You will not, I believe, object to a prefatory remark upon [Sidenote: 38] the sense of hearing. Theophrastus asserts that it is the most susceptible of all the senses, inasmuch as nothing that can be seen, tasted, or touched, is the cause of such strong emotional disturbance and excitement as takes hold upon the mind when certain sounds of beating, clashing, or ringing fall upon the ear. It is, however, more rational, rather than more emotional, than the other senses. Vice can find many places and parts of the body open for it to enter and seize upon the soul. But the only hold that virtue can take is upon pure young ears [Sidenote: B] which have at all times been protected from the corruptions of flattery or the touch of low communications. Hence the advice of Xenocrates, that ear-guards should be worn by boys more than by athletes, inasmuch as the latter merely have their ears disfigured by blows, while the former have their characters disfigured by words. Not that he would wed us to inattention or deafness. It is but a warning to beware of wrong communications, and to see that others of the right nature have first been fostered in our character by philosophy and have mounted guard in that quarter which is most open to influence and persuasion.
Bias, the ancient sage, was once bidden by Amasis to send him that piece of meat from a sacrificial victim which was at the same time the best and the worst. He replied by taking out and sending the tongue, on the ground that speech can do both the greatest harm and the greatest good. It is a general practice in fondling little children to take them by the ears, and to bid [Sidenote: C] them do the same to us—an indirect and playful way of suggesting that we should be especially fond of those who make our ears the instruments to our advantage.
It is, of course, obvious that a youth cannot be debarred from any or every kind of hearing, or from tasting any discourse at all. Otherwise not only will he remain entirely without fruit or growth in the way of virtue; he will actually be perverted in the direction of vice, his mind being an idle and uncultivated patch producing a plentiful crop of weeds. Propensity to pleasure and dislike of labour—the springs of innumerable forms of trouble and disease—are not of external origin, nor imported [Sidenote: D] from teaching, but they well up naturally from the soil. If therefore they are left free to take their natural course; if they are not done away with, or turned aside, by sound instruction; if nature is not thus brought under control, man will prove more unreclaimed than any brute beast.