51S LOGIC : OR, THE RIGHT USE OF REASON.' sons of a good genius, and a capacious mind, who write and speak very obscurely upon this account ; they affect a long train of dependencies before they come to a period ; they imagine that they can never fill, their page with too much sense ; but they little think how they bury their own best ideas in the crowd, and ren- der them in a manner invisible and useless to the greatest part of mankind. Such men may be great scholars, yet they are but poor teachers. 4. For the same reason, avoid too many subdivisions. Con- trive your scheme of thoughts in such a manner as may finish your whole argument with as few inferior branchings as reason will admit; and let them be such as are obvious and open to the understanding, that they may come within one single view of the mind. This will not only assist the understanding to receive, but it will aid the memory also to retain truth ; whereas a dis- course cut out into a vast multitude of gradual subordinations has many inconveniences in it ; it gives pain to the mind and memory, in surveying and retaining the scheme of discourse, and exposes the unskilful hearers to mingle the superior and inferior par- ticulars together ; it leads them into a thick wood instead of open day-light, and places them in a labyrinth, instead of a plain path. 5. " Give all diligence in your younger years to obtain a clear and easy way of expressing your conceptions," that your words, as fast as you utter them, may stamp your own ideas ex- actly on the mind of the hearer. This is a most happy talent for the conveyance of truth, and an excellent security against mis- takes and needless controversies. Rule III. Let, your method be distinct, and without the per - plexing mixture of things that ought to be kept separate, and this will be easily practised by four directions. 1. " Do not bring unnecessary heterogeneous* matter into your discourse on any subject ;" that is, do not mingle an argu- ment on one subject with matters that relate entirely to another, but just so far as is necessary to give a clearer knowledge of the subject in hand. Examples in Logic maybe borrowed from any of the sciences to illustrate the rules ; but long interpositions of natural philosophy, of the imagination and passions, of agency of spirits united to bodies, &c. break the thread of discourse, and perplex the subject. 2. " Let every complicated theme or idea be divided into its distinct single parts, as far as the nature of the subject and your present design requires it. Though you must not abound in needless subdivisions, yet something of this work is very neces- s Things of one kind are called homogeneous, things of different kinds ere heterogeneous.
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