both knew and felt the danger in which he stood. I could write a
treatise in proof and praise of the morality and moral elevation of
Rabelais' work which would make the church stare and the conventicle
groan, and yet should be the truth and nothing but the truth. I class
Rabelais with the creative minds of the world, Shakspeare, Dante,
Cervantes, &c.

All Rabelais' personages are phantasmagoric allegories, but Panurge
above all. He is throughout the [Greek (transliterated):
panourgia],--the wisdom, that is, the cunning of the human animal,--the
understanding, as the faculty of means to purposes without ultimate
ends, in the most comprehensive sense, and including art, sensuous
fancy, and all the passions of the understanding. It is impossible to
read Rabelais without an admiration mixed with wonder at the depth and
extent of his learning, his multifarious knowledge, and original
observation beyond what books could in that age have supplied him with.


(B. III. c. 9.)
How Panurge asketh counsel of Pantagruel, whether he should marry, yea
or no.


Note this incomparable chapter. Pantagruel stands for the reason as
contradistinguished from the understanding and choice, that is, from
Panurge; and the humour consists in the latter asking advice of the
former on a subject in which the reason can only give the inevitable
conclusion, the syllogistic 'ergo', from the premisses provided by the
understanding itself, which puts each case so as of necessity to
predetermine the verdict thereon. This chapter, independently of the