44 ADVANCEMENT OP LEARNING. [BOOK I. 



Here, therefore, is the first distemper of learning, when 

 men study words and not matter; and though we have given 

 an example of it from later times, yet such levities have and 

 will be found more or less in all ages. And this must needs 

 discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they 

 see learned men's works appear like the first letter of a 

 patent, which, though finely fiourished, is still but a letter. 

 Pygmalion's frenzy seems a good emblem of this vanity ;f for 

 vrords are but the images of matter, and unless they have 

 life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is to 

 fall in love with a picture. 



Yet the illustrating the obscurities of philosophy with 

 sensible and plausible elocution is not hastily to be con- 

 demned; for hereof we have eminent examples in Xeno- 

 phon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and Plato ;S and the thing 

 itself is of great use ; for although it be some hinderance to 

 the severe inquiry after truth, and the farther progress in 

 philosophy, that it should too early prove satisfactory to the 

 mind, and quench the desire of farther search, before a just 

 period is made ; yet when we have occasion for learning and 

 knowledge in civil life, as for conference, counsel, persuasion, 

 discourse, or the like, we find it ready prepared to our hands 

 in the authors who have wrote in this way. But the excess 

 herein is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he 

 saw the statue of Adonis, who was the delight of Venus, in 

 the temple, said with indignation, " There is no divinity in 

 thee;" so all the followers of Hercules in learning, that is, 

 the more severe and laborious inquirers after truth, will 

 despise these delicacies and afiectations as trivial and effe- 

 minate. 



The luxuriant style was succeeded by another, which, 

 though more chaste, has still its vanity, as turning wholly 

 upon pointed expressions and short periods, so as to appear 

 concise and round rather than diff'asive ; by which contri- 

 vance the whole looks more ingenious than it is. Seneca 



' Ovid, Metam. x. 243. 



« M. Fontenelle is an eminent modem instance in the same way 

 who, particularly in his ** Plurality of Worlds," renders the present 

 pystem of astronomy agreeably familiar, as his "History of the Eoya. 

 Academy" embellishes and explains tJje akbstrus© part* jf giatlieifi;\tigf 

 Vni mUw&l philosophy. Sh^Wf 



