“Wisdom is a great, a vast subject. It needs all the spare time that can be given to it.... Whatever amount of natural and moral questions you may have mastered, you will still be wearied with the vast abundance of questions to be asked and solved. So many, so great, are these questions, all superfluous things must be removed from the mind, that it may have free scope for exercise. Shall I waste my life in mere words (_syllabis_)? Thus does it come about that the learned are more anxious to talk than to live. Mark what mischief _excessive_ subtlety of mind produces, and how dangerous it may be to truth.”--(_Ep._ lxxxviii.)
“What is more vile or disgraceful than a learning which catches at popular applause (_clamores_)?”--(_Ep._ lii.)
Anticipating the ultimate triumph of Truth, he well says:--
“No virtue is really lost--that it has to remain hidden for a time is no loss to itself. A day will come which will publish the truth at present neglected and oppressed by the malignity (_malignitas_) of its age. He who thinks the world to be of his own age only, is born for the few. Many thousands of years, many millions of people, will supervene. Look forward to that time. Though the envy of your own day shall have condemned you to obscurity, there will come those who will judge you without fear or favour. If there is any reward for virtue from fame, that is imperishable. The talk of posterity, indeed, will be nothing to us. Yet it will revere us, even though we are insensible to its praise; and it will frequently consult us.... What now deceives has not the elements of duration. Falsehood is thinly disguised; it is transparent, if only you look close enough.”--(_Ep._ lxix.)
In his _Questions on Nature_, in which he often shows himself to have been much in advance of his contemporaries, and, indeed, of the whole mediæval ages, in scientific acumen, he takes occasion to reprobate the common practice of glorifying the lives and deeds of worthless princes and others, and exclaims in the modern spirit:--
“How much better to try to extinguish the evils of our own age than to glorify the bad deeds of others to posterity! How much better to celebrate the works of Nature [_deorum_] than the piracies of a Philip or Alexander and of the rest who, become illustrious by the calamities of nations, have been no less the pests of mankind than an inundation which devastates a whole country, or a conflagration in which a large proportion of living creatures is consumed.”--(_Quæst. Nat._ iii.)