to let you see a man's hand, keeping the rest of his body concealed, you
would know at once that what was behind was a man, without seeing his
whole body. Well, it is easy to find out in a few hours the essential
points of the various doctrines, and, for selecting the best, these will
suffice, without any of your scrupulous exacting investigation.

_Ly_. Upon my word, how confident you are in your faculty of divining the
whole from the parts! and yet I remember being told just the
opposite--that knowledge of the whole includes that of the parts, but not
vice versa. Well, but tell me; when Phidias saw the claw, would he ever
have known it for a lion's, if he had never seen a lion? Could you have
said the hand was a man's, if you had never known or seen a man? Why are
you dumb? Let me make the only possible answer for you--that you could
_not_; I am afraid Phidias has modelled his lion all for nothing;
for it proves to be neither here nor there. What resemblance is there?
What enabled you and Phidias to recognize the parts was just your
knowledge of the wholes--the lion and the man. But in philosophy--the
Stoic, for instance--how will the part reveal the other parts to you, or
how can you conclude that they are beautiful? You do not know the whole
to which the parts belong.

Then you say it is easy to hear in a few hours the essentials of all
philosophy--meaning, I suppose, their principles and ends, their accounts
of God and the soul, their views on the material and the immaterial,
their respective identification of pleasure or goodness with the
desirable and the Happy; well, it is easy--it is quite a trifle--to
deliver an opinion after such a hearing; but really to _know_ where
the truth lies will be work, I suspect, not for a few hours, but for a
good many days. If not, what can have induced them to enlarge on these
rudiments to the tune of a hundred or a thousand volumes apiece? I