of all ages for those discoveries and discourses they have left behind them for our instruction if we know how to make a right use of them, which is not to run them over in a hasty perusal, and perhaps lodge their opinions or some remarkable passages in our memories, but to enter into their reasonings, examine their proofs, and then judge of the truth or falsehood, probability, or improbability of what they advance, not by any opinion we have entertained of the author, but by the evidence he produces and the conviction he affords is drawn from things themselves. Knowing is seeing, and if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves that we do so by another man’s eyes, let him use ever so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible. Till we ourselves see it with our own eyes and perceive it by our own understandings, we are as much in the dark and as void of knowledge as before, let us believe any learned author as much as we will.
Euclid and Archimedes[1] are allowed to be knowing and to have demonstrated what they say, and yet whoever shall read over their writings without perceiving the connection of their proofs, and seeing what they show, though he may understand all their words, yet he is not the more knowing: he may believe indeed, but does not know what they say, and so is not advanced one jot in mathematical knowledge by all his reading of those approved mathematicians.
25. Haste.—The eagerness and strong bent of the mind after knowledge, if not warily regulated, is often
- ↑ Euclid and Archimedes. The former, a famous Greek geometriclan who lived at Alexandria abont 300 b. c.; the latter, the most famous of ancient geometricians, who lived from about 287 to 212 b. c.
