Letter 111

You have asked me what sophismata are called in Latin. Many have tried to impose a name upon them, but none has stuck; evidently, because the thing itself was not received among us, nor in use, the name too was resisted. Yet the term that Cicero used seems to me most apt: he calls them cavillationes, quibbles.

Whoever has given himself over to these does indeed weave crafty little questions, but profits nothing toward life; he becomes neither braver nor more temperate nor more uplifted. But the man who has practised philosophy as his own remedy becomes mighty in spirit, full of confidence, unsurpassable, and the greater for being approached.

It is as happens with great mountains, whose loftiness appears less to those who look from afar; when you have drawn near, then it becomes plain how high their summits are. Such, my dear Lucilius, is the philosopher who is so in fact and not by artifice. He stands admirable on the height, lofty, of a true greatness. He does not rise up on his toes nor walk on the tips of his fingers, after the manner of those who aid their stature by a lie and wish to seem taller than they are; he is content with his own greatness.

Why should he not be content to have grown to a height where fortune does not reach with her hand? Therefore he is both above human things and equal to himself in every condition of affairs, whether life goes forward on a favourable course, or is tossed and goes through adverse and difficult things; this steadfastness those quibbles, of which I spoke a little before, cannot bestow. With these the mind plays, it does not profit, and it draws philosophy down from her summit to the level ground.

Nor would I forbid you to do these things sometimes, but then, when you wish to do nothing. Yet they have this worst quality in them: they create a certain sweetness of their own, and hold and detain the mind, drawn on by an appearance of subtlety, when so great a mass of matters calls, when scarcely a whole lifetime suffices for you to learn this one thing, to despise life. "What?" you say. "To rule it?" That is the second task; for no one has ruled it well save one who had despised it. Farewell.