osterity with crotchets.
I know not what to say to it; but experience makes it manifest, that so
many interpretations dissipate truth and break it. Aristotle wrote to be
understood; if he could not do this, much less will another that is not
so good at it; and a third than he, who expressed his own thoughts. We
open the matter, and spill it in pouring out: of one subject we make a
thousand, and in multiplying and subdividing them, fall again into the
infinity of atoms of Epicurus. Never did two men make the same judgment
of the same thing; and 'tis impossible to find two opinions exactly
alike, not only in several men, but in the same man, at diverse hours.
I often find matter of doubt in things of which the commentary has
disdained to take notice; I am most apt to stumble in an even country,
like some horses that I have known, that make most trips in the smoothest
way.

Who will not say that glosses augment doubts and ignorance, since there's
no book to be found, either human or divine, which the world busies
itself about, whereof the difficulties are cleared by interpretation.
The hundredth commentator passes it on to the next, still more knotty and
perplexed than he found it. When were we ever agreed amongst ourselves:
"This book has enough; there is now no more to be said about it"? This
is most apparent in the law; we give the authority of law to infinite
doctors, infinite decrees, and as many interpretations; yet do we find
any end of the need of interpretating? is there, for all that, any
progress or advancement towards peace, or do we stand in need of any
fewer advocates and judges than when this great mass of law was yet in
its first infancy? On the contrary, we darken and bury intelligence; we
can no longer discover it, but at the mercy of so many fences and
barriers. Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does
nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and
perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work;
"Mus in pice."--["A mouse in a pitch barrel."]--It thinks it discovers
at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary
truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and
new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with
the motion: not much unlike AEsop's dogs, that seeing something like a
dead body floating in the sea, and not being able to approach it, set to
work to drink