perverseness, whose ingenuity should have yielded sooner.  But the method of the Schools having allowed and encouraged men to oppose and resist evident truth till they are baffled, i.e. till they are reduced to contradict themselves, or some established principles:  it is no wonder that they should not in civil conversation be ashamed of that which in the Schools is counted a virtue and a glory, viz. obstinately to maintain that side of the question they have chosen, whether true or false, to the last extremity; even after conviction.  A strange way to attain truth and knowledge:  and that which I think the rational part of mankind, not corrupted by education, could scare believe should ever be admitted amongst the lovers of truth, and students of religion or nature, or introduced into the seminaries of those who are to propegate the truths of religion or philosophy amongst the ignorant and unconvinced.  How much such a way of learning is like to turn young men’s minds from the sincere search and love of truth; nay, and to make them doubt whether there is any such thing, or, at least, worth the adhering to, I shall not now inquire.  This I think, that, bating those places, which brought the Peripatetic Philosophy into their schools, where it continued many ages, without teaching the world anything but the art of wrangling, these maxims were nowhere thought the foundations on which the sciences were built, nor the great helps to the advancement of knowledge.]

{Of great use to stop wranglers in disputes, but of little use to the discovery of truths.}

As to these general maxims, therefore, they are, as I have said, of great use in disputes, to stop the mouths of wranglers; but not of much use to the discovery of unknown truths, or to help the mind forwards in its search after knowledge.  For who ever began to build his knowledge on this general proposition, what is, is; or, it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be:  and from either of these, as from a principle of science, deduced a system of useful knowledge?  Wrong opinions often involving contradictions, one of these maxims, as a touchstone, may serve well to show whither they lead.  But yet, however fit to lay open the absurdity or mistake of a man’s reasoning or opinion, they are of very little use for enlightening the understanding:  and it will not be found that the mind receives much help from them in its progress in knowledge; which would be neither less, nor less certain, were these two general propositions never thought on.  It is true, as I have said, they sometimes serve in argumentation to stop a wrangler’s mouth, by showing the absurdity of what he saith, [and by exposing him to the shame of contradicting what all the world knows, and he himself cannot but own to be true.] But it is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another