[5]
2. Therefore, amid all the present most awful1
calamities I yet flatter myself that I have won
this good out of evil—that I may commit to written
form matters not at all familiar to our countrymen
but still very much worth their knowing. For
what, in the name of heaven, is more to be desired
[p. 173]
than wisdom? What is more to be prized? What
is better for a man, what more worthy of his nature?
Those who seek after it are called philosophers;
and philosophy is nothing else, if one will translate
the word into our idiom, than “the love of wisdom.”
Wisdom, moreover, as the word has been defined
by the philosophers of old, is “the knowledge of
things human and divine and of the causes by which
those things are controlled.” And if the man lives
who would belittle the study of philosophy, I quite
fail to see what in the world he would see fit to
praise.
1 Why philosophy is worth while.
M. Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. With An English Translation. Walter Miller. Cambridge. Harvard University Press; Cambridge, Mass., London, England. 1913.
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