A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I | Page 4

and is contrary to common opinion," which is an addition due to his own time.
Some of my readers are hardly inclined to think that the word paradox could once have had no disparagement in its meaning; still less that persons could have applied it to themselves. I chance to have met with a case in point against them. It is Spinoza's Philosophia Scriptur? Interpres, Exercitatio Paradoxa, printed anonymously at Eleutheropolis, in 1666. This place was one of several cities in the clouds, to which the cuckoos resorted who were driven away by the other birds; that is, a feigned place of printing, adopted by those who would have caught it if orthodoxy could have caught them. Thus, in 1656, the works of Socinus could only be printed at Irenopolis. The author deserves his self-imposed title, as in the following:[4]
"Quanto sane satius fuisset illam [Trinitatem] pro mysterio non habuisse, et Philosophi? ope, antequam quod esset statuerent, secundum ver? logices pr?cepta quid esset cum Cl. Kleckermanno investigasse; tanto fervore ac labore in profundissimas speluncas et obscurissimos metaphysicarum speculationum atque fictionum recessus se recipere ut ab adversariorum telis sententiam suam in tuto collocarent. {4} Profecto magnus ille vir ... dogma illud, quamvis apud theologos eo nomine non multum grati? iniverit, ita ex immotis Philosophi? fundamentis explicat ac demonstrat, ut paucis tantum immutatis, atque additis, nihil amplius animus veritate sincere deditus desiderare possit."
This is properly paradox, though also heterodox. It supposes, contrary to all opinion, orthodox and heterodox, that philosophy can, with slight changes, explain the Athanasian doctrine so as to be at least compatible with orthodoxy. The author would stand almost alone, if not quite; and this is what he meant. I have met with the counter-paradox. I have heard it maintained that the doctrine as it stands, in all its mystery is a priori more likely than any other to have been Revelation, if such a thing were to be; and that it might almost have been predicted.
After looking into books of paradoxes for more than thirty years, and holding conversation with many persons who have written them, and many who might have done so, there is one point on which my mind is fully made up. The manner in which a paradoxer will show himself, as to sense or nonsense, will not depend upon what he maintains, but upon whether he has or has not made a sufficient knowledge of what has been done by others, especially as to the mode of doing it, a preliminary to inventing knowledge for himself. That a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is one of the most fallacious of proverbs. A person of small knowledge is in danger of trying to make his little do the work of more; but a person without any is in more danger of making his no knowledge do the work of some. Take the speculations on the tides as an instance. Persons with nothing but a little geometry have certainly exposed themselves in their modes of objecting to results which require the higher mathematics to be known before an independent opinion can be formed on sufficient grounds. But persons with no geometry at all have done the same thing much more completely. {5}
There is a line to be drawn which is constantly put aside in the arguments held by paradoxers in favor of their right to instruct the world. Most persons must, or at least will, like the lady in Cadogan Place,[5] form and express an immense variety of opinions on an immense variety of subjects; and all persons must be their own guides in many things. So far all is well. But there are many who, in carrying the expression of their own opinions beyond the usual tone of private conversation, whether they go no further than attempts at oral proselytism, or whether they commit themselves to the press, do not reflect that they have ceased to stand upon the ground on which their process is defensible. Aspiring to lead others, they have never given themselves the fair chance of being first led by other others into something better than they can start for themselves; and that they should first do this is what both those classes of others have a fair right to expect. New knowledge, when to any purpose, must come by contemplation of old knowledge in every matter which concerns thought; mechanical contrivance sometimes, not very often, escapes this rule. All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors, and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception. I do not say that every man has made direct acquaintance with the whole of his mental ancestry; many have, as I may say, only known their