'Tis, says Epicharmus, the understanding that sees and hears, 'tis the understanding that improves everything, that orders everything, and that acts, rules, and reigns: all other faculties are blind, and deaf, and without soul.

And certainly we render it timorous and servile, in not allowing it the liberty and privilege to do anything of itself.

Whoever asked his pupil what he thought of grammar and rhetoric, or of such and such a sentence of Cicero?
Our masters stick them, full feathered, in our memories, and there establish them like oracles, of which the letters and syllables are of the substance of the thing.

To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory.

That which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book.