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lukeprog comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong
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Le Bovier de Fontenelle
This explains all those urges I get to burn witches, my talent at farming, all my knowledge at hunting and tracking and my outstanding knack for feudal political intrigue.
(Composition is not the relationship to previous minds that education entails. Can someone think of a better one?)
Derivation.
Much better.
We rest upon the frontal lobes of giants.
Is that a praise of educated minds, or a caution against too readily classifying a mind as educated?
(Possibly related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ul/for_progress_to_be_by_accumulation_and_not_by/)
I read it as expressing the same view as The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship.
From the description of him on Wikipedia, I am certain it is the former, although the bone wedrifid picks with "composed" is symptomatic of where he falls short of his contemporary, Voltaire. He was a most refined, civilised, intelligent, and educated writer, very popular among the intellectual class, and achieved memberships of distinguished academic societies, but his strength, a great one indeed, was in writing well on what was already known, and he created little that was new. Voltaire's name lives to this day, but Fontenelle's, while important in his time, does not.
Scholarship is indeed a virtue, but Fontenelle's was not in service of a higher goal.