Page:Of the conduct of the understanding (IA ofconductofunder00lock).pdf/126

120 writer, yet he will perceive that they give no light nor strength to his reasonings.

This, though it be the shortest and easiest way of reading books with profit, and keeping one’s self from being misled by great names or plausible discourses; yet it being hard and tedious to those who have not accustomed themselves to it, it is not to be expected that everyone (amongst those few who really pursue truth) should this way guard his understanding from being imposed on by the willful, or at least undesigned sophistry, which creeps into most of the books of argument. They that write against their conviction, or that, next to them, are resolved to maintain the tenets of a party they were engaged in, cannot be supposed to reject any arms that may help to defend their cause, and therefore such should be read with the greatest caution. And they who write for opinions they are sincerely persuaded of and believe to be true, think they may so far allow themselves to indulge their laudable affection to truth, as to permit their esteem of it to give it the best colors, and set it off with the best expressions and dress they can, thereby to gain it the easiest entrance into the minds of their readers and fix it deepest there.

One of those being the state of mind we may justly suppose most writers to be in, it is fit their readers, who apply to them for instruction, should not lay by that caution which becomes a sincere pursuit of truth, and should make them always watchful against whatever might conceal or misrepresent it. If they have not the skill of representing to themselves the author’s sense by pure ideas separated from sounds, and thereby divested of the false lights and deceitful ornaments of