“In the name of the graces” (mark this expression well), “was not Protagoras a very skillful man, who showed his thought only in riddles to us common folk?” In the name of the Graces. The grace of truth is to be veiled. Or the grace of the mind is to be veiled. All graces are veiled. None are naked, — though beauty may be. The wise have always spoken in riddles, and the riddles of a moment are a great means of instruction; we love the instruction that results from them because we have produced it. The answer belongs to the reader who has sought it, as to the author who has placed it. Any naked, rough truth has not passed enough through the soul, has not rolled enough in our head; intelligence has not purified it enough, nor the heart soaked it enough in its juices, nor the imagination adorned it enough in its liveries. The mind has done no more than hew or square it like a piece of wood the first hand has roughed out. Truth, or rather the matter in which it is found, must be handled and handled again until it becomes clarity, air, light, form, color, etc. Everything we say must be tinged with us, with our soul; this operation is long, but it immortalizes everything.

Add. — When one says of a proposition, “There is some truth in that,” one is surely speaking of an imperfect proposition in which truth has not been sufficiently freed from every useless admixture; unless it is a question of those phrases in which one has wished rather to make one think of truth without dwelling on it than to express it and bring it into view.