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Updated: June 11, 2025
Your converted children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to the fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and, pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work; these are the true fog children clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with corrupt, and corrupting, " Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw."
They spent their leisure hours together, read the same books, and kindled at the same sentiments. In their charmed circle they unbent; indulged, perchance, in ironical sallies on the follies they alike despised. They freed their minds, as Cicero did to Atticus; they said things to each other which they might have hesitated to say in public, or among fools and dunces.
Your metaphysics are no better than so much philosophical gold leaf, which a cunning reasoner beats out into a sheet as large as the broadest American lake, to make dunces believe the earth can be transmuted into the precious material; while a plain practical man puts the value of the metal into his pocket, in good current coin."
His head was as clear as ever another's for all matters of daily life; but he found it hard to learn scholarship, and what Herdegen could master in one hour, it took him a whole livelong day to get. Notwithstanding he was not one of the dunces, for he strove hard with all diligence, and rather would he have lost a night's sleep than have left what he deemed a duty only half done.
The chronicles of the past teem with instances of youths who have developed into brilliant men, in spite of the fact that they had either had no schooling at all, or had been considered the dunces of their class.
The throne of the dunces, which Dryden had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his Dunciad, passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald and Colley Cibber. There is a great waste of strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as has been said, like flies in amber, are now quite unknown.
He throws the weight of his verbal criticism and puny discoveries in black-letter reading into the gap, that is supposed to be making in the Constitution by Whigs and Radicals, whom he qualifies without mercy as dunces and miscreants; and so entitles himself to the protection of Church and State. The character of his mind is an utter want of independence and magnanimity in all that he attempts.
It is maintained, by Helvetius and his set, that an infant of genius is quite the same as any other infant, only that certain surprisingly favorable influences accompany him through life, especially through childhood, and expand him, while others lie close-folded and continue dunces.
As for the supreme rulers of this contradictory Church, so benevolent and yet so cruel, so enlightened and yet so fanatical, so humble and yet so proud, this institution of blended piety and fraud, equally renowned for saints, theologians, statesmen, drivellers, and fanatics; the joy and the reproach, the glory and the shame of earth, there never were greater geniuses or greater fools: saints of almost preternatural sanctity, like the first Leo and Gregory, or hounds like Boniface VIII. or Alexander VI.; an array of scholars and dunces, ascetics and gluttons, men who adorned and men who scandalized their lofty position; and yet, on the whole, we are forced to admit, the most remarkable body of rulers any empire has known, since they were elevated by their peers, and generally for talents or services, at a period of life when character is formed and experience is matured.
But Aristotle was out of all patience with the account I gave him of Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them, “whether the rest of the tribe were as great dunces as themselves?” I then desired the governor to call up Descartes and Gassendi, with whom I prevailed to explain their systems to Aristotle.
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