Two Apologies and Dialogue with Trypho

been born, would have caused no harm to anyone, and with whom, had he been our contemporary, we would have thought even a single hour of conversation a great waste of time. In short, there is no art that does not occasionally lapse into trifles and absurdities. There is nothing in any part of learning that protects itself from the penchant for trifling inherent in common minds. Truly, the whole matter, if I am not mistaken, stands thus. To travel through the entire world of letters, to pass over the trifling parts of all liberal arts and sciences, to thoroughly learn the fruitful ones, to correct, adorn, and enrich all of them, to determine the boundaries of each that the nature of things has assigned, and to propagate what the industry of predecessors has left behind: this is clearly the mark of a divine genius. Next to this, but at a long interval, is the one who has dedicated himself to one noble art so that he excels in it above all, yet does not trifle in it, nor allows himself to be ignorant of what other disciplines possess that are either more splendid in themselves or more useful for amplifying or adorning his own. The third place is held by men who are indeed nothing if compared to the former, but who are great and excellent when compared to the common run of the learned: those who, whatever trifles the futility of predecessors may have added to the art to which they entirely devote themselves, even though acquired by great labor on their own part, despise and neglect; and they exercise themselves in what possesses solid and true science in such a way that they prove useful to themselves, to others, and perhaps even to their own art. The rest of the crowd will either flutter through everything with an inconstant and reckless impulse and prefer to know nothing than to seem ignorant of anything,