HOW, ALTHOUGH WE PREFERRED THE WORKS OF THE ANCIENTS, WE HAVE NOT
CONDEMNED THE STUDIES OF THE MODERNS
Although the novelties of the moderns were never disagreeable to our
desires, who have always cherished with grateful affection those who
devote themselves to study and who add anything either ingenious or
useful to the opinions of our forefathers, yet we have always desired
with more undoubting avidity to investigate the well-tested labours of
the ancients. For whether they had by nature a greater vigour of
mental sagacity, or whether they perhaps indulged in closer application
to study, or whether they were assisted in their progress by both these
things, one thing we are perfectly clear about, that their successors
are barely capable of discussing the discoveries of their forerunners,
and of acquiring those things as pupils which the ancients dug out by
difficult efforts of discovery. For as we read that the men of old
were of a more excellent degree of bodily development than modern times
are found to produce, it is by no means absurd to suppose that most of
the ancients were distinguished by brighter faculties, seeing that in
the labours they accomplished of both kinds they are inimitable by
posterity. And so Phocas writes in the prologue to his Grammar:
Since all things have been said by men of sense
The only novelty is--to condense.
But in truth, if we speak of fervour of learning and diligence in
study, they gave up all their lives to philosophy; while nowadays our
contemporaries carelessly spend a few years of hot youth, alternating
with the excesses of vice, and when the passions have been calmed, and
they have attained the capacity of discerning truth so difficult to
discover, they soon become involved in worldly affairs and retire,
bidding farewell to the schools of philosophy. They offer the fuming
must of their youthful intellect to the difficulties of philosophy,
and bestow the clearer wine upon the money-making business of life.
Further, as Ovid in the first book of the De Vetula justly complains:
The hearts of all men after gold aspire;
Few study to be wise, more to acquire:
Thus, Science! all thy virgin charms are sold,
Whose chaste embraces should disdain their gold,
Who seek not thee thyself, but pelf through thee,
Longing for riches, not philosophy.
And further on:
Thus Philosophy is seen
Exiled, and Philopecuny is queen,
which is known to be the most violent poison of learning.
How the ancients indeed regarded life as the only limit of study, is
shown by Valerius, in his book addressed to Tiberius, by many examples.
Carneades, he says, was a laborious and lifelong soldier of wisdom:
after he had lived ninety years, the same day put an end to his life
and his philosophizing. Isocrates in his ninety-fourth year wrote a
most noble work. Sophocles did the same when nearly a hundred years
old. Simonides wrote poems in his eightieth year. Aulus Gellius did
not desire to live longer than he should be able to write, as he says
himself in the prologue to the Noctes Atticae.
The fervour of study which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus the
philosopher used to relate to incite young men to study, as Gellius
tells in the book we have mentioned. For the Athenians, hating the
people of Megara, decreed that if any of the Megarensians entered
Athens, he should be put to death. Then Euclid, who was a Megarensian,
and had attended the lectures of Socrates before this decree,
disguising himself in a woman's dress, used to go from Megara to Athens
by night to hear Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back.
Imprudent and excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of
geometry, who would not declare his name, nor lift his head from the
diagram he had drawn, by which he might have prolonged his life, but
thinking more of study than of life dyed with his life-blood the figure
he was studying.
There are very many such examples of our proposition, but the brevity
we aim at does not allow us to recall them. But, painful to relate,
the clerks who are famous in these days pursue a very different course.
Afflicted with ambition in their tender years, and slightly fastening
to their untried arms the Icarian wings of presumption, they
prematurely snatch the master's cap; and mere boys become unworthy
professors of the several faculties, through which they do not make
their way step by step, but like goats ascend by leaps and bounds; and,
having slightly tasted of the mighty stream, they think that they have
drunk it dry, though their throats are hardly moistened. And because
they are not grounded in the first rudiments at the fitting time, they
build a tottering edifice on an unstable foundation, and now that they
have grown up, they are ashamed to learn what they ought to have
learned while young, and thus they are compelled to suffer for ever for
too hastily jumping at dignities they have not deserved. For these and
the like reasons the tyros in the schools do not attain to the solid
learning of the ancients in a few short hours of study, although they
may enjoy distinctions, may be accorded titles, be authorized by
official robes, and solemnly installed in the chairs of the elders.
Just snatched from the cradle and hastily weaned, they mouth the rules
of Priscian and Donatus; while still beardless boys they gabble with
childish stammering the Categorics and Peri Hermeneias, in the writing
of which the great Aristotle is said to have dipped his pen in his
heart's blood. Passing through these faculties with baneful haste and
a harmful diploma, they lay violent hands upon Moses, and sprinkling
about their faces dark waters and thick clouds of the skies, they offer
their heads, unhonoured by the snows of age, for the mitre of the
pontificate. This pest is greatly encouraged, and they are helped to
attain this fantastic clericate with such nimble steps, by Papal
provisions obtained by insidious prayers, and also by the prayers,
which may not be rejected, of cardinals and great men, by the cupidity
of friends and relatives, who, building up Sion in blood, secure
ecclesiastical dignities for their nephews and pupils, before they are
seasoned by the course of nature or ripeness of learning.
Alas! by the same disease which we are deploring, we see that the
Palladium of Paris has been carried off in these sad times of ours,
wherein the zeal of that noble university, whose rays once shed light
into every corner of the world, has grown lukewarm, nay, is all but
frozen. There the pen of every scribe is now at rest, generations of
books no longer succeed each other, and there is none who begins to
take place as a new author. They wrap up their doctrines in unskilled
discourse, and are losing all propriety of logic, except that our
English subtleties, which they denounce in public, are the subject of
their furtive vigils.
Admirable Minerva seems to bend her course to all the nations of the
earth, and reacheth from end to end mightily, that she may reveal
herself to all mankind. We see that she has already visited the
Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and Greeks, the Arabs and the
Romans. Now she has passed by Paris, and now has happily come to
Britain, the most noble of islands, nay, rather a microcosm in itself,
that she may show herself a debtor both to the Greeks and to the
Barbarians. At which wondrous sight it is conceived by most men, that
as philosophy is now lukewarm in France, so her soldiery are unmanned
and languishing.