udeness, knowing that the discoveries of each of
the faithful, when weighed in a faithful balance, makes a tiny portion
of science, but that by the anxious investigations of a multitude of
scholars, each as it were contributing his share, the mighty bodies of
the sciences have grown by successive augmentations to the immense bulk
that we now behold. For the disciples, continually melting down the
doctrines of their masters, and passing them again through the furnace,
drove off the dross that had been previously overlooked, until there
came out refined gold tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times
to perfection, and stained by no admixture of error or doubt.

For not even Aristotle, although a man of gigantic intellect, in whom
it pleased Nature to try how much of reason she could bestow upon
mortality, and whom the Most High made only a little lower than the
angels, sucked from his own fingers those wonderful volumes which the
whole world can hardly contain. But, on the contrary, with lynx-eyed
penetration he had seen through the sacred books of the Hebrews, the
Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, the Persians and the Medes,
all of which learned Greece had transferred into her treasuries. Whose
true sayings he received, but smoothed away their crudities, pruned
their superfluities, supplied their deficiencies, and removed their
errors. And he held that we should give thanks not only to those who
teach rightly, but even to those who err, as affording the way of more
easily investigating truth, as he plainly declares in the second book
of his Metaphysics. Thus many learned lawyers contributed to the
Pandects, many physicians to the Tegni, and it was by this means that
Avicenna edited his Canon, and Pliny his great work on Natural History,
and Ptolemy the Almagest.

For as in the writers of annals it is not difficult to see that the
later writer always presupposes the earlier, without whom he could by
no means relate the former times, so too we are to think of the authors
of the sciences. For no man by himself has brought forth any science,
since between the earliest students and those of the latter time we
find intermediaries, ancient if they be compared with our own age, but
modern if we think of the foundations of learning, and these men we
consider the most learned. What would Virgil, the chief poet among the
Latins, have achieved, if he had not despoiled Theocritus, Lucretius,
and Homer, and h