(3) Here therefore [is] the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter; whereof, though I have represented an example of late times, yet it hath been and will be secundum majus et minus in all time.  And how is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent or limited book, which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter?  It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity; for words are but the images of matter, and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.

(4) But yet notwithstanding it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.  For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use, for surely, to the severe inquisition of truth and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hindrance because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the desire of further search before we come to a just period.  But then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like, then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors which write in that manner.  But the excess of this is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus’ minion, in a temple, said in disdain, Nil sacri es; so there is none of Hercules’ followers in learning—­that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth—­but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness.  And thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.

(5) The second which followeth is in nature worse than the former:  for as substance of matter is better than beauty of words, so contrariwise vain matter is worse than vain words:  wherein it seemeth the reprehension of St. Paul was not only proper for those times, but prophetical for the times following; and not only respective to divinity, but extensive to all knowledge:  Devita profanas vocum novitates, et oppositiones falsi nominis scientiae.  For he assigneth two marks and badges of suspected and falsified science:  the one, the novelty and strangeness of terms; the other, the strictness of positions, which of necessity doth induce oppositions, and so questions and altercations.  Surely, like as many substances in nature which are solid do putrefy and corrupt into worms;—­so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrefy and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome, and (as I may term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality.