[63] We have now to the best of our ability described the mating of the reason which yearns to see and learn with the faculties both of the lawful and the concubine type. We must now continue the thread of our discourse by examining the words which follow. Abraham, it says, “hearkened to the voice of Sarah” (Gen. 16:2), for the learner must needs obey the commands of virtue.
[64] Yet not all do obey, only those in whom the strong longing for knowledge has become ingrained. Hardly a day passes but the lecture-halls and theatres are filled with philosophers discoursing at length, stringing together without stopping to take breath their disquisitions on virtue.
[65] Yet what profit is there in their talk? For instead of attending, the audience dismiss their minds elsewhither, some occupied with thoughts of voyaging and trading, some with their farming and its returns, others with honours and civic life, others on the profits they get from their particular trade and business, others with the vengeance they hope to wreak on their enemies, others with the enjoyments of their amorous passions, the class of thought in fact differing with the class of person. Thus, as far as what is being demonstrated is concerned, they are deaf, and while they are present in the body are absent in mind, and might as well be images or statues.
[66] And any who do attend sit all the time merely hearing, and when they depart they remember nothing that has been said, and in fact their object in coming was to please their sense of hearing rather than to gain any profit; thus their soul is unable to conceive or bring to the birth, but the moment the cause which stirred up pleasure is silent their attention is extinguished too.
[67] There is a third class, who carry away an echo of what has been said, but prove to be sophists rather than philosophers. The words of these deserve praise, but their lives censure, for they are capable of saying the best, but incapable of doing it.
[68] Rarely then shall we find one who combines attention, memory and the valuing of deeds before words, which three things are vouched for in the case of Abraham, the lover of learning, in the phrase “He hearkened to the voice of Sarah,” for he is represented not as hearing, but as hearkening, a word which exactly expresses assent and obedience.
[69] There is a point, too, in the addition “to the voice,” instead of “he hearkened to Sarah speaking.” For it is a characteristic mark of the learner that he listens to a voice and to words, since by these only is he taught whereas he who acquires the good through practice, and not through teaching, fixes his attention not on what is said, but on those who say it, and imitates their life as shewn in the blamelessness of their successive actions.
[70] Thus we read in the case of Jacob, when he was sent to marry into his mother’s family, “Jacob heard his father and mother, and went to Mesopotamia” (Gen. 28:7). “Heard them,” it says, not their voice or words, for the practiser must be the imitator of a life, not the hearer of words, since the latter is the characteristic mark of the recipient of teaching, and the former of the strenuous self-exerciser. Thus this text too is meant as a lesson to us that we may realize the difference between a learner and a practiser, how the course of one is determined by what a person says, the other by the person himself.