Note 275 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 2)

Stubbe has an eloquent passage, which describes the philosophy of science. The new Experimental School had perhaps too wholly rejected some virtues of the old one; the cultivation of the human understanding, as well as the mere observation on the facts that they collected; an error which has not been entirely removed.

“That art of reasoning by which the prudent are discriminated from fools, which methodiseth and facilitates our discourses, which informs us of the validity of consequences and the probability of arguments, and manifests the fallacies of impostors; that art which gives life to solid eloquence, and which renders Statesmen, Divines, Physicians, and Lawyers accomplished; how is this cried down and vilified by the ignoramuses of these days! What contempt is there raised upon the disputative Ethics of Aristotle and the Stoics; and those moral instructions, which have produced the Alexanders and the Ptolemies, the Pompeys and the Ciceroes, are now slighted in comparison of day-labouring! Did we live at Sparta, where the daily employments were the exercises of substantial virtue and gallantry, and men, like setting dogs, were rather bred up unto, than taught reason and worth, it were a more tolerable proposal (though the different policy of these times would not admit of it); but this working, so recommended, is but the feeding of carp in the air, &c. As for the study of Politics, and all critical learning, these are either pedantical, or tedious, to those who have a shorter way of studying men.”—Preface to “Legends no Histories.”