’Tis a thousand pities that matters should be at such a pass in this age of ours, that philosophy, even with men of understanding, should be, looked upon as a vain and fantastic name, a thing of no use, no value, either in opinion or effect, of which I think those ergotisms and petty sophistries, by prepossessing the avenues to it, are the cause.  And people are much to blame to represent it to children for a thing of so difficult access, and with such a frowning, grim, and formidable aspect.  Who is it that has disguised it thus, with this false, pale, and ghostly countenance?  There is nothing more airy, more gay, more frolic, and I had like to have said, more wanton.  She preaches nothing but feasting and jollity; a melancholic anxious look shows that she does not inhabit there.  Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them,—­[Plutarch, Treatise on Oracles which have ceased]—­“Either I am much deceived, or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no, very deep discourse.”  To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied:  “Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb ------ is spelt with a double A, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives ----- and -----, and the superlatives ---- and ------, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science:  but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.”

              “Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in aegro
               Corpore; deprendas et gaudia; sumit utrumque
               Inde habitum facies.”

["You may discern the torments of mind lurking in a sick body; you
may discern its joys:  either expression the face assumes from the
mind.”—­Juvenal, ix. 18]

The soul that lodges philosophy, ought to be of such a constitution of health, as to render the body in like manner healthful too; she ought to make her tranquillity and satisfaction shine so as to appear without, and her contentment ought to fashion the outward behaviour to her own mould, and consequently to fortify it with a graceful confidence, an active and joyous carriage, and a serene and contented countenance.  The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.  ’Tis Baroco and Baralipton—­[Two terms of the ancient scholastic logic.]—­that render their disciples so dirty and ill-favoured, and not she; they do not so much as know her but by hearsay.  What!  It is she that calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by certain imaginary epicycles, but by natural and manifest reasons.  She has virtue for her end, which is not, as the schoolmen say, situate upon the summit of a perpendicular,