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Updated: May 24, 2025
I will reduce them into writing, and to-morrow publish them to all the learned men in the city, that we may dispute publicly before them. But see in what manner I mean that we shall dispute. I will not argue pro et contra, as do the sottish sophisters of this town and other places.
And I do highly commend the manner of arguing which thou hast proposed, to wit, by signs without speaking; for by this means thou and I shall understand one another well enough, and yet shall be free from this clapping of hands which these blockish sophisters make when any of the arguers hath gotten the better of the argument.
The study of Gargantua, according to the discipline of his schoolmasters the Sophisters. The first day being thus spent, and the bells put up again in their own place, the citizens of Paris, in acknowledgment of this courtesy, offered to maintain and feed his mare as long as he pleased, which Gargantua took in good part, and they sent her to graze in the forest of Biere.
It is not worth our while to discuss, like sophisters, whether in no case some evil for the sake of some benefit is to be tolerated. Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long.
It is not worth our while to discuss, like sophisters, whether, in no case, some evil, for the sake of some benefit, is to be tolerated. Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long.
Many schollers have been infected with that loathsome and marrow-wasting disease before ever they came to read Aristotles treatise of Temperance. Cicero was wont to say, "That could he out-live the lives of two men, he should never find leasure to study the Lyrike Poets." And I find these Sophisters both worse and more unprofitable.
He might be embarrassed, if the case were really such as sophisters represent it in their paltry style of debating. But in this, as in most questions of state, there is a middle. There is something else than the mere alternative of absolute destruction or unreformed existence. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna.
Nor think, that our learning and knowledge in the theory of the truth; nor our abilities to rencounter sophisters, will secure us from a fall; let us not think that the enemies are contemptible, and therefore we need be the less anxious, nor yet think that former experiences and through-bearings, in the like cases, will be a pillow, whereby we may now lay ourselves down to sleep.
But having made mention of one of those little sentences he was wont in mirth and raillery to object against the sophisters, he does, without alleging any reason against it or solving the subtlety of the objection, stir up a terrible tragedy against Stilpo, saying that the life of man is subverted by him, inasmuch as he affirms that one thing cannot be predicated of another.
And, as for disputing contentiously, I will not do it, for it is too base a thing, and therefore leave it to those sottish sophisters who in their disputes do not search for the truth, but for contradiction only and debate.
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