An intelligent man is not jealous of a cutler who has made a first-rate sword, nor of a sculptor who has just finished a fine piece of statuary; he knows there are rules and methods in those arts beyond his ken; that tools have to be handled with which he is unacquainted, and of whose very names and shapes he is ignorant; it is sufficient for him to be aware that he has never served an apprenticeship to such a trade, and he consoles himself, therefore, that he has not mastered them. But he may, on the contrary, envy, and even be jealous of a minister of state, and of those who govern; as if reason and common sense, of which he has a share as well as they have, are the only things required for ruling a nation and for the administration of public affairs, and as if they could take the place of regulations, directions, and experience. (86.) We meet with few utterly dull and stupid men, but with fewer sublime and transcendental ones. The generality of mankind hovers between these two extremes; the gap is filled by a great number of men of ordinary talents, but who are very useful and serviceable to the State, and efficient as well as agreeable; as, for example, in commerce, finances, during war, in navigation, arts, trades, in the possession of a good memory, in gambling,[558] in society, and in conversation. (87.) All the intelligence of the world is useless to a man who has none, for having no ideas himself, he cannot be improved by those of others. (88.) To feel the want of reasoning faculties is the next thing to possessing them; a madman cannot have this sensation. Thus the next best thing to intelligence is the consciousness that we have none, for then we might do what is considered impossible, and, without intelligence, neither be a fool nor a fop nor impertinent. (89.) A man who has not a large amount of intelligence is grave and all of a piece; he does not laugh, he never jokes nor trifles; and is as incapable of rising to great things as of suiting himself, by way of change, to small ones; he hardly knows how to play with his children. (90.) Everybody says of a coxcomb that he is a coxcomb, but no one dares to tell him so; he dies without knowing it and without anybody being avenged on him. (91.) What a dissonance is there between the mind and the heart! Some philosophers lead bad lives though they have large stores of “wise saws;” and some politicians, full of schemes and ideas, cannot govern themselves. (92.) The mind wears out like other things; sciences are its aliment; they nourish it and wear it out. (93.) Men of inferior rank are sometimes burdened with a thousand useless virtues, but they have no opportunities of making use of them.