[48] viz. Such circumstances as induced Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, and many other ancient philosophers, not to engage in wedlock, because they found that they could give greater assistance to philosophy by continuing single; but Pythagoras and Socrates, though they rank among the wisest men that ever lived, did not find a married life incompatible with the cultivation of philosophy in the highest perfection possible to man. Wedlock, therefore, is never to be avoided from any sordid and selfish motives.
[49] Hence Diogenes, in perfect conformity with that dignified independence of character which he so eminently possessed, and which is to be found more or less in the conduct of all the ancient philosophers, when a certain wealthy and ostentatious man brought him to a fine house which he had built, and desired him not to spit, as he perceived he begun to hawk, spit in the man’s face, observing at the same time, that he could not find a worse place to spit in.
[50] Odyss. lib. 7, v. 183.
[51] This admirable passage is so conformable to the following beautiful lines in Pope’s Essay on Man, that it is most probably the source from whence they were derived. The lines are these:
“Self love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake,
The centre moved, a circle straight succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbour first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race;