Learning and Business

⁴ Learning pretends to insinuate those particular seducements or indispositions of the mind for policy and government.

Learning ministers in all of them greater strength of medicine or remedy than it offers cause of indisposition or infirmity.

• By a secret operation it makes men perplexed and irresolute
• On the other side, by plain precept, it teaches them:
  • when and on what grounds to resolve
  • how to carry things in suspense, without prejudice, till they resolve.

If it makes men positive and regular, it teaches them:

• what things are in their nature demonstrative, and what are conjectural
• the use of distinctions and exceptions, as the latitude of principles and rules.

If it misleads by disproportion or dissimilarity of examples, it teaches men:

• the force of circumstances
• the errors of comparisons
• all the cautions of application

So that in all these it does rectify more effectually than it can pervert.

These medicines it conveys into men’s minds much more forcibly by the quickness and penetration of examples.

The errors of Clement 7th were so lively described by Guicciardini who served under him.

The errors of Cicero were written by his own pencil in his Epistles to Atticus.

These errors show how irresolute they were.

The errors of Phocion shows his being obstinate or inflexible.

The fable of Ixion shows him as vaporous or imaginative.

The errors of Cato 2nd shows how he will never be one of the Antipodes, to tread opposite to the present world.

⁵ Learning gives a conceit that:

• disposes men to leisure and privateness, and
• makes them slothful

It is strange that the learning which accustoms the mind to a perpetual motion and agitation should induce slothfulness.

Only the learned men love business for itself.

The rest just love it for profit.

Examples are hirelings that loves the work for the wages or for honour because:

• it bears them up in the eyes of men, and refreshes their reputation.
• it puts them in mind of their fortune and gives them occasion to pleasure and displeasure
• it exercises some faculty that they are proud of it advances any other their ends

It is an example of untrue valours: the valour of some men emerge from what is seen by others who judge by their own designs.

Only learned men love business as an action according to nature. To them, business is as agreeable to mental health just as exercise is to bodily health.

They take pleasure in the action itself, and not in the purchase.

This makes them the most untiring men in business.

⁶ A man who is laborious in reading and study but idle in business and action has:

• some weakness of body or
• softness of spirit.

Seneca says: Quidam tam sunt umbratiles, ut putent in turbido esse quicquid in luce est.

and not of learning: well may it be that such a point of a man’s nature may make him give himself to learning, but it is not learning that breedeth any such point in his nature.

⁷ People complain that learning takes up too much time or leisure.

I answer that the busiest man has many vacant times of leisure while he is waiting for the returns of business. This is unless he does not delegate or is unworthily ambitious to always meddle in things that may be better done by others.

Those leisurely times could either be spent in pleasure or in studies.

Demosthenes replied to his adversary Æschines, that was a man given to pleasure, and told him “That his orations did smell of the lamp.”

“Indeed,” said Demosthenes, “there is a great difference between the things that you and I do by lamp-light.”

Learning will not expel business. Rather, it will keep and defend the possession of the mind against idleness and pleasure, which otherwise at unawares may enter to the prejudice of both.

⁸ Some say that learning would undermine the reverence of laws and government. This is false.

Saying that a blind custom of obedience is a surer obligation than duty taught and understood, is to affirm that a blind man can walk better by a cane than a non-blind man walking by a light.

Learning makes the minds of men gentle, generous, manageable, and pliant to government.

Ignorance makes them churlish, thwart, and mutinous.

Most barbarous, rude, and unlearned times have been most subject to tumults, seditions, and changes.

⁹ Cato the Censor was well punished for his blasphemy against learning, in the same kind wherein he offended.

When he was past 60 years old, he wanted to go to school again and learn Greek.

So he read the Greek authors. It proved that his former censure of Greek learning was rather an affected gravity, than according to the inward sense of his own opinion.

As for Virgil’s verses, though it pleased him to brave the world in taking to the Romans the art of empire, and leaving to others the arts of subjects, yet so much is manifest—that the Romans never ascended to that height of empire till the time they had ascended to the height of other arts.

For in the time of the two first Cæsars, which had the art of government in greatest perfection, there lived the best poet, Virgilius Maro; the best historiographer, Titus Livius; the best antiquary, Marcus Varro; and the best or second orator, Marcus Cicero, that to the memory of man are known.

Socrates was accused during the time of the Thirty Tyrants. They were the most base, bloody, and envious persons that have governed.

His discourses were then seen as corrupting of manners. But they were later acknowledged as sovereign medicines of the mind and manners, and so have been received ever since till this day.

Politicians, from their feigned gravity, have thrown imputations on learning.

At present, we have the love and reverence towards learning through two learned princes:

• Queen Elizabeth
• your Majesty

These are like Castor and Pollux, lucida sidera, stars of excellent light and most benign influence, hath wrought in all men of place and authority in our nation.