Montaigne, the Education of Children (Volume 15) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899. Excerpt: ... OF EXPERIENCE. Book III, Chapter XIII. Philosophers, with good reason, send ns back to the rules of nature, but they themGo back to selves have nothing to do with nature for such sublime knowledge. They wisdom. misrepresent and show us her face painted with too high and too sophisticated a colour, for which reason we have so many portraits of so uniform a subject. As philosophy has given us feet with which to walk, so she has given us prudence to guide us in life; not such an ingenious, robust, and majestic a prudence as that of their invention, but one that is easy, quiet, and healthful. It very well performs the promises to him who has the good fortune to know how to apply it sincerely and regularly--that is to say, according to nature. The more simply a man commits himself to nature, the more-wisely. Oh, what soft, easy, and wholesome pillows are ignorance and indifference whereon to lay a well-made head I would rather understand myself well in myself than in Cicero. I have had enough experience to make me wise, if I Avere only a good scholar. Any one who will recall an instance of anger, and who remembers the fever that transformed him, will realize the deformity better than in Aristotle, and will conceive a more just hatred of it. Whoever will remember the dangers he has escaped, those that threaten him, and the slight occasions that have removed him from one condition to another, will by that means prepare himself for future changes, and give him a knowledge of his state. The life of Caesar himself is no greater example than our own; both popular and imperial, it is still a life to which all human accidents may refer.... In my childhood what they had to correct me for most often was my refusal of those things which children commonly Children shoul...