How men,
whose plentiful fortunes allow them leisure to improve their
understandings, can satisfy themselves with a lazy ignorance, I cannot
tell: but methinks they have a low opinion of their souls, who lay out
all their incomes in provisions for the body, and employ none of it to
procure the means and helps of knowledge; who take great care to
appear always in a neat and splendid outside, and would think
themselves miserable in coarse clothes, or a patched coat, and yet
contentedly suffer their minds to appear abroad in a piebald livery of
coarse patches and borrowed shreds, such as it has pleased chance,
or their country tailor (I mean the common opinion of those they
have conversed with) to clothe them in. I will not here mention how
unreasonable this is for men that ever think of a future state, and
their concernment in it, which no rational man can avoid to do
sometimes: nor shall I take notice what a shame and confusion it is to
the greatest contemners of knowledge, to be found ignorant in things
they are concerned to know. But this at least is worth the
consideration of those who call themselves gentlemen, That, however
they may think credit, respect, power, and authority the
concomitants of their birth and fortune, yet they will find all
these still carried away from them by men of lower condition, who
surpass them in knowledge.
Pages:
1053
1054
1055
1056
1057
1058
1059
1060
1061
1062
1063
1064
1065
1066
1067
1068
1069
1070
1071
1072
1073
1074
1075
1076
1077