And oh! what greater joy than this canst thou obtain,1 and more efficacious for moral improvement? Democritus says we ought to pray that we may be visited by phantoms which are propitious, and that from out the circumambient air such only may encounter us as are agreeable to our natures and good, rather than those which are perverse and bad, thereby intruding into philosophy a doctrine which is not true, and which leads astray into boundless superstitions.
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1 An iambic trimeter from the Tympanistae of Sophocles (Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag.2, p. 270).
Plutarch. Plutarch's Lives. with an English Translation by. Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1918. 6.
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