Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/156

 promoted without them. The learned men of the present age pretend to no acquaintance with Mercury or Apollo; and can do as little in natural knowledge by such a sham revelation as they can by reminiscence. If a man should, for five years together, read lectures. to one that was not allowed to make pauses or ask questions, another man in the ordinary road, by books and professors, would learn more at least to much better purpose-in six months, than he could in all that time.

Pythagoras was, without question, a wise man, well skilled in the arts of civil prudence, by which he appeased great disturbances in those Italian commonwealths. He had much more knowledge than any man of that age in Italy, and knew how to make the most of it. He took great delight in arithmetical speculations, which as Galileo not improbably guesses, he involved in mysteries, that so, ignorant people might not despise him for busying himself in such abstruse matters, which they could not comprehend, and if they could have comprehended did not know to what use to put them. He took a sure way to have all his studies valued, by obliging his