[So Hobbes said that if he had read as much as the academical
     pedants he should have known as little.]

I love and honour knowledge as much as they that have it, and in its true use ’tis the most noble and the greatest acquisition of men; but in such as I speak of (and the number of them is infinite), who build their fundamental sufficiency and value upon it, who appeal from their understanding to their memory: 

“Sub aliena umbra latentes,”

     ["Sheltering under the shadow of others.”—­Seneca, Ep., 33.]

and who can do nothing but by book, I hate it, if I dare to say so, worse than stupidity.  In my country, and in my time, learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds; if it meet with those that are dull and heavy, it overcharges and suffocates them, leaving them a crude and undigested mass; if airy and fine, it purifies, clarifies, and subtilises them, even to exinanition.  ’Tis a thing of almost indifferent quality; a very useful accession to a well-born soul, but hurtful and pernicious to others; or rather a thing of very precious use, that will not suffer itself to be purchased at an under rate; in the hand of some ’tis a sceptre, in that of others a fool’s bauble.

But let us proceed.  What greater victory do you expect than to make your enemy see and know that he is not able to encounter you?  When you get the better of your argument; ’tis truth that wins; when you get the advantage of form and method,’tis then you who win.  I am of opinion that in, Plato and Xenophon Socrates disputes more in favour of the disputants than in favour of the dispute, and more to instruct Euthydemus and Protagoras in the, knowledge of their impertinence, than in the impertinence of their art.  He takes hold of the first subject like one who has a more profitable end than to explain it—­namely, to clear the understandings that he takes upon him to instruct and exercise.  To hunt after truth is properly our business, and we are inexcusable if we carry on the chase impertinently and ill; to fail of seizing it is another thing, for we are born to inquire after truth:  it belongs to a greater power to possess it.  It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine knowledge.  The world is but a school of inquisition:  it is not who shall enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses.  He may as well play the fool who speaks true, as he who speaks false, for we are upon the manner, not the matter, of speaking.  ’Tis my humour as much to regard the form as the substance, and the advocate as much as the cause, as Alcibiades ordered we should:  and every day pass away my time in reading authors without any consideration of their learning; their manner is what I look after, not their subject:  And just so do I hunt after the conversation of any eminent wit, not that he may teach me, but that I may know him, and that knowing