6 DEDICATION. 



or send it beyond seas for impression, unless I had first pro- 

 posed 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 per- 

 suaded, that if I could make good my proposition before you 

 and our College, illustrious by its numerous body of learned in- 

 dividuals, 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 wel- 

 come further information from whomsoever and from whence - 

 soever it may come; nor are they so narrow-minded as to ima- 

 gine any of the arts or sciences transmitted to us by the an- 

 cients, in such a state of forwardness or completeness, that no- 

 thing is left for the ingenuity and industry of others; very 

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

 finitely less than all that still remains unknown; nor do philo- 

 sophers 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 indis- 

 posed 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 scep- 

 tics. And then the studious, and good, and true, never suffer 

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



