Previous  - next

no sustenance but clouds of dust.

The whole course of things being thus entirely changed between us
and the ancients, and the moderns wisely sensible of it, we of this
age have discovered a shorter and more prudent method to become
scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
The most accomplished way of using books at present is twofold:
either first to serve them as some men do lords, learn their titles
exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance; or, secondly, which is
indeed the choicer, the profounder, and politer method, to get a
thorough insight into the index by which the whole book is governed
and turned, like fishes by the tail. For to enter the palace of
learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms,
therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get
in by the back-door. For the arts are all in a flying march, and
therefore more easily subdued by attacking them in the rear. Thus
physicians discover the state of the whole body by consulting only
what comes from behind. Thus men catch knowledge by throwing their
wit on the posteriors of a book, as boys do sparrows with flinging
salt upon their tails. Thus human life is best understood by the
wise man's rule of regarding the end. Thus are the sciences found,
like Hercules' oxen, by tracing them backwards. Thus are old
sciences unravelled like old stockings, by beginning at the foot.

Besides all this, the army of the sciences hath been of late with a
world of martial discipline drawn into its close order, so that a
view or a muster may be taken of it with abundance of expedition.
For this great blessing we are wholly indebted to systems and
abstracts, in which the modern fathers of learning, like prudent
usurers, spent their sweat for the ease of us their children. For
labour is the seed of idleness, and it is the peculiar happiness of
our noble age to gather the fruit.

Now the method of growing wise, learned, and sublime having become
so regular an affair, and so established in all its forms, the
number of writers must needs have increased accordingly, and to a
pitch that has made it of absolute necessity for them to interfere
continually with each other. Besides, it is reckoned that there is
not at this present a sufficient quantity of new matter left in
Nature to furnish and adorn any one particular subject to the extent
of a volume. This I am told by a very skilful computer, who hath
given a full demonstration of it from rules of arithmetic.

This perhaps may be objected against by those who maintain the
infinity of matter, and therefore will not allow that any species of
it can be exhausted. For answer to which, let us examine the
noblest branch of modern wit or invention planted and cultivated by

Previous  - next