Let us hope that those nations with more intelligence and refined feelings will make a beginning, and then by force of example induce the Germans to do the same.[8] Meanwhile, hear what Thomas Hood says of them (Up the Rhine):  “For a musical people they are the most noisy I ever met with” That they are so is not due to their being more prone to making a noise than other people, but to their insensibility, which springs from obtuseness; they are not disturbed by it in reading or thinking, because they do not think; they only smoke, which is their substitute for thought.  The general toleration of unnecessary noise, for instance, of the clashing of doors, which is so extremely ill-mannered and vulgar, is a direct proof of the dulness and poverty of thought that one meets with everywhere.  In Germany it seems as though it were planned that no one should think for noise; take the inane drumming that goes on as an instance.  Finally, as far as the literature treated of in this chapter is concerned, I have only one work to recommend, but it is an excellent one:  I mean a poetical epistle in terzo rimo by the famous painter Bronzino, entitled “De’ Romori:  a Messer Luca Martini” It describes fully and amusingly the torture to which one is put by the many kinds of noises of a small Italian town.  It is written in tragicomic style.  This epistle is to be found in Opere burlesche del Berni, Aretino ed altri, vol. ii. p. 258, apparently published in Utrecht in 1771.

The nature of our intellect is such that ideas are said to spring by abstraction from observations, so that the latter are in existence before the former.  If this is really what takes place, as is the case with a man who has merely his own experience as his teacher and book, he knows quite well which of his observations belong to and are represented by each of his ideas; he is perfectly acquainted with both, and accordingly he treats everything correctly that comes before his notice.  We might call this the natural mode of education.

On the other hand, an artificial education is having one’s head crammed full of ideas, derived from hearing others talk, from learning and reading, before one has anything like an extensive knowledge of the world as it is and as one sees it.  The observations which produce all these ideas are said to come later on with experience; but until then these ideas are applied wrongly, and accordingly both things and men are judged wrongly, seen wrongly, and treated wrongly.  And so it is that education perverts the mind; and this is why, after a long spell of learning and reading, we enter the world, in our youth, with views that are partly simple, partly perverted; consequently we comport ourselves with an air of anxiety at one time, at another of presumption.  This is because our head is full of ideas which we are now trying to make use of, but almost always apply wrongly.  This is the result of [Greek:  hysteron proteron] (putting