This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
The Introduction.
I HAVE sent, Nicander, the reflections of some spare
hours concerning Hearing, digested into the following short
essay, that being out of the hands of governors and come
to man's estate, you may know how to pay a proper attention to those who would advise you. For that libertinism
which some wild young fellows, for want of more happy
education, mistake for liberty, subjects them to harder
tyrants than their late tutors and masters, even to their
own vicious inclinations, which, as it were, break loose
upon them. And as Herodotus observes of women, that
they put off modesty with their shift,1 so some young men
lay aside with the badges of minority all the sense of
shame or fear, and divested of the garment of modesty
which sat so well upon them are covered with insolence.
But you, who have often heard that to follow God and to
obey reason are all one, cannot but believe that men of best
sense in passing from minority to manhood do not throw
off the government, but simply change their governor. In
the room of some mercenary pedant, they receive that
divine guide and governor of human life, reason, under
whose subjection alone men are properly said to live in
freedom. For they only live at their own will who have
learned to will as they ought; and that freedom of will
which appears in unconstrained appetites and unreasonable
actions is mean and narrow, and accompanied with much
repentance.
[p. 442]
1 Herod. I. 8.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.