1. From their birth, men exercise their senses, earlier than their
intelligence,[106] and they are by necessity forced to direct their
attention to sense-objects. Some stop there, and spend their life
without progressing further. They consider suffering as evil, and
pleasure as the good, judging it to be their business to avoid the one
and encompass the other. That is the content of wisdom for those of
them that pride themselves on being reasonable; like those heavy birds
who, having weighted themselves down by picking up too much from the
earth, cannot take flight, though by nature provided with wings. There
are others who have raised themselves a little above earthly objects
because their soul, endowed with a better nature, withdraws from
pleasures to seek something higher;[107] but as they are not capable
of arriving at contemplation of the intelligible, and as, after having
left our lower region here, they do not know where to lodge, they
return to a conception of morality which considers virtue to consist
in these common-place actions and occupations whose narrow sphere they
had at first attempted to leave behind. Finally a third kind is that
of those divine men who are endowed with a piercing vision, and whose
penetrating glance contemplates the splendor of the intelligible world,
and rise unto it, taking their flight above the clouds and darkness of
this world. Then, full of scorn for terrestrial things, they remain up
there, and reside in their true fatherland with the unspeakable bliss
of the man who, after long journeys, is at last repatriated.