her verbal
crimes: what vice do they not raise and heap up, being always governed
and commanded by passion? We first quarrel with their reasons, and then
with the men. We only learn to dispute that we may contradict; and so,
every one contradicting and being contradicted, it falls out that the
fruit of disputation is to lose and annihilate truth. Therefore it is
that Plato in his Republic prohibits this exercise to fools and ill-bred
people. To what end do you go about to inquire of him, who knows nothing
to the purpose? A man does no injury to the subject, when he leaves it
to seek how he may treat it; I do not mean by an artificial and
scholastic way, but by a natural one, with a sound understanding. What
will it be in the end? One flies to the east, the other to the west;
they lose the principal, dispersing it in the crowd of incidents after an
hour of tempest, they know not what they seek: one is low, the other
high, and a third wide. One catches at a word and a simile; another is
no longer sensible of what is said in opposition to him, and thinks only
of going on at his own rate, not of answering you: another, finding
himself too weak to make good his rest, fears all, refuses all, at the
very beginning, confounds the subject; or, in the very height of the
dispute, stops short and is silent, by a peevish ignorance affecting a
proud contempt or a foolishly modest avoidance of further debate:
provided this man strikes, he cares not how much he lays himself open;
the other counts his words, and weighs them for reasons; another only
brawls, and uses the advantage of his lungs. Here's one who learnedly
concludes against himself, and another who deafens you with prefaces and
senseless digressions: an other falls into downright railing, and seeks a
quarrel after the German fashion, to disengage himself from a wit that
presses too hard upon him: and a last man sees nothing into the reason of
the thing, but draws a line of circumvallation about you of dialectic
clauses, and the formulas of his art.

Now, who would not enter into distrust of sciences, and doubt whether he
can reap from them any solid fruit for the service of life, considering
the use we put them to?

"Nihil sanantibus litteris."

["Letters which cure nothing."--Seneca, Ep., 59.]

Who has got understanding by his logic? Where are all her fair promises?

"Nec ad melius vivendum, nec ad commodius disserendum