Thus fear and other perturbations are evils.

Therefore, as constancy proceeds from knowledge, so does perturbation from error.

Now, they who are said to be naturally inclined to anger, or to pity, or to envy, or to any feeling of this kind, their minds are constitutionally, as it were, in bad health; yet they are curable, as the disposition of Socrates is said to have been; for when Zopyrus, who professed to know the character of every one from his person, had heaped a great many vices on him in a public assembly, he was laughed at by others, who could perceive no such vices in Socrates; but Socrates kept him in countenance by declaring that such vices were natural to him, but that he had got the better of them by his reason.

Therefore, as any one who has the appearance of the best constitution may yet appear to be naturally rather inclined to some particular disorder, so different minds may be more particularly inclined to different diseases.

But as to those men who are said to be vicious, not by nature, but their own fault, their vices proceed from wrong opinions of good and bad things, so that one is more prone than another to different motions and perturbations.