The most superficial fact regarding the 'Discourses,' the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's 'History,' compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.

By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.

Philosophizing means, then, to ascend from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.

If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.

But the God of the Bible is not only One, but the only possible One.

The facile delusions which conceal from us our true situation all amount to this: that we are, or can be, wiser than the wisest men of the past. We are thus induced to play the part, not of attentive and docile listeners, but of impresarios and lion-tamers.