“As for the natural faculties that are in me, of which this book is the essay, I feel them bending under the load. My conceptions and my judgment move only by groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering, and when I have gone ahead as far as I can, still I am not at all satisfied: I can still see country beyond, but with a dim and clouded vision, so that I cannot clearly distinguish it. And when I undertake to speak indiscriminately of everything that comes to my fancy without using any but my own natural resources, if I happen, as I often do, to come across in the good authors those same subjects, I have attempted to treat — as in Plutarch I have just this very moment come across his discourse on the power of imagination — seeing myself so weak and puny, so heavy and sluggish, in comparison with those men, I hold myself in pity and disdain.

“Still I am pleased at this, that my opinions have the honor of often coinciding with theirs, and that at least I go the same way, though far behind them, saying ‘How true!’ Also that I have this, which not everyone has, that I know the vast difference between them and me. And nonetheless I let my thoughts run on, weak and lowly as they are, as I have produced them, without plastering or sewing up the flaws that this comparison has revealed to me.”

I.26 “Of the education of children” (p. 130)