94 INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 



lished areas present themselves in the true and native rays 

 of things ? A new method must be entered upon, by which 

 we may glide into minds the most obstructed. For as the 

 delirium of phrenetics is subdued by art and ingenuity, 

 but by force and contention raised to fury; so in this uni 

 versal insanity we must use moderation. What 1 Are 

 these conditions trifling which pertain to the legitimate 

 mode of communicating knowledge ? Do they seem to 

 thee so free and easy, that the method is innocent, that it 

 affords no handle or occasion for error ? that it has a cer 

 tain inherent and innate power of conciliating belief and 

 repelling the injuries of time, so that knowledge thus 

 delivered, like a plant full of life s freshness, may spread 

 daily and grow to maturity ? that it will set apart for 

 itself, and as it were adopt, a legitimate reader ? And 

 whether I shall have accomplished all this or not, I appeal 

 to future time. 



CHAPTER SECOND. 



BUT plainly I dissemble not, my son, that in some way I 

 must remove those philosophasters, fuller of fables than the 

 very poets, the ravishers of minds, falsifiers of things ; and 

 much more also, their satellites and parasites, that profes 

 sorial and money-gaming crowd : who dictates the song, 

 that I may devote them to oblivion ? For what silence can 

 there be for truth, when they are thus clamorous with their 

 brutish and inarticulate reasons ? But perhaps it were safer 

 to condemn them by name, lest, while they flourish with 

 such authority, if not named they may seem to be excepted, 

 or lest any might conceive, seeing such severe and mortal 

 hatred at work amongst them, and such contentions, that 

 I were sent to these battles of larves and shadows to give 

 assistance to the other side. Let us then summon Aristotle, 

 worst of sophists, crazed with useless subtlety, base laugh 

 ing stock of words. At a time when the human mind, 

 carried by some chance as by favourable weather to some 

 what of truth, did rest, he ventured to lay the severest 

 shackles on the mind, and to compose a kind of art of in 

 sanity, and to bind us to words. Nay, also, out of his 

 bosom have been produced and nourished those most cun 

 ning prattlers, who, when they had turned away from all 

 perambulation of this earth, and from all light of things 

 and of history, exhibited to us, chiefly from the exceeding 

 ductile materials of his precepts and positions, and from 



