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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
To search for truth among the groves of the Academy.
Philocles to Palemon
What mortal, if he had never chanced to hear your character, Palemon, could imagine that a genius fitted for the greatest affairs and formed amid courts and camps, should have so violent a turn towards philosophy and the schools? Who is there could possibly believe that one of your rank and credit in the fashionable world should be so thoroughly conversant in the learned one, and deeply interested in the affairs of a people so disagreeable to the generality of mankind and humour of the age?
I believe, truly, you are the only well-bred man who would have taken the fancy to talk philosophy in such a circle of good company as we had round us yesterday, when we were in your coach together in the park. How you could reconcile the objects there to such subjects as these was unaccountable. I could only conclude that either you had an extravagant passion for philosophy, to quit so many charms for it, or that some of those tender charms had an extravagant effect, which sent you to philosophy for relief.
In either case, I pitied you, thinking it a milder fate to be, as I truly was for my own part, a more indifferent lover. It was better, I told you, to admire beauty and wisdom a little more moderately.
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