Discourses: Book 1 26 : 3

Once when he had disconcerted the student who was reading the hypothetical arguments, and the one who had set the other the passage to read laughed at him, Epictetus said to the latter, "You are laughing at yourself. You did not give the young man a preliminary training, nor discover whether he was able to follow these arguments, but you treat him merely as a reader. Why is it, then," he added, "that to a mind unable to follow a judgement upon a complex argument we entrust the assigning of praise or blame, or the passing of a judgement upon what is done well or ill? If such a person speaks ill of another, does the man in question pay any attention to him, or if he praises another, is the latter elated? when the one who is dispensing praise or blame is unable, in matters as trivial as these, to find the logical consequence? This, then, is a starting point in philosophy—a perception of the state of one's own governing principle; for when once a man realizes that it is weak, he will no longer wish to employ it upon great matters. But as it is, some who are unable to swallow the morsel buy a whole treatise and set to work to eat that. Consequently they throw up, or have indigestion; after that come colics and fluxes and fevers. But they ought first to have considered whether they have the requisite capacity. However, in a matter of theory it is easy enough to confute the man who does not know, but in the affairs of life a man does not submit himself to confutation, and we hate the person who has confuted us. But Socrates used to tell us not to live a life unsubjected to examination.