_Dis._ “O, wise master, we have often heard you repeat that true philosophy was the science that taught all the virtues, and the only earthly riches that never left their possessor in want. Your words have excited in us a great desire to possess this treasure. We wish to know where the teaching of philosophy will lead us, and by what steps we may attain to it. But our age is weak and without your help we shall not be able to mount these steps.” _Master._ “It will be easy to show you the way of wisdom, provided you seek it purely for God’s sake to preserve the purity of your own soul, and for the love of virtue; if you love it for its own sake, and do not seek in it any worldly honour and glory or, still less, riches or pleasure.” _Dis._ “Master, raise us up from the earth where our ignorance now detains us, lead us to those heights of science where you passed your own early years. For if we may listen to the fables of the poets, they would seem to tell us that the sciences are the true banquets of the gods.” _Master._ “We read of Wisdom, which is spoken of by the mouth of Solomon, that she built herself a house and hewed out seven pillars. Now, although these pillars represent the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost and the seven Sacraments of the Church, we may also discern in them the _seven liberal arts_, grammar, rhetoric, dialects, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, which are like so many steps on which philosophers expend their labours, and have obtained the honours of eternal renown.”