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An honorable person does not need to have read all books, nor to have carefully learned everything that is taught in schools. Moreover, their education would be poor if they had devoted too much time to letters. There are many other things to do in life, and they must direct it in such a way that the greater part remains for performing noble actions, which their own reason should teach them, if they received lessons from reason alone. But they come ignorant into the world, and since the knowledge of their early years rests only on the weakness of the senses or the authority of masters, it can hardly be helped that their imagination is filled with an infinite number of false ideas before their reason could take command over it; so that subsequently, they need either a good nature or frequent lessons from a wise person, both to shake off the false doctrines with which their mind is prejudiced, and to lay the first foundations of solid science, and discover all the means by which they can elevate their knowledge to the highest point it can reach."

“In this work, I intend to teach what these means are, and to bring to light the true riches of our nature, by opening to each person the way by which they can find within themselves, without borrowing from another, the knowledge necessary to direct their life, and subsequently acquire, through practice, the most curious sciences that human reason can possess.”

“But, lest the grandeur of my design should at first seize your mind with such astonishment that faith in my words can no longer find place, I warn you that what I undertake is not as difficult as one might imagine. Indeed, the knowledge that does not exceed the capacity of the human mind is united by such a marvelous link, and can be deduced one from another by such necessary consequences, that there is no need for much art and skill to find them, provided that, beginning with the simplest, one learns to rise gradually to the most sublime. This is what I want to show here through a series of reasonings so clear and so common that everyone will judge that if they have not noticed the same things as I have, it is only because they have not looked in the right direction, nor directed their thoughts to the same objects as I have, and that I deserve no more glory for having discovered them than a peasant would deserve for having found by chance under his feet a treasure that had long escaped numerous searches.”

“And certainly, I am astonished that among so many excellent minds, who would have succeeded much better than I in this endeavor, none has deigned to make this distinction, and that almost all have conducted themselves like the traveler who, abandoning the main road, loses their way on a side path amid thorns and precipices.”

“But I do not wish to examine what others have known or have been ignorant of. It will suffice for me to note that, even if all the knowledge we could desire were found in books, what good they contain is mixed with so many useless things, and dispersed throughout the mass of so many large volumes, that to read them would require more time than human life gives us, and to recognize what is useful in them would require more talent than to find it ourselves.”

“This makes me hope that the reader will not be displeased to find here a shorter path, and that the truths I will advance will please them, although I do not borrow them from Plato or Aristotle, but that they will have value in themselves, like money which has just as much worth whether it comes from a peasant’s purse or from the treasury. I have even managed to make them equally useful to all men.

I could not, therefore, find a style more suited to this purpose than that used in conversations, where each person familiarly explains to their friends what they believe they know best. I thus suppose, under the names of Eudoxe, Polyandre, and Epistémon, a man endowed with an ordinary mind, but whose judgment is unspoiled by any false opinions, and who possesses all his reason intact, as he received it from nature; and who, in his country house where he lives, receives the visit of two men of the greatest minds, and most distinguished of the century, one of whom has never studied anything, while the other knows very well all that can be learned in schools.

And there, among other discussions that each can imagine as they please, as well as the local circumstances and the objects that surround them, objects from which I will often have them draw examples to make their concepts clearer, I bring into their conversation the subject which they will discuss until the end of these two books.”