ans by improved codices, that we might make
royal roads, by which our scholars in time to come might attain without
stumbling to any science.

CHAPTER XIII

WHY WE HAVE NOT WHOLLY NEGLECTED THE FABLES OF THE POETS

All the varieties of attack directed against the poets by the lovers of
naked truth may be repelled by a two-fold defence: either that even in
an unseemly subject-matter we may learn a charming fashion of speech,
or that where a fictitious but becoming subject is handled, natural or
historical truth is pursued under the guise of allegorical fiction.

Although it is true that all men naturally desire knowledge, yet they
do not all take the same pleasure in learning. On the contrary, when
they have experienced the labour of study and find their senses
wearied, most men inconsiderately fling away the nut, before they have
broken the shell and reached the kernel. For man is naturally fond of
two things, namely, freedom from control and some pleasure in his
activity; for which reason no one without reason submits himself to the
control of others, or willingly engages in any tedious task. For
pleasure crowns activity, as beauty is a crown to youth, as Aristotle
truly asserts in the tenth book of the Ethics. Accordingly the wisdom
of the ancients devised a remedy by which to entice the wanton minds of
men by a kind of pious fraud, the delicate Minerva secretly lurking
beneath the mask of pleasure. We are wont to allure children by
rewards, that they may cheerfully learn what we force them to study
even though they are unwilling. For our fallen nature does not tend to
virtue with the same enthusiasm with which it rushes into vice. Horace
has expressed this for us in a brief verse of the Ars Poetica, where he
says:

All poets sing to profit or delight.

And he has plainly intimated the same thing in another verse of the
same book, where he says:

He hits the mark, who mingles joy with use.

How many students of Euclid have been repelled by the Pons Asinorum, as
by a lofty and precipitous rock, which no help of ladders could enable
them to scale! THIS IS A HARD SAYING, they exclaim, AND WHO CAN
RECEIVE IT. The child of inconstancy, who ended by wishing to be
transformed into an ass, would perhaps never have given up the study of
philosophy, if he had met him in friendly guise veiled under the cloak
of pleasure; but anon, astonished by Crato's chair and struck dumb by
his endless questions,