34. Seventhly, language is often abused by figurative speech.
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. It is
evident how much men love to deceive and be deceived, since rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and
deceit, has its established professors, is publicly taught, and has always been had in great reputation: and I doubt
not but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality, in me to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like
the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And it is in vain to find fault
with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived.
