There are those frivolous and vain subtleties, by means of which men sometimes seek recommendation: like poets who make entire works of verse beginning with the same letter: we see eggs, balls, wings, axes fashioned in ancient times by the Greeks with the measure of their verses, lengthening or shortening them, in such a way that they come to represent this or that figure. Such was the science of the man who amused himself by counting how many ways the letters of the alphabet could be arranged, and found the incredible number that can be seen in Plutarch.
I think it a good opinion of the one to whom a man was presented who had learned to throw a grain of millet with such skill that he always passed it through the hole of an awl, and was asked afterwards for some gift in return for such rare skill: whereupon he ordered, quite humorously, and rightly in my opinion, that this worker be given two or three bushels of millet, so that such a fine art would not remain unused. It is a wonderful testimony to the weakness of our judgment that he recommends things based on their rarity or novelty, or even their difficulty, if goodness and usefulness are not added to them.
We have just been playing a game at my place to see who could come up with more things that are the same at both ends: as you can see, sir, it is a title that is given to the highest person in our state, who is the King, and is also given to the common people, such as merchants, and does not apply to those in between. Women of quality are called Ladies; those of average standing, Demoiselles; and those of the lowest rank, again Ladies. The dice that are laid on the tables are only allowed in the houses of princes and in taverns. Democritus said that the gods and the beasts had more acute feelings than men, who are of average character. The Romans wore the same attire on days of mourning and days of celebration.
It is certain that extreme fear and extreme ardor of courage equally trouble the stomach and make it weak. The saubriquet of Tremblant, from whom the twelfth King of Navarre, Sancho, took his nickname, learned that boldness as well as fear make our limbs tremble. And the one whose armourers, seeing his skin shiver, tried to reassure him by whetting his appetite for the hazard he was about to face, said to them: You know me ill. If my flesh knew where my courage would carry it soon, it would pass out of it altogether. The weakness that comes to us from coldness and disgust for the exercises of Venus also comes to us from an overly vehement appetite and unregulated heat.
Extreme cold and extreme heat both cook and roast. Aristotle said that lead cauldrons melt and flow from the cold and harshness of winter, as well as from intense heat. Desire and satiety fill with pain the seats above and below voluptuousness. Foolishness and wisdom meet at the same point of feeling and resolution to the suffering of human accidents: the Wise indulge in and command evil, and the others ignore it: these are, so to speak, on this side of accidents, the others on the other side; who, after having weighed and considered their qualities well, having measured them and judged them as they are, rise above them by the force of a vigorous courage: they scorn and trample them, having a strong and solid soul, against which the blows of fortune, when they come to strike, they must necessarily rebound and be blunted, finding a body in which they cannot make an impression: the ordinary and average condition of men lies between these two extremes, that is to say of those who perceive evils, feel them, and cannot bear them.
Childhood and decrepitude meet in imbecility of brain; avarice and profusion, in a similar desire to attract and acquire. It can be said, with appearance, that there is abecedary ignorance, which goes before science, another, doctoral, which comes after science: ignorance that science makes and generates, just as it destroys the first. Good Christians are made of simple minds, less curious and less educated, who, out of reverence and obedience, simply believe and keep to the law.
In the average vigor of minds and average capacity, the error of opinions is engendered: they follow the appearance of the first sense, and have some title to interpret with simplicity and stupidity, to see us arrested in the old way, looking at us who are not instructed by study. The great minds, more stale and clear-sighted, do another kind of good believers; who, by long and religious investigation, penetrate a deeper and more abstruse light into the scriptures, and feel the mysterious and divine secret of our Ecclesiastical policy. Yet we see some of them have reached this final stage through the second, with marvelous fruit and confirmation, as if at the extreme limit of Christian intelligence, and enjoy their victory with consolation, thanksgiving, reformation of manners and great modesty.
And in this rank do I not include those others who, in order to purge themselves of the suspicion of their past error and to reassure us of them, make themselves extreme, indiscreet and unjust in the conduct of our cause, and beset it with endless reproaches of violence. Simple peasants are honest people, and philosophers are honest people, or, according to our times, strong and clear natures, enriched by a broad education in useful sciences. The mestizos who have disdained the first seat of ignorance of letters, and have not been able to join the other (the ass between two saddles, of which I am, and so many others), are dangerous, inept, importunate: these here trouble the world.
However, for my part, I am retreating as far as I can into the first and natural seat, from which I have tried in vain to leave. Popular and purely natural poetry has a naivety and grace that makes it comparable to the principal beauty of poetry perfected according to art; as can be seen in the villanelles of Gascony and in the songs that are brought to us from nations that have no knowledge of any science, or even of writing. Mediocre poetry that stops halfway is scorned, without honor or value. But because, after the path had been opened to the mind, I found, as usually happens, that we had taken for an uneasy exercise of a rare subject what is not so at all; and that after our invention had been exhausted, it discovers an infinite number of similar examples, I will add only this one: that if these essays were worthy of judgment, it could happen, in my opinion, that they would hardly appeal to the common and ordinary minds, nor to the singular and excellent: those would not understand them enough, these would understand them too much; they could flounder in the middle ground.