Complete. From “Resolves, Divine, Moral, and Political.”

LEARNING falls far short of wisdom. Nay, so far, that you shall scarcely find a greater fool than is sometimes a mere scholar; he will speak Greek to an ostler, and Latin familiarly to women who understand it not. Knowledge is the treasure of the mind; but discretion is the key to it, without which it is useless. The practical part of wisdom is the best. A native genius is beyond industrious study. Wisdom is no inheritance; no, not to the greatest clerks. Men commonly write more formally than they practice; and conversing only with books, they fall into affectation and pedantry. He who is made up of the press and the pen shall be sure to be ridiculous. Company and conversation are the best instructors for a noble behavior. What we learn in the study is mostly from imagination and fancy. And how airy must they needs be, who are composed wholly of the fumes, perhaps, of distempered brains! For if they have not judgment enough to amend their conversation, they may well want judgment to choose the worthiest authors. I grant they may know much; and I think any man may do so who hath but memory, and bestows some time in a library. There is a free nobleness of mind which some men are graced with, which far outshines the notions of the formal student; and some men speak more excellently even from nature’s self than can the scholar by all the strains of art. How fond and untunable are a freshman’s brawls, when we meet with him out of his college!—oftentimes with a long recited sentence quite out of the way; arguments about nothing, or at best niceties; as one would be of Martin’s religion, another of Luther’s, and so quarrel about their faith. How little invention is required to put false matter into a true syllogism:—O pueriles ineptias! in hoc supercilia subduximus? in hoc barbam dimisimus? Disputationes istæ, utinam tantum non prodessent; nocent. O most childish follies! is it for these we knit our brows, and stroke our beards? Would to God these disputations only did not profit us; they are hurtful. In discourse, give me a man who speaks reason rather than authors; sense, rather than a syllogism; his own, rather than another’s. He who is continually quoting from others argues a barrenness in himself which forces him to be ever a-borrowing; in the one, a man shows judgment; in the other, reading: and in my opinion it is a greater commendation to say that one is wise than that one is well read. So far I will honor knowledge, as to think that when it meets with an able nature in the mind it is of great advantage. Any man shall speak the better, when he knows what others have said; and sometimes the consciousness of his inward knowledge gives a confidence to his outward behavior which is, of all other things, the best to grace a man in his carriage.