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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Excerpts From the Life and Letters of John Locke Supplement 2 This grand miscarriage in our study draws after it another of less consequence, which yet is very natural for bookish men to run into, and that is the reading of authors very intently and diligently to mind the arguments pro and con they use, and endeavour to lodge them safe in their memory, to serve them upon occasion.

This, when it succeeds to the purpose designed (which it only does in very good memories, and indeed, is rather the business of the memory than judgment), sets a man off before the world as a very knowing learned man, but upon trial will not be found to be so; indeed it may make a man a ready talker and disputant, but not an able man.

It teaches a man to be a fencer; but in the irreconcileable war between truth and falsehood, it seldom or never enables him to choose the right side, or to defend it well, being got of it. He that desires to be knowing indeed, that covets rather the possession of truth than the show of learning, that designs to improve himself in the sold substantial knowledge of things, ought, I think, to take another course; i. e. to endeavour to get a clear and true notion of things as they are in themselves.

This, being fixed in the mind well (without trusting to or troubling the memory, which often fails us), always naturally suggests arguments upon all occasions, either to defend the truth or confound error.

This seems to me to be that which makes some men's discourses to be so clear, evident, and demonstrative, even in a few words; for it is but laying before us the true nature of anything we would discourse of, and our faculty of reasoning is so natural to us that the clear inferences do, as it were, make themselves: we have, as it were, an instinctive knowledge of the truth, which is always most acceptable to the mind, and the mind embraces it in native and naked beauty.