The above are from a series of word-pictures ([see p. 85].)
We take cunning for a sinister or crooked wisdom; and certainly there is a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man—not only in point of honesty, but in point of ability.
Bacon.
Cunning, being the ape of wisdom, is the most distant from it that can be. And as an ape for the likeness it has to a man—wanting what really should make him so—is by so much the uglier, cunning is only the want of understanding, which, because it cannot compass its ends by direct ways, would do it by a trick and circumvention.
John Locke (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693).
A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool in circumbendibus.
S. T. Coleridge.