turn in their ways of talking; and yet one cannot think that all whose lot fell in the city were born with different parts from those who were bred at the university or inns of court.[1]
To what purpose all this but to show that the difference so observable in men’s understandings and parts does not arise so much from their natural faculties as acquired habits. He would be laughed at that should go about to make a fine dancer out of a country hedger[2] at past fifty. And he will not have much better success who shall endeavor at that age to make a man reason well, or speak handsomely, who has never been used to it, though you should lay before him a collection of all the best precepts of logic or oratory. Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter or musician extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker or a strict reasoner by a set of rules[3] showing him wherein right reasoning consists.
- ↑ Inns of court. Legal societies in London which have the exclusive privilege of calling candidates to the bar. The name is also applied to the buildings occupied by these societies. They are the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn, and Gray's Inn.
- ↑ Hedger. One who makes or mends hedges, Used here, in general, for any countryman.
- ↑ A set of rules. Locke here emphasizes the thought that he so often expressed, that no artificial method of reasoning will ever lead to a knowledge of the truth. In the “Essay on the Human Understanding,” Bk. IV. ch. xvii, § 4-6, is to be found Locke’s celebrated attack on the syllogism. It is here that we read, “God has not been so sparing to men, to make them barely two-legged creatures, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.” Summing up the discussion in these sections, the philosopher says: “Of what use then are syllogisms? I answer, their chief and main use is in the schools, where men are allowed without shame to deny the agreement of ideas that do manifestly agree; or out of the schools, to those who from thence have learned without shame to deny the connection of ideas, which even to themselves is visible. But to an ingenuous searcher after truth, who has no other aim but to find it, there is no need of any such form to force the allowing of the inference.”
