wresting them, he thereby produced the most beautiful effects of our soul:  he presents it neither elevated nor rich; he only represents it sound, but assuredly with a brisk and full health.  By these common and natural springs, by these ordinary and popular fancies, without being moved or put out, he set up not only the most regular, but the most high and vigorous beliefs, actions, and manners that ever were.  ’Tis he who brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies.  See him plead before his judges; observe by what reasons he rouses his courage to the hazards of war; with what arguments he fortifies his patience against calumny, tyranny, death, and the perverseness of his wife:  you will find nothing in all this borrowed from arts and sciences:  the simplest may there discover their own means and strength; ’tis not possible more to retire or to creep more low.  He has done human nature a great kindness in showing it how much it can do of itself.

We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another’s than of our own.  Man can in nothing fix himself to his actual necessity:  of pleasure, wealth, and power, he grasps at more than he can hold; his greediness is incapable of moderation.  And I find that in curiosity of knowing he is the same; he cuts himself out more work than he can do, and more than he needs to do:  extending the utility of knowledge to the full of its matter: 

     “Ut omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque, intemperantia laboramus.”

     ["We carry intemperance into the study of literature, as well as
     into everything else.”—­Seneca, Ep., 106.]

And Tacitus had reason to commend the mother of Agricola for having restrained her son in his too violent appetite for learning.

Tis a good, if duly considered, which has in it, as the other goods of men have, a great deal of vanity and weakness, proper and natural to itself, and that costs very dear.  Its acquisition is far more hazardous than that of all other meat or drink; for, as to other things, what we have bought we carry home in some vessel, and there have full leisure to examine our purchase, how much we shall eat or drink of it, and when:  but sciences we can, at the very first, stow into no other vessel than the soul; we swallow them in buying, and return from the market, either already infected or amended:  there are some that only burden and overcharge the stomach, instead of nourishing; and, moreover, some that, under colour of curing, poison us.  I have been pleased, in places where I have been, to see men in devotion vow ignorance as well as chastity, poverty, and penitence:  ’tis also a gelding of our unruly appetites, to blunt this cupidity that spurs us on to the study of books, and to deprive the soul of this voluptuous complacency that tickles us with the opinion of knowledge:  and ’tis plenarily to accomplish the vow of poverty, to add unto it that of the mind.  We need little doctrine to live at our ease; and Socrates teaches us that this is in us, and the way how to find it, and the manner how to use it:  All our sufficiency which exceeds the natural is well-nigh superfluous and vain:  ’tis much if it does not rather burden and cumber us than do us good: