not walk on four legs? We might as well call the horse unhappy
because it does not learn grammar or eat cakes. No creature is unhappy,
if it lives according to its nature. The sciences were invented to our
utmost destruction; far from conducing to our happiness, they are even
in its way, though for its sake they are supposed to have been invented.
By the agency of evil demons they have stolen into human life with the
other pests. For did not the simple-minded people of the Golden Age live
happily, unprovided with any science, only led by nature and instinct?
What did they want grammar for, when all spoke the same language? Why
have dialectics, when there were no quarrels and no differences of
opinion? Why jurisprudence, when there were no bad morals from which
good laws sprang? They were too religious to investigate with impious
curiosity the secrets of nature, the size, motions, influence of the
stars, the hidden cause of things.

It is the old idea, which germinated in antiquity, here lightly touched
upon by Erasmus, afterwards proclaimed by Rousseau in bitter earnest:
civilization is a plague.

Wisdom is misfortune, but self-conceit is happiness. Grammarians, who
wield the sceptre of wisdom--schoolmasters, that is--would be the most
wretched of all people if I, Folly, did not mitigate the discomforts of
their miserable calling by a sort of sweet frenzy. But what holds good
of schoolmasters, also holds good of poets, orators, authors. For them,
too, all happiness merely consists in vanity and delusion. The lawyers
are no better off and after them come the philosophers. Next there is a
numerous procession of clergy: divines, monks, bishops, cardinals,
popes, only interrupted by princes and courtiers.

In the chapters[12] which review these offices and callings, satire has
shifted its ground a little. Throughout the work two themes are
intertwined: that of salutary folly, which is true wisdom, and that of
deluded wisdom, which is pure folly. As they are both put into the mouth
of Folly, we should have to invert them both to get truth, if Folly ...
were not wisdom. Now it is clear that the first is the principal theme.
Erasmus starts from it; and he returns to it. Only in the middle, as he
reviews human accomplishments and dignities in their universal
foolishness, the second theme predominates and the book becomes an
ordinary satire on human folly, of which there are many though few are
so delicate. But in the other p