Daily Lesson: Intelligence and Knowledge

You must have intelligence and knowledge. The two qualities to make you admirable. To have one without the other is half happiness. Some are not content with being intelligent. We want to be great. Unhappiness of foolish you will have, if you want to show society more than nature has given you.

Baltasar Gracián,The Art of Prudence

Gracián marks a difference between intelligence, seen as the faculty to learn, to understand, to reason, to make decisions and to form a certain idea of reality, and the knowledge, understood as the accumulation of information and experience acquired through study. In such a way that it allows to understand that the true virtue, not only resides in being intelligent, and says that only some of all have the interest to acquire this second characteristic Is it possible that something can be known without understanding it? if you do not reason, there is no real knowledge, and to be able to reason you have to be intelligent, are not we all intelligent? it is true that not in the same measure, but in fact, we all have some intelligence, therefore, we all naturally have intelligence but not knowledge, so Gracian states that it will be unhappy who pretends to possess more than what nature has given , then, it can be inferred that we should not pretend knowledge because nature has only endowed us with intelligence. That maxim of Socrates: I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.