20 Oct My feeling changes, not my judgement. (MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE) | Part B’
But I know not how it happens (and yet it unquestionably does happen), that there is as much emptiness and weakness of understanding as in any other class of persons, in those who profess to have the most knowledge, who deal with lettered occupations, and with offices which have to do
with books and learning; either because more is demanded and expected from them than from the ignorant, and common faults cannot be excused in them; or because their belief in their knowledge makes them bolder to put themselves forward and lay themselves too open, whereby they betray and ruin themselves. Just as a craftsman manifests his lack of skill much more completely on a valuable material that he has in his hands, if he handles it and botches it stupidly and contrary to the rule of the trade, than on a worthless material.
I recur readily to discourse on the utility of our education: its aim has been to make us, not good men and wise, but learned; it has succeeded. It has not taught us to follow and embrace virtue and wisdom, but it has impressed on us their verbal derivation and etymology. We know how to decline virtue, if we do not know how to love it.
Our education has taught us the definitions, the divisions and the subdivisions of virtue, like the surnames and branches of a genealogy, without taking the further care to bring about any habit of intimacy and personal intercourse between us and it . It has chosen for our instruction, not the books which contain the soundest and truest opinions, but those which speak the purest Greek and Latin; and, amidst fine sayings, has poured into our imagination the idlest fancies of antiquity. A good education changes the judgement and the character; as happened to Polemo, that dissolute young Greek, who, having by chance gone to hear a lecture of Xenocrates, not only remarked the eloquence and ability of the lecturer, but carried home with him, not only learning of fine quality, but a more visible and more substantial fruit, which was the sudden change and improvement in his former life .
Who has ever felt such an effect from our education?
Should you not do what the converted Polemo did? Should you not lay aside the tokens of your disease, the leg- and the arm- and the neck-wrappings, as he is said to have slipped from his neck, unobserved, the wreaths, when, drunk, he was sharply reprimanded by the voice of a master who was fasting? (Horace)
The least contemptible kind of man seems to me to be that which, from its naturalness, has the lowest rank, and exhibits to us a more even intercourse. The characters and talk of peasants I find to be commonly more in accordance with the injunctions of true philosophy than are those of our
philosophers.
The common people are wiser because they are wise only so much as is needful.(Lactantius)
The Essays of Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
