on; 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 meanin