My friend Sossius Senecio,
Is it possible, do you think, that all the arguments in
the world can make a man sensibly assured that he is a
proficient in virtue, upon this supposition, that his proceedings do not in the least alleviate and abate his folly,
but that the vice in him, weighing in equal balance against
his good inclinations, holds him down, as
Heavy lead pulls down the yielding net?
In the study of music or grammar, I am sure, such a
conclusion would be very absurd; for the scholar could
never be certain that he had made any improvement in
those sciences, if all the while he is a learning he did not
exhaust by little and little his former ignorance about them,
but remained during the whole progress of his application
under the same degree of unskilfulness as at first setting
out.
The like may be said of those that are under the hands
of a physician. According to this assertion, if the patient
take physic which does not recruit his strength or give
him ease by abating the severity of the distemper, it is
absolutely impossible that he should discern any alteration
in himself, before the contrary habit is perfectly and in the
highest degree induced, and his body thoroughly sound and
well. As in these instances you cannot say the persons
have advanced any thing, so long as they perceive no sensible
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change in themselves by the abatement of the contrary weight, and do not find that their minds are elevated,
as it were, in the opposite scale; just so, in truth, is it with
those that profess philosophy. They cannot be assured of
any progress or improvement, if the soul do not gradually
advance and purge off the rest of its former imperfections,
but still lie under the like equal pressure and grievance of
pure, absolute, unmixed evil, till it have attained the state
of perfect, supreme good; for the truth of it is, a wise man
cannot in a moment of time change from the lowest degree
of vice imaginable to the most heroic perfection of virtue,
if he only make a brisk attempt to throw off vice all at
once, and do not constantly and resolutely endeavor by little
and little to lighten the burthen and dispossess the evil
habit of it.
You know very well how much trouble those give themselves who maintain this assertion, and what strange questions they raise with regard to it,—for instance, why a wise
virtuous man should never perceive how he became such,
but should either be quite ignorant, or at least doubt, that
ever by little and little, now adding something, now subtracting and removing others, he advanced to the aggregate perfection of virtue. Now if (as they affirm) the
change from bad to good were either so quick and sudden,
as that he was extremely vicious in the morning may
become eminently virtuous at night, or that any one going
to bed wicked might chance to rise a virtuous man next
morning, and, having all the former day's errors and imperfections absolutely removed out of his mind, might say
to them, as it is in the poet,
Vain dreams ! farewell, like spectres haste away,
At the new light of virtue's glorious day;
1
do you think that any one in the world could be ignorant
of so extraordinary a conversion, and perfectly shut his
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eyes upon the beams of virtue and wisdom so fully and
manifestly breaking in upon his soul? In my opinion, if
any person should have Caeneus's foolish wish, and be
changed (as it is reported he was) from one sex to the
other, it is more probable that such a one should be altogether ignorant of the metamorphosis, than that any should,
from a lazy, unthinking, debauched fellow, commence a
wise, prudent, and valiant hero, and from a sottish bestiality advance to the perfection of divine life, and yet know
nothing at all of the change.
