[50] But in Milcah he marries a queen, not a ruler of men or perhaps cities, but one who merely bears the same name with a different meaning. For just as heaven, being the best and greatest of created things, may be rightly called the king of the world of our senses, so the knowledge of heaven, which the star-gazers and the Chaldaeans especially pursue, may be called the queen of sciences.
[51] Milcah, then, is the legitimate wife, but the concubine is she who sees one thing of what is, though it be but the meanest of all. Now to see the best, that is the truly existing, is the lot of the best of races, Israel, for Israel means seeing God. The race or kind that strives for the second place sees the second best, that is the heaven of our senses, and therein the well-ordered host of the stars, the choir that moves to the fullest and truest music.
[52] Third are the sceptics, who do not concern themselves with the best things in nature, whether perceived by the senses or the mind, but spend themselves on petty quibbles and trifling disputes. These are the housemates of Reumah, who “sees something,” even the smallest, men incapable of the quest for the better things which might bring profit to their lives.
[53] In the case of physicians what is called word-medicine is far removed from assistance to the sick, for diseases are cured by drugs and surgery and prescriptions of diet, but not with words; and so too in philosophy there are men who are merely word-mongers and word-hunters, who neither wish nor practise to cure their life, brimful of infirmities as it is, but from their earliest years to extreme old age contend in battles of argument and battles of syllables and blush not to do so. They act as though happiness depended on the endless fruitless hypercriticism of words as such, instead of on establishing on a better basis character, the fount of human life, by expelling the vices from its borders and planting there the virtues as settlers in their stead.