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66 in the several ways of inquiry and reasoning which the most skillful have made use of, teaches the mind sagacity and wariness, and a suppleness to apply itself more closely and dexterously to the bents and turns of the matter in all its researches. Besides, this universal taste of all the sciences with an indifferency before the mind is possessed with any one in particular, and grown into love and admiration of what is made its darling, will prevent another evil very commonly to be observed in those who have from the beginning been seasoned only by one part of knowledge. Let a man be given up to the contemplation of one sort of knowledge, and that will become everything. The mind will take such a tincture from a familiarity with that object, that everything else, how remote soever, will be brought under the same view. A metaphysician will bring plowing and gardening immediately to abstract notions, the history of nature shall signify nothing to him. An alchemist, on the contrary, shall reduce divinity to the maxims of his laboratory: explain morality by sal, sulphur, and mercury, and allegorize the scripture itself, and the sacred mysteries thereof, into the philosopher’s stone. And I heard once a man who had a more than ordinary excellency in music seriously accommodate Moses’ seven days of the first week