Cicero declares that "He who does not know history is destined to remain a child." The ideas of Voltaire (in Candide), Cervantes (in Don Quixote), and William Shakespeare (in Hamlet) illustrate how men remain children because of their ignorance or denial of the history of mankind, which is a history of corruption, greed, violence, and deceit. As long as an individual lives in ignorance of the past, he will see every experience as utterly new and will deal with that experience in the same way as a child who lives with no storehouse of knowledge or wisdom which would allow him to avoid past mistakes.
The message of Voltaire's Candide is that the world in which we live is populated with people who live primarily in order to get what they want, using whatever means necessary, and always looking for innocent victims of whom they can take advantage. Voltaire rejects the optimistic view that people tend to be reasonable, kind, helpful, wise, or compassionate. Candide is an innocent in this cruel and cold world, the perfect victim for the majority of people who are looking precisely for such a victim to use and abuse. Candide is the ideal example of "he who does not know history" and is, therefore, "destined to remain a child."
He is either a fool or a saint, but in either case he is not equipped to deal with the general run of human beings who live like jackals searching for anything or anybody to devour. He believes that other human beings are as good as he is, as naturally good as he is, despite the fact that almost every experience he encounters gives evidence that people are just the opposite of him. In the army, for example, he commits the great "crime" of going for a walk when he is not supposed to, and because of that innocent and human act, he is badly beaten, the recipient of "four thousand strokes, which had laid bare every muscle and nerve from his neck to his backside" (Voltaire 22). Even though Voltaire brings Candide ...