The Works of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Part 2

...let it be; again, even if there be some good men, the sciences themselves will have nothing of goodness, nothing of truth, unless they borrow or acquire it from the inventors or possessors themselves. For if they fall into the hands of some wicked person, they will be harmful, and will render him worse than he was when he was merely wicked: such as the perverse grammarian, the vain-talking poet, the lying historian, the fawning rhetorician, the boastful memorialist, the litigious dialectician, the disruptive sophist, the babbling Lullist, the fortune-telling arithmetician, the lascivious musician, the immodest dancer, the boastful geometer, the wandering cosmographer, the pernicious architect, the piratical sailor, the deceitful astronomer, the wicked magician, the perfidious cabalist, the dreaming natural philosopher, the monstrous metaphysician, the morose ethicist, the iniquitous politician, the tyrannical prince, the oppressive magistrate, the seditious people, the schismatic priest, the superstitious monk, the prodigal economist, the perjured merchant, the compiling quaestor, the slothful farmer, the cattle-rustling shepherd, the foul-mouthed fisherman, the thieving hunter, the marauding soldier, the extortionate noble, the murderous physician, the poisonous apothecary, the gluttonous cook, the impostor alchemist, the duplicitous jurisconsult, the protector of a thousand crimes for an advocate, the forgery-committing notary, the venal judge, and the thief upon the high tribunal, the heretical theologian, and the seducer of the entire multitude. Nothing, however, is more ill-omened than an art or science infested with impiety, and every great artist and most learned author is a most pernicious agent of evil things. But if it falls even into the hands of someone not so much wicked as foolish, nothing is more insolent and importunate, for besides the fact that he defends what remains to him of his innate foolishness, the authority of learning protects him, and he has the instruments of letters with which to defend his madness—things which other fools lack, and thus they rave more mildly—just as Plato says concerning the Rhetorician: For the more inept and unlearned he is, he says, the more he will tell, he will imitate everything, and will deem nothing unworthy of himself. Nothing, therefore, is more destructive than to rave with reason. But if some good and wise man possesses them, perhaps the sciences will be good and useful to the Republic, but they will render their possessor no happier; for (as Porphyry and Iamblichus say) the accumulation of words and the multitude of disciplines is not happiness, which furthermore receives no increase based on the quality of reasoning and words; for if this were so, nothing would prevent those who have gathered all the disciplines from being happy; but this one...