On Fugitives (166-170)

Having now said thus much concerning the third head of our subject, we will proceed to the fourth and last of the propositions we proposed to examine, according to which discovery sometimes comes to meet us without there having been any search. To this order belongs every self-taught and self-instructed wise man; for such an one has not been improved by consideration, and care, and labour, but from the first moment of his birth he has found wisdom ready prepared and showered upon him from above from heaven, of which he drinks an unmixed draught and on which he feasts, and continues being intoxicated with a sober intoxication with correctness of reason.

This is the man whom the law calls Isaac, whom the soul did not conceive at one time and bring forth at another, for says the scripture, "having conceived him she brought him forth," [*] as if without any consideration of time. For it was not a man who was now being thus brought forth, but a conception of the purest character, beautiful rather in its nature than in consequence of any study; for which reason also she who brings him forth is said to have given up the usual manner of women, that is to say her usual, and reasonable, and human customs.

For the self-taught race is something new, and beyond any description, and truly divine, existing not by any human conceptions, but by some inspired frenzy. Are you ignorant that the Hebrews stand in no need of midwives for their delivery? But they, as Moses says, "bring forth before the midwives can arrive," by which is meant that they have nature alone for a coadjutor, without having any need of methods, or arts, or sciences. And Moses gives very beautiful and very natural definitions of what is taught a man by himself; one being such a thing [*] [*]

accordingly, that which is taught by others requires a long time, but what is taught a man by himself is quick, and in a manner independent of time. And the one again has God for its expounder, but the other has man. Now the first definition he has placed in the question, "What is this that thou has found so quickly, O my son?" [*] But the other is contained in the answer to this question, "What the Lord God gave unto me."

There is also a third definition of what is taught a man by himself, namely that which of its own accord rises upwards. For it is said in the hortatory injunctions, "Ye shall not sow, neither shall ye reap those things which arise from the earth of their own accord." [*] For nature has no need of any art since God himself sows those things, and by his agricultural skill brings to perfection, as if they grew of themselves, things which do not grow of themselves, except inasmuch as they stand in need of no human assistance whatever.