“Neque enim disputari sine reprehensione potest.”

     ["Neither can a man dispute, but he must contradict.” 
     (Or:) “Nor can people dispute without reprehension.” 
     —­Cicero, De Finib., i. 8.]

When any one contradicts me, he raises my attention, not my anger:  I advance towards him who controverts, who instructs me; the cause of truth ought to be the common cause both of the one and the other.  What will the angry man answer?  Passion has already confounded his judgment; agitation has usurped the place of reason.  It were not amiss that the decision of our disputes should pass by wager:  that there might be a material mark of our losses, to the end we might the better remember them; and that my man might tell me:  “Your ignorance and obstinacy cost you last year, at several times, a hundred crowns.”  I hail and caress truth in what quarter soever I find it, and cheerfully surrender myself, and open my conquered arms as far off as I can discover it; and, provided it be not too imperiously, take a pleasure in being reproved, and accommodate myself to my accusers, very often more by reason of civility than amendment, loving to gratify and nourish the liberty of admonition by my facility of submitting to it, and this even at my own expense.

Nevertheless, it is hard to bring the men of my time to it:  they have not the courage to correct, because they have not the courage to suffer themselves to be corrected; and speak always with dissimulation in the presence of one another:  I take so great a pleasure in being judged and known, that it is almost indifferent to me in which of the two forms I am so:  my imagination so often contradicts and condemns itself, that ’tis all one to me if another do it, especially considering that I give his reprehension no greater authority than I choose; but I break with him, who carries himself so high, as I know of one who repents his advice, if not believed, and takes it for an affront if it be not immediately followed.  That Socrates always received smilingly the contradictions offered to his arguments, a man may say arose from his strength of reason; and that, the advantage being certain to fall on his side, he accepted them as a matter of new victory.  But we see, on the contrary, that nothing in argument renders our sentiment so delicate, as the opinion of pre-eminence, and disdain of the adversary; and that, in reason, ’tis rather for the weaker to take in good part the oppositions that correct him and set him right.  In earnest, I rather choose the company of those who ruffle me than of those who fear me; ’tis a dull and hurtful pleasure to have to do with people who admire us and approve of all we say.  Antisthenes commanded his children never to take it kindly or for a favour, when any man commended them.  I find I am much prouder of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardour of dispute, I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am