ii FORTITUDE 273 



also is rejected, in spite of her claim to be absolutely 

 just ; as all things are ultimately or really one, no part 

 of the world, she claims, should be treated as more 

 worthy or unworthy than another, and fortune regards 

 all equally, or does not respect any particular person 

 more than another, which is really justice ! 



To the place for which these have striven succeeds Courage. 

 Fortitude, the servant of the higher virtues : " Constant 

 and brave must be he that administers judgment, with 

 prudence, by the law, and according to truth. He 

 shall be guided by the book in which is the catalogue 

 of the things the brave man ought not to fear, viz. : 

 those which do not make him worse, as hunger, 

 nakedness, thirst, pain, poverty, solitude, persecution, 

 death ; and that of other things which, as they make 

 him worse, must be avoided at all cost, gross ignor- 

 ance, injustice, infidelity, lying, avarice, and the rest. 1 

 Beside Fortitude may be placed Simplicity? between simplicity, 

 the vicious extremes of Boastfulness on the one hand 

 and Dissimulation on the other, the latter being the 

 less hateful of the two : " sometimes even the gods 

 must make use of it, and to escape envy, reproach, 

 outrage, Prudence is wont to cover Truth with her 

 vestments." Simplicity is pleasing to the gods, for it 

 has in a manner the likeness of the divine countenance, Seif-con- 

 being always the same and unconscious of itself. That 

 which reflects upon or is conscious of itself, makes itself 

 in a sense to be many, to be other and other, becoming 

 both object and faculty, the knowing and the knowable, 

 whereas in the act of intelligence many things concur in 

 one. The most simple intelligence does not know itself, 

 by reflection, because it is absolute, pure light : and again 

 it alone knows itself, negatively, for it cannot be hidden. 3 



1 Lag. p. 487, 488. 2 P. 49Z (Cassiopoeia). 3 P. 493. 



T 



sciousness. 



