This paragraph begins with an allusion to the stoic view that man's true good depends not on what happens to him but on his own state of mind, which remains in his power. Historically this view was the ethical consequence of the sceptical contention, to which folly goes on to refer, that we cannot know the true world. Although there is a clear distinction between the stoics and the academicians or sceptics, the sixteenth century very often confused the two, powerfully assisted by Cicero who makes Pyrrho, the most important sceptic, sound like an exaggerated stoic. Folly is here drawing on Cicero's De Oratore (I, 10).