Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 10 — Of common conceptions, against the Stoics

Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 10 — Of common conceptions, against the Stoics, Plutarch; served verbatim

DIADUMENUS. Since then they will not depart from any of these contrarieties, but confess and hold them all,—that those who are proceeding towards virtue are fools and vicious, that those who are become good and wise perceive not this change in themselves, and that there is a great difference between folly and wisdom,—they must surely seem to you wonderfully to preserve an agreement in their doctrines, and yet more so in their actions, when affirming all men who are not wise to be equally wicked, unjust, faithless, and fools, they on the other side abhor and detest some of them,—nay, sometimes to such a degree that they refuse even to speak to them when they meet them,—while others of them they trust with their money, choose to offices, and take for husbands to their daughters. Now if they say these things in jest, let them smooth their brows; but if in earnest and as philosophers, it is against the common notions to reprove and blame all men alike in words, and yet to deal with some of them as moderate persons and with others as very wicked; and exceedingly to admire Chrysippus, to deride Alexinus, and yet to think neither of them more or less mad than the other. ’Tis so, say they; but as he who is not above a cubit under the superficies of the sea is no less drowned than he who is five hundred fathom deep, so they that are coming towards virtue are no less in vice than those that are farther off. And as blind men are still blind, though they shall perhaps a little after recover their sight; so these that have proceeded towards virtue, till such time as they have attained to it, continue foolish and wicked. But that they who are in the way towards virtue resemble not the blind, but such as see less clearly, nor are like to those who are drowned, but—those which swim, and that near the harbor,—they themselves testify by their actions. For they would not use counsellors and generals and lawgivers as blind guides, nor would they imitate the works and actions and words and lives of some, if they saw them all equally drowned in folly and wickedness. But leaving this, wonder at the men in this behalf, that they are not taught by their own examples to give up the doctrine that these men are wise being ignorant of it themselves, and neither knowing nor being sensible that they are recovered from being drowned and see the light, and that being gotten above vice, they fetch breath again.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Chrysippus — a candidate entry

Of common conceptions, against the Stoics, Plutarch — translated by Samuel White (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)