The Essays, vol 5 | Page 8

not performed its office unless it have altered the form and condition of
what was committed to it to concoct. Our minds work only upon trust,
when bound and compelled to follow the appetite of another's fancy,
enslaved and captivated under the authority of another's instruction; we
have been so subjected to the trammel, that we have no free, nor natural
pace of our own; our own vigour and liberty are extinct and gone:
"Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt."
["They are ever in wardship."--Seneca, Ep., 33.]
I was privately carried at Pisa to see a very honest man, but so great an
Aristotelian, that his most usual thesis was: "That the touchstone and
square of all solid imagination, and of all truth, was an absolute
conformity to Aristotle's doctrine; and that all besides was nothing but
inanity and chimera; for that he had seen all, and said all." A position,
that for having been a little too injuriously and broadly interpreted,
brought him once and long kept him in great danger of the Inquisition

at Rome.
Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads,
and lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust.
Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to him, than those
of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded
to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not, he
will remain in doubt.
"Che non men the saver, dubbiar m' aggrata."
["I love to doubt, as well as to know."--Dante, Inferno, xi. 93]
for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own
reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who follows
another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after
nothing.
"Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet."
["We are under no king; let each vindicate himself." --Seneca, Ep.,33]
Let him, at least, know that he knows. It will be necessary that he
imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts;
and no matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know
how to apply it to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every
one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks
them after: 'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since
both he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several
sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they
find them, but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and
purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several
fragments he borrows from others, he will transform and shuffle
together to compile a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to
say, his judgment: his instruction, labour and study, tend to nothing else
but to form that. He is not obliged to discover whence he got the
materials that have assisted him, but only to produce what he has
himself done with them. Men that live upon pillage and borrowing,

expose their purchases and buildings to every one's view: but do not
proclaim how they came by the money. We do not see the fees and
perquisites of a gentleman of the long robe; but we see the alliances
wherewith he fortifies himself and his family, and the titles and
honours he has obtained for him and his. No man divulges his revenue;
or, at least, which way it comes in but every one publishes his
acquisitions. The advantages of our study are to become better and
more wise. 'Tis, says Epicharmus, the understanding that sees and hears,
'tis the understanding that improves everything, that orders everything,
and that acts, rules, and reigns: all other faculties are blind, and deaf,
and without soul. And certainly we render it timorous and servile, in
not allowing it the liberty and privilege to do anything of itself.
Whoever asked his pupil what he thought of grammar and rhetoric, or
of such and such a sentence of Cicero? Our masters stick them, full
feathered, in our memories, and there establish them like oracles, of
which the letters and syllables are of the substance of the thing. To
know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain
what one has intrusted to our memory. That which a man rightly knows
and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty,
without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling
over the leaves of his book. A mere bookish learning is a poor, paltry
learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no foundation for
any superstructure to be built upon it, according to