I lay my work before the public at home, or send it beyond seas 

 for impression, unless I had first proposed its subject to you, 

 had confirmed its conclusions by ocular demonstrations in your 

 presence, had replied to your doubts and objections, and secured 

 the assent and support of our distinguished President. For I 

 was most intimately persuaded, that if I could make good my 

 proposition before you and our College, illustrious by its numer- 

 ous body of learned individuals, I had less to fear from others; 

 I even ventured to hope that I should have the comfort of 

 finding all that you had granted me in your sheer love of truth, 

 conceded by others who were philosophers like yourselves. For 

 true philosophers, who are only eager for truth and knowledge, 

 never regard themselves as already so thoroughly informed, but 

 that they welcome further information from whomsoever and 

 from whencesoever it may come; nor are they so narrow-minded 

 as to imagine any of the arts or sciences transmitted to us by 

 the ancients, in such a state of forwardness or completeness, 

 that nothing is left for the ingenuity and industry of others; 

 very many, on the contrary, maintain that all we know is still 

 infinitely less than all that still remains unknown; nor do 

 philosophers pin their faith to others' precepts in such wise that 

 they lose their liberty, and cease to give credence to the con- 

 clusions of their proper senses. Neither do they swear such 

 fealty to their mistress Antiquity, that they openly, and in 

 sight of all, deny and desert their friend Truth. But even as 

 they see that the credulous and vain are disposed at the first 

 blush to accept and to believe everything that is proposed to 

 them, so do they observe that the dull and unintellectual are 

 indisposed to see what lies before their eyes, and even to deny 

 the light of the noonday sun. They teach us in our course of 

 philosophy as sedulously to avoid the fables of the poets and 

 the fancies of the vulgar, as the false conclusions of the sceptics. 

 And then the studious, and good, and true, never suffer their 

 minds to be warped by the passions of hatred and envy, which 

 unfit men duly to weigh the arguments that are advanced in 

 behalf of truth, or to appreciate the proposition that is even 



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