Since wit and fancy find easier entertainment in the world than dry
truth and real knowledge, figurative speeches and allusion in language
will hardly be admitted as an imperfection or abuse of it. I
confess, in discourses where we seek rather pleasure and delight
than information and improvement, such ornaments as are borrowed
from them can scarce pass for faults. But yet if we would speak of
things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric,
besides order and clearness; all the artificial and figurative
application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but
to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the
judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats: and therefore, however
laudable or allowable oratory may render them in harangues and popular
addresses, they are certainly, in all discourses that pretend to
inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where truth and
knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either
of the language or person that makes use of them. What and how various
they are, will be superfluous here to take notice; the books of
rhetoric which abound in the world, will instruct those who want to be
informed: only I cannot but observe how little the preservation and
improvement of truth and knowledge is the care and concern of mankind;
since the arts of fallacy are endowed and preferred.
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