Page 83 - UTOPIA

ing all his wealth, he will not part with one farthing of it to
them as long as he lives!
‘These and such like notions have that people imbibed,
partly from their education, being bred in a country whose
customs and laws are opposite to all such foolish maxims,
and partly from their learning and studies—for though
there are but few in any town that are so wholly excused
from labour as to give themselves entirely up to their stud-
ies (these being only such persons as discover from their
childhood an extraordinary capacity and disposition for
letters), yet their children and a great part of the nation,
both men and women, are taught to spend those hours in
which they are not obliged to work in reading; and this they
do through the whole progress of life. They have all their
learning in their own tongue, which is both a copious and
pleasant language, and in which a man can fully express his
mind; it runs over a great tract of many countries, but it is
not equally pure in all places. They had never so much as
heard of the names of any of those philosophers that are so
famous in these parts of the world, before we went among
them; and yet they had made the same discoveries as the
Greeks, both in music, logic, arithmetic, and geometry. But
as they are almost in everything equal to the ancient phi-
losophers, so they far exceed our modern logicians for they
have never yet fallen upon the barbarous niceties that our
youth are forced to learn in those trifling logical schools
that are among us. They are so far from minding chimeras
and fantastical images made in the mind that none of them
could comprehend what we meant when we talked to them

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