Dantès: “You must teach me a small part of what you know….”
Faria: “Alas! my child, . . . human knowledge is confined within very narrow limits; and when I have taught you mathematics, physics, history, and the three or four modern languages with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to communicate to you the stock of learning I possess.”
Dantès: “Two years!…Do you really believe I can acquire all these things in so short a time?”
Faria: “Not their application, certainly, but their principles you may; to learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other.”
Dantès: “But can I not learn philosophy as well as other things?”
Faria: “My son, philosophy, as I understand it, it reducible to no rules by which it can be learned; it is the amalgamation of all the sciences, the golden cloud which bears the soul to heaven.”
(The Count of Monte Cristo, page 195)
Interesting commentary on education. Faria believes that he can teach the principles of knowledge in two years, but that learning their application will take longer. Memory makes learners, and philosophy makes the learned. If he had expressed this in three stages instead of two, I would say he was expressing the medieval Trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Memory would certainly refer to the grammar stage, and philosophy might combine logic and rhetoric.
“To learn is not to know.” How easy it is to think we have “learned” something because we have been exposed to its principles. But Faria suggests—rightly, I think—that we do not truly know something until we have learned its application, until we have applied philosophy to it. I am not positive what precisely he means by philosophy here, but at least we could say that we do not truly know something until we have reflected on it deeply.
I’d love to hear other folks’ comments on this passage.
Mary Jo
Principles are at the heart of how I teach. If I can get across the Biblical Principles then the education will happen. I think that’s much of the problem in schools these days. You can’t teach to the test, for memorization of facts, and expect to churn out scholars. You have to explaing the origins, the “why’s” and “what’s” and Who’s” out there.
Don’t you just love his writing? I enjoy good literature more than good food.