'A False Tooth, or a Rhinoplastic Nose'

“People who get their wisdom out of books are like those who have got their knowledge of a country from the descriptions of travellers. Truth that has been picked up from books only sticks to us like an artificial limb, or a false tooth, or a rhinoplastic nose; the truth we have acquired by our own thinking is like the natural member.” 

Well, yes and no. Reliance solely on books for one’s moral/intellectual/emotional education is risky, as is any form of autodidacticism (though a strain of it is often invaluable). Today, in our aliterate age, of course, there’s little danger of that happening. Books complement experience, and vice versa. Writers document life so we don’t necessarily have to. The tension between books and life is part of growing up and one of several ways we learn things, including wisdom.

 

The speaker above is John Morley (1838-1923), a Liberal statesman, biographer and close friend of William Gladstone, four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The passage is drawn from a lecture, “Aphorisms,” delivered to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on November 11, 1887. Morley devotes much of his talk to French and German aphorists (La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Pascal, et al.; Schopenhauer, Lichtenberg, Goethe). Also, the ancients:

 

“Horace's Epistles are a mine of genial, friendly, humane observation. Then there is none of the ancient moralists to whom the modern, from Montaigne, Charron, Ralegh, Bacon, downwards, owe more than to Seneca. Seneca has no spark of the kindly warmth of Horace; he has not the animation of Plutarch; he abounds too much in the artificial and extravagant paradoxes of the Stoics.”

 

His writing is orderly and uncluttered, but Morley is no aphorist, though his prose is occasionally aphoristic. Take this: “[W]hat is called Stupidity springs not at all from mere want of Understanding, but from the fact that the free use of a man’s understanding is hindered by some definite vice: Frivolity, Envy, Dissipation, Covetousness, all these darling vices of fallen man,—these are at the bottom of what we name Stupidity. This is true enough, but it is not so much to the point as the saying of a highly judicious aphorist of my own acquaintance, that ‘Excessive anger against human stupidity, is itself one of the most provoking of all forms of that stupidity.’”

 

To write aphoristically it is necessary to first think aphoristically, peeling away the dross, cliched and overly emphatic. There are other effectives ways to write, but concisely always improves things. A contemporary aphorist, Theodore Dalrymple, in his book of aphorisms, Midnight Maxims (Mirabeau, 2021), writes: “Not everything can be said in a few words, but nothing can always be said in many words.”