What possible form of argument, my dear Sosius Senecio, will keep alive in a man the consciousness that he is growing better in regard to virtue, if it is a fact that the successive stages of his progress produce no abatement of his unwisdom, but, on the contrary, vice constantly beset all progress, and with countervailing weight drags him down,
As leaden weights submerge the fisher’s net?
For, by the same token, in music or grammar, a man would not realize that he was making any improvement if in the process of learning he should in no wise lower the level of his ignorance about these subjects, and his lack of proficiency should all the time persist to the same degree. So, too, in the case of a sick man, a course of treatment that should not in some way effect an easing and alleviation of the malady, by making it to yield and let go its hold on him, would not afford him any perception of a change for the better until the opposite condition had been unmistakably engendered, his body have completely recovered its strength. On the contrary, just as in these cases persons make no progress unless their progress is marked by such an abatement of what is oppressing them, that, when the scale turns and they swing upward in the opposite direction, they can note the change, so too, in the study of philosophy, neither progress nor any sense of progress is to be assumed, if the soul does not put aside any of its gross stupidity and purge itself thereof, and if, up to the moment of its attaining the absolute and perfect good, it is wedded to evil which is also absolute. Why, if this be so, the wise man in a moment or a second of time changes from the lowest possible depravity to an unsurpassable state of virtue; and all his vice, of which he has not in long years succeeded in removing even a small portion, he suddenly leaves behind for ever.