Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Banner of the Bull: Three Episodes in the Career of Cesare Borgia
In that shrewd chapter of his upon a prince's choice of ministers - of which I shall presently have more to say - Messer Niccolo Macchiavelli discovers three degrees in the intelligence of mankind. To the first belong those who understand things for themselves by virtue of their own natural endowments; to the second those who have at least the wit to discern what others understand; and to the third those who neither understand things for themselves nor yet through the demonstrations which others afford them. The first are rare and excellent, since they are the inventive and generative class; the second are of merit, since if not actually productive, they are at least reproductive; the third, being neither one nor the other, but mere parasites who prey for their existence - and often profitably - upon the other two, are entirely worthless.
There is yet a fourth class which the learned and subtle Florentine appears to have overlooked, a class which combines in itself the attributes of those other three.
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