What then? shall I not hurt him who has hurt me?  In the first place consider what hurt ([Greek:  blabae]) is, and remember what you have heard from the philosophers.  For if the good consists in the will (purpose, intention, [Greek:  proaireeis]), and the evil also in the will, see if what you say is not this:  What then, since that man has hurt himself by doing an unjust act to me, shall I not hurt myself by doing some unjust act to him?  Why do we not imagine to ourselves (mentally think of) something of this kind?  But where there is any detriment to the body or to our possession, there is harm there; and where the same thing happens to the faculty of the will, there is (you suppose) no harm; for he who has been deceived or he who has done an unjust act neither suffers in the head nor in the eye nor in the hip, nor does he lose his estate; and we wish for nothing else than (security to) these things.  But whether we shall have the will modest and faithful or shameless and faithless, we care not the least, except only in the school so far as a few words are concerned.  Therefore our proficiency is limited to these few words; but beyond them it does not exist even in the slightest degree.

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What the beginning of philosophy is.—­The beginning of philosophy, to him at least who enters on it in the right way and by the door is a consciousness of his own weakness and inability about necessary things; for we come into the world with no natural notion of a right-angled triangle, or of a diesis (a quarter tone), or of a half-tone; but we learn each of these things by a certain transmission according to art; and for this reason those who do not know them do not think that they know them.  But as to good and evil, and beautiful and ugly, and becoming and unbecoming, and happiness and misfortune, and proper and improper, and what we ought to do and what we ought not to do, who ever came into the world without having an innate idea of them?  Wherefore we all use these names, and we endeavor to fit the preconceptions to the several cases (things) thus:  he has done well; he has not done well; he has done as he ought, not as he ought; he has been unfortunate, he has been fortunate; he is unjust, he is just; who does not use these names? who among us defers the use of them till he has learned them, as he defers the use of the words about lines (geometrical figures) or sounds?  And the cause of this is that we come into the world already taught as it were by nature some things on this matter ([Greek:  topon]), and proceeding from these we have added to them self-conceit ([Greek:  oiaesin]).  For why, a man says, do I not know the beautiful and the ugly?  Have I not the notion of it?  You have.  Do I not adapt it to particulars?  You do.  Do I not then adapt it properly?  In that lies the whole question; and conceit is added here; for beginning from these things which are admitted men