Then I shall be able to tell which is best, and where I ought to buy.' Yet this is what you would do with the philosophies.

Why drain the cask when you might taste, and see?
-- How slippery you are; how you escape from one's fingers! Still, you have given me an advantage, and are in your own trap.
-- How so?
-- Thus! You take a common object known to every one, and make wine the figure of a thing which presents the greatest variety in itself, and about which all men are at variance, because it is an unseen and difficult thing.

I hardly know wherein philosophy and wine are alike unless it be in this, that the philosophers exchange their ware for money, like the wine-merchants; some of them with a mixture of water or worse, or giving short measure.

However, let us consider your parallel.

The wine in the cask, you say, is of one kind throughout.
But have the philosophers--has your own [165] master even--but one and the same thing only to tell you, every day and all days, on a subject so manifold?
Otherwise, how can you know the whole by the tasting of one part?
The whole is not the same--Ah! and it may be that God has hidden the good wine of philosophy at the bottom of the cask.