IV.
Parables of Barlaam
For some reason or other, which has never yet been fully investigated, there is nothing so irritating to humanity, nothing so boring, as the inculcation to morality. "Whether it is that we feel instinctively that we know what is right even if we do not do it, and therefore need not be told it, or whether we resent being told by another, who thereby lays claim to greater moral insight than ourselves, the result is certain, nothing makes people feel so wicked as moral exhortations. Nowadays the moralists know this; formerly they only suspected it. So in former days they invented the Parable so as to administer the moral pill in the story jam.
Greece and India, I have shown elsewhere, each invented separately the Fable as a means
