Of the impediments of knowledge in handling it by parts, and in slipping off particular sciences from the root and stock of universal knowledge, being the 8th chapter, the whole chapter.
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So if the moral philosophers that have spent such an
infinite quantity of debate touching Good and the highest good, had cast
their eye abroad upon nature and beheld the appetite that is in all things
to receive and to give; the one motion affecting preservation and the other
multiplication; which appetites are most evidently seen in living creatures
in the pleasure of nourishment and generation; and in man do make the
aptest and most natural division of all his desires, being either of sense
of pleasure or sense of power; and in the universal frame of the world are
figured, the one in the beams of heaven which issue forth, and the other in
the lap of the earth which takes in: and again if they had observed the
motion of congruity or situation of the parts in respect of the whole,
evident in so many particulars; and lastly if they had considered the
motion (familiar in attraction of things) to approach to that which is
higher in the same kind; when by these observations so easy and concurring
in natural philosophy, they should have found out this quaternion of good,
in enjoying or fruition, effecting or operation, consenting or proportion,
and approach or assumption; they would have saved and abridged much of
their long and wandering discourses of pleasure, virtue, duty, and
religion. So likewise in this same logic and rhetoric, or arts of argument
and grace of speech, if the great masters of them would but have gone a
form lower, and looked but into the observations of Grammar concerning the
kinds of words, their derivations, deflexions, and syntax; specially
enriching the same with the helps of several languages, with their
differing proprieties of words, phrases, and tropes; they might have found
out more and better footsteps of common reason, help of disputation, and
advantages of cavillation, than many of these which they have propounded.
So again a man should be thought to dally, if he did note how the figures
of rhetoric and music are many of them the same. The repetitions and
traductions in speech and the reports and hauntings of sounds in music are
the very same things. Plutarch hath almost made a book of the Lacedaemonian
kind of jesting, which joined ever pleasure with distaste. Sir,
(saith a man of art to Philip king of Macedon when he controlled him in his
faculty,) God forbid your fortune should be such as to know these things
better than I. In taxing his ignorance in his art he represented to him
the perpetual greatness of his fortune, leaving him no vacant time for so
mean a skill. Now in music it is one of the ordinariest flowers to fall
from a discord or hard tune upon a sweet accord. The figure that Cicero and
the rest commend as one of the best points of elegancy, which is the fine
checking of expectation, is no less well known to the musicians when they
have a special grace in flying the close or cadence. And these are no
allusions but direct communities, the same delights of the mind being to be
found not only in music, rhetoric, but in moral philosophy, policy, and
other knowledges, and that obscure in the one, which is more apparent in
the other, yea and that discovered in the one which is not found at all in
the other, and so one science greatly aiding to the invention and
augmentation of another. And therefore without this intercourse the axioms
of sciences will fall out to be neither full nor true; but will be such
opinions as Aristotle in some places doth wisely censure, when he saith
These are the opinions of persons that have respect but to a few
things. So then we see that this note leadeth us to an administration
of knowledge in some such order and policy as the king of Spain in regard
of his great dominions useth in state; who though he hath particular
councils for several countries and affairs, yet hath one council of State
or last resort, that receiveth the advertisements and certificates from all
the rest. Hitherto of the diversion, succession, and conference of wits.
[@ Works III, 228-31] |
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