"Learning gives us a fuller conviction of the imperfections of our nature; which one would think, might dispose us to modesty"
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Education is supposed to puff us up; Collier insists it should do the opposite. The line is a cleric's neat little booby trap for the ego: the more you know, the more you should notice how much in you is crooked, limited, or self-serving. Its bite comes from that dry aside, "which one would think" - a politely sharpened blade. He implies the obvious moral outcome (modesty) should follow automatically from learning, then exposes the stubborn fact that it often doesn't. The subtext is a rebuke aimed not at the uneducated, but at the educated classes who treat knowledge as social armor.
Collier is writing in a late 17th/early 18th-century England where wit, polite skepticism, and new intellectual fashions were rising alongside older religious authority. As an Anglican clergyman and moral polemicist (famously hostile to the theater's supposed corruptions), he sees "learning" as spiritually useful only when it reveals human fallenness. He's speaking from a tradition that distrusts the self's ability to manage power responsibly - including the power that comes from books, status, and rhetorical skill.
The intent is pastoral and disciplinary: learning should function like a mirror, not a pedestal. Collier's real target is pride dressed up as sophistication, the kind that mistakes mental agility for moral improvement. His sentence turns scholarship into a test of character: if it doesn't produce modesty, it has merely given vanity better vocabulary.
Collier is writing in a late 17th/early 18th-century England where wit, polite skepticism, and new intellectual fashions were rising alongside older religious authority. As an Anglican clergyman and moral polemicist (famously hostile to the theater's supposed corruptions), he sees "learning" as spiritually useful only when it reveals human fallenness. He's speaking from a tradition that distrusts the self's ability to manage power responsibly - including the power that comes from books, status, and rhetorical skill.
The intent is pastoral and disciplinary: learning should function like a mirror, not a pedestal. Collier's real target is pride dressed up as sophistication, the kind that mistakes mental agility for moral improvement. His sentence turns scholarship into a test of character: if it doesn't produce modesty, it has merely given vanity better vocabulary.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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