Not so we. While treating our own concerns with the greatest indifference, ignorance, and neglect, we begin discussing other people’s pedigrees—how our neighbour’s grandfather was a Syrian and his grandmother a Thracian. ‘So-and-So owes more than seven hundred pounds, and cannot pay the interest.’ We also make it our business to inquire about such matters as where So-and-So got his wife from, and what private talk was that between A and B in the corner. Socrates, on the other [Sidenote: C] hand, went about inquiring, ‘By what arguments did Pythagoras carry conviction?’ So Aristippus, when he met Ischomachus at Olympia, proceeded to ask by what kind of conversation Socrates affected the Athenians as he did. When he had gleaned a few seeds or samples of his talk, he was so moved that he suffered a physical collapse, and became quite pale and thin. In the end he set sail for Athens, and slaked his thirst with draughts from the fountain-head, studying the man, his discourses and his philosophy, of which the aim was to recognize one’s own vices and get rid of them. But there are some to whom their own life is a most distressing [Sidenote: D] spectacle, and who therefore cannot bear to look at it nor to reflect the light of reason upon themselves. Their soul is so fraught with all manner of vices, that, shuddering with horror at what lies within, it darts away from home, and goes prowling round other men’s concerns, where it lets its malice batten and grow fat. It often happens that a domestic fowl, though there is plenty of food lying at its disposal, will slink into a corner and scratch _Where so appeareth, mayhap, one barley-grain in a dunghill._