reason, send us back to the rules of nature;
but they have nothing to do with so sublime a knowledge; they falsify
them, and present us her face painted with too high and too adulterate a
complexion, whence spring so many different pictures of so uniform a
subject. As she has given us feet to walk with, so has she given us
prudence to guide us in life: not so ingenious, robust, and pompous a
prudence as that of their invention; but yet one that is easy, quiet, and
salutary, and that very well performs what the other promises, in him who
has the good luck to know how to employ it sincerely and regularly, that
is to say, according to nature. The most simply to commit one's self to
nature is to do it most wisely. Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome
pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered
head!

I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero. Of the
experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but
a good scholar: whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger,
and to what a degree that fever transported him, will see the deformity
of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceive a more just hatred
against it; whoever will remember the ills he has undergone, those that
have threatened him, and the light occasions that have removed him from
one state to another, will by that prepare himself for future changes,
and the knowledge of his condition. The life of Caesar has no greater
example for us than our own: though popular and of command, 'tis still a
life subject to all human accidents. Let us but listen to it; we apply
to ourselves all whereof we have principal need; whoever shall call to
memory how many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment,
is he not a great fool if he does not ever after suspect it? When I find
myself convinced, by the reason of another, of a false opinion, I do not
so much learn what he has said to me that is new and the particular
ignorance--that would be no great acquisition--as, in general, I learn my
own debility and the treachery of my understanding, whence I extract the
reformation of the whole mass. In all my other errors I do the same, and
find from this rule great utility to life; I regard not the species and
individual as a stone that I have stumbled at; I learn to suspect my
steps throughout, and am careful to place them right. To learn that a
man has said or done a foolish thing is n