For as Aristotle saith,
that children at the first will call every woman mother, but
afterward they come to distinguish according to truth, so
experience, if it be in childhood, will call every philosophy
mother, but when it cometh to ripeness it will discern the true
mother. So as in the meantime it is good to see the several glosses
and opinions upon Nature, whereof it may be everyone in some one
point hath seen clearer than his fellows, therefore I wish some
collection to be made painfully and understandingly de antiquis
philosophiis, out of all the possible light which remaineth to us of
them: which kind of work I find deficient. But here I must give
warning, that it be done distinctly and severedly; the philosophies
of everyone throughout by themselves, and not by titles packed and
faggoted up together, as hath been done by Plutarch. For it is the
harmony of a philosophy in itself, which giveth it light and
credence; whereas if it be singled and broken, it will seem more
foreign and dissonant. For as when I read in Tacitus the actions of
Nero or Claudius, with circumstances of times, inducements, and
occasions, I find them not so strange; but when I read them in
Suetonius Tranquillus, gathered into titles and bundles and not in
order of time, they seem more monstrous and incredible: so is it of
any philosophy reported entire, and dismembered by articles.
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