“Che non men the saver, dubbiar m’ aggrata.”

     ["I love to doubt, as well as to know.”—­Dante, Inferno, xi. 93]

for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason, they will no more be theirs, but become his own.  Who follows another, follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing.

          “Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet.”

          ["We are under no king; let each vindicate himself.” 
          —­Seneca, Ep.,33]

Let him, at least, know that he knows.  It will be necessary that he imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to apply it to his own use.  Truth and reason are common to every one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after:  ’tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he and I equally see and understand them.  Bees cull their several sweets from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them, but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and purely their own, and no more thyme and marjoram:  so the several fragments he borrows from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment:  his instruction, labour and study, tend to nothing else but to form that.  He is not obliged to discover whence he got the materials that have assisted him, but only to produce what he has himself done with them.  Men that live upon pillage and borrowing, expose their purchases and buildings to every one’s view:  but do not proclaim how they came by the money.  We do not see the fees and perquisites of a gentleman of the long robe; but we see the alliances wherewith he fortifies himself and his family, and the titles and honours he has obtained for him and his.  No man divulges his revenue; or, at least, which way it comes in but every one publishes his acquisitions.  The advantages of our study are to become better and more wise.  ’Tis, says Epicharmus, the understanding that sees and hears, ’tis the understanding that improves everything, that orders everything, and that acts, rules, and reigns:  all other faculties are blind, and deaf, and without soul.  And certainly we render it timorous and servile, in not allowing it the liberty and privilege to do anything of itself.  Whoever asked his pupil what he thought of grammar and rhetoric, or of such and such a sentence of Cicero?  Our masters stick them, full feathered, in our memories, and there establish them like oracles, of which the letters and syllables are of the substance of the thing.  To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory.  That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had