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Besides all this, what should hinder but there may
be an understanding of evil, and an existence of good?
As the Gods, I believe, enjoy health, but understand the
fever and pleurisy. Since even we, who, as they say, have
abundance of evils but no good, are not yet destitute of
the knowledge what prudence, what goodness, and what
happiness is. And this also would be wonderful, that if
virtue were absent, there should be those who could teach
us what it is and give us a comprehension of it, while if
vice were not extant, it should be impossible to have any
understanding of it. For see what these men persuade us
who philosophize against the conceptions,—that by folly
indeed we comprehend prudence, but prudence without
folly cannot so much as comprehend folly itself.
Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by. William W. Goodwin, PH. D. Boston. Little, Brown, and Company. Cambridge. Press Of John Wilson and son. 1874. 4.
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