For the disciples,
continually melting down the doctrines of their masters, and
passing them again through the furnace, drove off the dross that
had been previously overlooked, until there came out refined gold
tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times to perfection,
and stained by no admixture of error or doubt.
For not even Aristotle, although a man of gigantic intellect, in
whom it pleased Nature to try how much of reason she could bestow
upon mortality, and whom the Most High made only a little lower
than the angels, sucked from his own fingers those wonderful
volumes which the whole world can hardly contain. But, on the
contrary, with lynx-eyed penetration he had seen through the
sacred books of the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the
Chaldaeans, the Persians and the Medes, all of which learned
Greece had transferred into her treasuries. Whose true sayings
he received, but smoothed away their crudities, pruned their
superfluities, supplied their deficiencies, and removed their
errors. And he held that we should give thanks not only to those
who teach rightly, but even to those who err, as affording the
way of more easily investigating truth, as he plainly declares in
the second book of his Metaphysics. Thus many learned lawyers
contributed to the Pandects, many physicians to the Tegni, and it
was by this means that Avicenna edited his Canon, and Pliny his
great work on Natural History, and Ptolemy the Almagest.
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