--Ovid, Trist, iii. 4, 57.]

If we enjoy nothing but what we touch, we may say farewell to the money
in our chests, and to our sons when they are gone a hunting. We will
have them nearer to us: is the garden, or half a day's journey from home,
far? What is ten leagues: far or near? If near, what is eleven, twelve,
or thirteen, and so by degrees. In earnest, if there be a woman who can
tell her husband what step ends the near and what step begins the remote,
I would advise her to stop between;

"Excludat jurgia finis . . . .
Utor permisso; caudaeque pilos ut equinae
Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum
Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi:"

["Let the end shut out all disputes . . . . I use what is
permitted; I pluck out the hairs of the horse's tail one by one;
while I thus outwit my opponent."--Horace, Ep., ii, I, 38, 45]

and let them boldly call philosophy to their assistance; in whose teeth
it may be cast that, seeing it neither discerns the one nor the other end
of the joint, betwixt the too much and the little, the long and the
short, the light and the heavy, the near and the remote; that seeing it
discovers neither the beginning nor the end, it must needs judge very
uncertainly of the middle:

"Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium."

["Nature has green to us no knowledge of the end of things."
--Cicero, Acad., ii. 29.]