I would strongly recommend Lloyd's "State Worthies" [_The Statesmen and Favourites of England since the Reformation._ By David Lloyd. London, 1665-70] as the manual of every man who would rise in the world. In every twenty pages it recommends contradictions, but he who cannot reconcile them for himself, and discover which suits his plan, can never rise in the world. _N.B._--I have a mind to draw a complete character of a worldly-wise man out of Lloyd. He would be highly-finished, useful, honoured, popular--a man revered by his children, his wife, and so forth. To be sure, he must not expect to be _beloved_ by _one_ proto-friend; and, if there be truth in reason or Christianity, he will go to hell--but, even so, he will doubtless secure himself a most respectable place in the devil's chimney-corner.
The falseness of that so very common opinion, "Mathematics, aye, that is something! that has been useful--but metaphysics!" Now fairly compare the two, what each has really done.
But [be thou] only concerned to find out truth, which, on what side soever it appears, is always _victory_ to every honest mind.
Christianity, too (as well as Platonism and the school of Pythagoras), has its esoteric philosophy, or why are we forbidden to cast pearls before swine? But who are the swine? Are they the poor and despised, the unalphabeted in worldly learning? O, no! the rich whose hearts are steeled by ignorance of misery and habits of receiving slavish obedience--the dropsical learned and the St. Vitus' [bewitched] sciolist.
In controversy it is highly useful to know whether you are really addressing yourself to an opponent or only to partisans, with the intention of preserving them firm. Either is well, but they should never be commingled.
In her letter to Lord Willoughby Queen Elizabeth hath the word "eloign." There is no exact equivalent in modern use. Neither "withdraw" or "absent" are precisely synonymous.
We understand Nature just as if, at a distance, we looked at the image of a person in a looking-glass, plainly and fervently discoursing, yet what he uttered we could decipher only by the motion of the lips or by his mien.
I must extract and transcribe from the preface to the works of Paracelsus that eloquent defence of technical new words and of old words used in a new sense. The whole preface is exceedingly lively, and (excepting the mountebank defence of intentional obscurity and the attack on logic, as if it were ever intended to be an organon of discovery of material truth and directly, instead of a formal preliminary assisting the mind indirectly, and showing what cannot be truth, and what has not been proved truth,) very just.