2. The stronger ground of objection to them was their unreality. They had lost touch with life. They had made philosophy itself seem unreal. “They are not philosophers, but fiddlers,” said the sturdy old Stoic Musonius.[190] It is not necessary to suppose that they were all charlatans. There was then, as now, the irrepressible young man of good morals who wished to air his opinions. But the tendency to moralize had become divorced from practice. They preached, not because they were in grim earnest about the reformation of the world, but because preaching was a respectable profession, and the listening to sermons a fashionable diversion. “The mass of men,” says Plutarch,[191] “enjoy and admire a philosopher when he is discoursing about their neighbours; but if the philosopher, leaving their neighbours alone, speaks his mind about things that are of importance to the men themselves, they take offence and vote him a bore; for they think that they ought to listen to a philosopher in his lecture-room in the same bland way that they listen to tragedians in the theatre. This, as might be expected, is what happens to them in regard to the sophists; for when a sophist gets down from his pulpit and puts aside his MSS., in the real business of life he seems but a small man, and under the thumb of the majority. They do not understand about real philosophers that both seriousness and play, grim looks and smiles, and above all the direct personal application of what they say to each individual, have a useful result for those who are in the habit of giving a patient attention to them.” * * * * * Against this whole system of veneering rhetoric with philosophy, there was a strong reaction. Apart from the early Christian writers, with whom “sophist” is always a word of scorn, there were men, especially among the new school of Stoics, who were at open war with its unreality.[192] I will ask you to listen to the expostulation which the great moral reformer Epictetus addresses to a rhetorician who came to him: “First of all, tell yourself what you want to be and then act accordingly. For this is what we see done in almost all other cases. Men who are practising for the games first of all decide what they mean to be, and then proceed to do the things that follow from their decision.... So then when you say, Come and listen to my lecture, first of all consider whether your action be not thrown away for want of an end, and then consider whether it be not a mistake, on account of your real end being a wrong one. Suppose I ask a man, ‘Do you wish to do good by your expounding, or to gain applause?’ Thereupon straightway you hear him saying, ‘What do I care for the applause of the multitude?’ And his sentiment is right: for in the same way, applause is nothing to the musician _quâ_ musician, or to the geometrician _quâ_ geometrician.