(2.) Confidence in Opinions evermore dwells with untamed passions, and is maintained upon the depraved obstinacy of an ungovern'd spirit. He's but a novice in the Art of Autocrasy, that cannot castigate his passions in reference to those presumptions, and will come as far short of wisdom as science: for the Judgement being the leading power, and director of action, if It be swaied by the over-bearings of passion, and stor'd with lubricous opinions in stead of clearly conceived truths, and be peremptorily resolved in them, the practice will be as irregular, as the conceptions erroneous. Opinions hold the stirrup, while vice mount into the saddle.Autocrasy: "power over oneself; self-control" (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. autocracy, sense 1, citing this passage).
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Considerations Against Dogmatizing, II
Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680), Scepsis Scientifica: or, Confest Ignorance, the Way to Science; in an Essay of the Vanity of Dogmatizing and Confident Opinion, ed. John Owen (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co, 1885), p. 195 (from Chap. XXVII):