Miscellaneous Essays (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Miscellaneous Essays"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him." "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit." These are two contradictory proverbs, which are to be found side by side in a venerable book with which all Englishmen are supposed to be peculiarly familiar. They furnish a good example both of the value of proverbs, and of their complete inadequacy as rules of life. A proverb is the expression of a very wide experience, an experience so wide that it is in a measure common to a whole people, or even to the whole human race. But not the whole life of any individual, much less the experience of hundreds of millions of mankind, separated from one another by enormous intervals both of space and time, can ever be condensed into a single sentence. A man's life, in almost every sense, is a heap of contradictions, a long series of conflicts, a daily death, and a perpetual new birth. And when men come to live together, the moral permutations and combinations which become possible are absolutely innumerable.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.