This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom has covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not destined to fatuous research.  All the secrets that Nature hides from us are so many evils against which she would fain shelter us.

Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really inconsistent with one another?  These sounding contrasts are mere deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the results of induction from history.  Astronomy, for instance, is born of superstition; geometry from the desire of gain; physics from a futile curiosity; all of them, even morals, from human pride.  Are we for ever to be the dupes of words, and to believe that these pompous names of science, philosophy, and the rest, stand for worthy and profitable realities?[161] Be sure that they do not.

How many errors do we pass through on our road to truth, errors a thousandfold more dangerous than truth is useful?  And by what marks are we to know truth, when we think that we have found it?  And above all, if we do find it, who of us can be sure that he will make good use of it?  If celestial intelligences cultivated science, only good could result; and we may say as much of great men of the stamp of Socrates, who are born to be the guides of others.[162] But the intelligences of common men are neither celestial nor Socratic.

Again, every useless citizen may be fairly regarded as a pernicious man; and let us ask those illustrious philosophers who have taught us what insects reproduce themselves curiously, in what ratio bodies attract one another in space, what curves have conjugate points, points of inflection or reflection, what in the planetary revolutions are the relations of areas traversed in equal times—­let us ask those who have attained all this sublime knowledge, by how much the worse governed, less flourishing, or less perverse we should have been if they had attained none of it?  Now if the works of our most scientific men and best citizens lead to such small utility, tell us what we are to think of the crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who devour the public substance in pure loss.

Then it is in the nature of things that devotion to art leads to luxury, and luxury, as we all know from our own experience, no less than from the teaching of history, saps not only the military virtues by which nations preserve their independence, but also those moral virtues which make the independence of a nation worth preserving.  Your children go to costly establishments where they learn everything except their duties.  They remain ignorant of their own tongue, though they will speak others not in use anywhere in the world; they gain the faculty of composing verses which they can barely understand; without capacity to distinguish truth from error, they possess the art of rendering them indistinguishable to others by specious arguments.  Magnanimity, equity, temperance, courage, humanity, have no real meaning to them; and if they hear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.