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" Without understanding it, the replies Yes! and No! are proved most easily. That is, some maintained that antiquity makes fools wise, while others may confirm the contrary, that nature makes people more clever than the ancients can. Which of them should be read and which imitated? Where is an explanation of the two that opens our understanding? Perhaps the ancients have the same relation to nature as the scholiasts to their author? Whoever studies the ancients without knowing nature is reading the notes without the text; and whoever reads over a small fragment in the large quarto edition of Petronius makes himself at least a Doctor, perhaps without knowing a hair better what kind of creature an aribiter elegantiarum was at the house of a Roman Cacsar. For him who has no skin over his eyes, Homer has no cover. For him who has not yet seen the bright day, neither Didymus nor Eustathius will work that miracle. We either lack the principles to read the ancients, or we succeed with them as our old countryman taught the congregation to sing: "The spirit does not with to leave the flesh, demanded most of all by the law (of imitation)."
Rage dispels all my thoughts, most noble Sir, when I bring to mind how a gift of God as noble as the science is laid waste, torn apart - by the free spirit in coffee bars, trampled by lazy monks in academic fairs, - and how it is possible that young people can fall in love with the old fairy, erudition, with no teeth and no hair, or with false ones. Trial is the proof of men. "
― Johann Georg Hamann , Writings on Philosophy and Language
