mities you have contracted will permit, in the same course of
study; but you begin to foresee that you shall want time, and you make
grievous complaints of the shortness of human life. Give me leave now
to ask you how many thousand years God must prolong your life in order
to reconcile you to His wisdom and goodness?

"It is plain, at least highly probable, that a life as long as that of
the most aged of the patriarchs would be too short to answer your
purposes; since the researches and disputes in which you are engaged
have been already for a much longer time the objects of learned
inquiries, and remain still as imperfect and undetermined as they were
at first. But let me ask you again, and deceive neither yourself nor
me, have you, in the course of these forty years, once examined the
first principles and the fundamental facts on which all those
questions depend, with an absolute indifference of judgment, and with
a scrupulous exactness? with the same care that you have employed in
examining the various consequences drawn from them, and the heterodox
opinions about them? Have you not taken them for granted in the whole
course of your studies? Or, if you have looked now and then on the
state of the proofs brought to maintain them, have you not done it as
a mathematician looks over a demonstration formerly made--to refresh
his memory, not to satisfy any doubt? If you have thus examined, it
may appear marvelous to some that you have spent so much time in many
parts of those studies which have reduced you to this hectic condition
of so much heat and weakness. But if you have not thus examined, it
must be evident to all, nay, to yourself on the least cool reflection,
that you are still, notwithstanding all your learning, in a state of
ignorance. For knowledge can alone produce knowledge; and without such
an examination of axioms and facts, you can have none about
inferences."

In this manner one might expostulate very reasonably with many a great
scholar, many a profound philosopher, many a dogmatical casuist. And
it serves to set the complaints about want of time, and the shortness
of human life, in a very ridiculous but a true light.

II

RULES FOR THE STUDY OF HISTORY[7]

I have considered formerly, with a good deal of attention, the subject
on which you command me to communicate my thoughts to you; and I
practised in those days, as much as business and pleasure allowed me
time to do, the rules that seemed