rtake, with one and
the same lesson, and the same measure of direction, to instruct several
boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken; and
'tis no wonder, if in a whole multitude of scholars, there are not found
above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and
discipline. Let the master not only examine him about the grammatical
construction of the bare words of his lesson, but about the sense and let
him judge of the profit he has made, not by the testimony of his memory,
but by that of his life. Let him make him put what he has learned into a
hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to
see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking
instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato. 'Tis
a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office
unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it
to concoct. Our minds work only upon trust, when bound and compelled to
follow the appetite of another's fancy, enslaved and captivated under the
authority of another's instruction; we have been so subjected to the
trammel, that we have no free, nor natural pace of our own; our own
vigour and liberty are extinct and gone:

"Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt."

["They are ever in wardship."--Seneca, Ep., 33.]

I was privately carried at Pisa to see a very honest man, but so great an
Aristotelian, that his most usual thesis was: "That the touchstone and
square of all solid imagination, and of all truth, was an absolute
conformity to Aristotle's doctrine; and that all besides was nothing but
inanity and chimera; for that he had seen all, and said all." A position,
that for having been a little too injuriously and broadly interpreted,
brought him once and long kept him in great danger of the Inquisition at
Rome.

Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and
lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust.
Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to him, than those
of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded
to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not,
he will remain in doubt.

"Che non men the saver, dubbiar m' aggrata."

["I love to doubt, as well as to kno