65 OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. 



which is immortality or continuance : for to this terideth 

 generation, and raising of houses and families ; to this tend 

 buildings, foundations, and monuments ; to this tendeth the 

 desire of memory, fame, and celebration, and in effect the 

 strength of all other human desires. We see then how far 

 the monuments of wit and learning are more durable than 

 the monuments of power or of the hands. For have not the 

 verses of Homer continued twenty-five hundred years, or 

 more, without the loss of a syllable or letter ; during which 



10 time infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been 

 decayed and demolished ? It is not possible to have the 

 true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar ; no, 

 nor of the kings or great personages of much later years ; for 

 the originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but lose of 

 the life and truth. But the images of men's wits and know 

 ledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, 

 and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly 

 to be called images, because they generate still, and cast 

 their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing 



20 infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages : so that if the 

 invention of the ship was thought so noble, which carrieth 

 riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth 

 the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how 

 much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass 

 through the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to 

 participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the 

 one of the other ? Nay further, we see, some of the phil 

 osophers which were least divine, and most immersed in the 

 senses, and denied generally the immortality of the soul, yet 



30 came to this point, that whatsoever motions the spirit of man 

 could act and perform without the organs of the body, they 

 thought, might remain after death, which were only those of 

 the understanding, and not of the affections ; so immortal and 

 incorruptible a thing did knowledge seem unto them to be. 

 But we, that know by divine revelation, that not only the 

 understanding but the affections purified, not only the spirit 



