g to them; and if they
hear speak of God, it breeds more terror than awful fear.

Whence spring all these abuses, if not from the disastrous inequality
introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the cheapening of
virtue?[163] People no longer ask of a man whether he has probity, but
whether he is clever; nor of a book whether it is useful, but whether it
is well written. And after all, what is this philosophy, what are these
lessons of wisdom, to which we give the prize of enduring fame? To
listen to these sages, would you not take them for a troop of
charlatans, all bawling out in the market-place, Come to me, it is only
I who never cheat you, and always give good measure? One maintains that
there is no body, and that everything is mere representation; the other
that there is no entity but matter, and no God but the universe: one
that moral good and evil are chimeras; the other that men are wolves and
may devour one another with the easiest conscience in the world. These
are the marvellous personages on whom the esteem of contemporaries is
lavished so long as they live, and to whom immortality is reserved after
their death. And we have now invented the art of making their
extravagances eternal, and thanks to the use of typographic characters
the dangerous speculations of Hobbes and Spinoza will endure for ever.
Surely when they perceive the terrible disorders which printing has
already caused in Europe, sovereigns will take as much trouble to
banish this deadly art from their states as they once took to
introduce it.

If there is perhaps no harm in allowing one or two men to give
themselves up to the study of sciences and arts, it is only those who
feel conscious of the strength required for advancing their subjects,
who have any right to attempt to raise monuments to the glory of the
human mind. We ought to have no tolerance for those compilers who rashly
break open the gate of the sciences, and introduce into their sanctuary
a populace that is unworthy even to draw near to it. It may be well that
there should be philosophers, provided only and always that the people
do not meddle with philosophising.[164]

In short, there are two kinds of ignorance: one brutal and ferocious,
springing from a bad heart, multiplying vices, degrading the reason, and
debasing the soul: the other "a reasonable ignorance, which consists in
limiting our curiosity to the extent of the faculties we have received;
a modest ignor