In other words, "Can a Chimera Bombinating in a Vacuum Devour Second Intentions?"

Before I found out how ignorant my schoolteachers were, I used to have a lot of fun in school memorizing arbitrary facts. It took my mind off how miserable I was compared to the other kids. I was learning from experience that the best way to combat misery was to walk away from it and spend an afternoon learning the names of, say, twenty song birds. At least this helped me look forward to that far off day when I might actually see and hear such beautiful creatures.

Having fun with facts became a personal preoccupation as well. I loved books with tables and diagrams, for example. I used to study a two-page timeline in The Golden Treasury of Natury History by Bertha Morris Parker, which symbolized the rise and fall main groups of prehistoric animals as adjacent rivers that widened and narrowed according to their respective evolutionary success. It occured to me that, to further my education, I should ask the publishers to prepare a larger and more detailed infographic for me, and made a "note to self" about it. I remember being sick in bed and memorizing the names of all the bones in the human body, which, being a boy scout, I knew would come in handy. Another time I used the pages of a book to study the properties of an ostensibly random recursive magazine-page selection algorithm, the intriguing conclusions of which I carefully wrote down for that day when I would start publishing my astonishingly original mathematical findings.

My father thought it was wonderful that I showed no interest or ability in playing with other children but would sit and read a dictionary for hours, studiously avoiding him and his wife and his daughter. And using big words like "paleontology" always brought gasps of admiration from my aunts and uncles, whose gasps I was naive enough to believe sincere. None of these people knew or cared how depressed I actually was. The truth was that none of these people considered me so much as a friend.

And that was my secret reason for forging this intellectual armor. I didn't understand why people avoided me and, since I was sure they had good reasons, saw my lack of comprehension as a fatal stupidity. If I could somehow become smart, or merely appear to be so, maybe someone somewhere would think me interesting and I could have friends like everyone else.

I especially hated it when I would get questions wrong in class and people would tease me. The world was all appearances, apparently, and nothing was what it seemed. If you weren't a good detective you wouldn't see the all-important but tiny differences in things. For example, a cat would see all the sillouettes at the left as "fish". But a good detective would see a mammal, a fish, and a prehistoric reptile. If I could become a good detective, then, schoolteachers could no longer trick me and schoolmates no longer laugh at my fumbles.

I soon graduated from memorizing lists of names to grasping entire taxonomies, where relationships between classes of objects are diagrammed in networks. As a dinosaur expert I had of course learned the Linneaen tree of life. But I eventually found a lost science called , which quickly became my favorite. Rhetoric gives us names for things most people don't think worth naming, like , which means using the name of a part of a thing to substitute for the thing itself. And if you think such behavior exclusive to the linguistically gifted, ask yourself why juvenile delinquents in 1950's movies refer to their cars as "wheels".

Linnaean taxonomy is interesting and handy, but in itself has no predictive value. The theory of natural selection does. Rhetoric doesn't tell us who we are, it only documents superficial aspects of how we get into each other's heads. Studying rhetoric won't help you resist its charms, it just helps you talk about them. Rhetoric tells us as much about who we are as a time-lapse movie of someone's eyebrows wriggling over a 12-month period might tell us her occupation. The study of rhetoric died because the study of psychology rose. This doesn't mean that it can't be fun to study eyebrows or that, in fact, you just might learn something useful eventually. But it's important to take the direct route to truth whenever you can find it or you risk just meandering about forever in the trivial and superficial.

There's nothing wrong with organizing observations into lists and networks of names. In fact it can be quite important. Or at least Sherlock thought so. But it's not where knowledge should end, and for a very simple reason. We're not looking for more and more facts to cram into our heads. We're looking for insights, which extract the important underlying principles producing those facts. Astronomy is a good example. All throughout the Middle Ages astronomers took measurements of the movements of the heavenly bodies, which were only imperfectly predicted by Ptolemy's theory of epicycles. I see their houses stuffed with enormous bookcases weighed down with hand-written observations. But when they finally understood the heliocentric cosmology of Nicolaus Copernicus, and gave up epicycles in favor of ellipses, they were able to throw out all those centuries of observations and replace them with a few simple formulas. Sadly, it's not recorded whether poor Sherlock was able to replace his ashen monograph with similarly compacted heuristics.

The study of logical fallacies is a similar dead end. It won't teach you how to abort pointless arguments before they begin, any more than learning how to conduct an autopsy would help prevent murders. And often the effectiveness of fallacious argument lies precisely in the ability of the arguer to hide the premises which are fallacious, driving home his spurious conclusions with intimidating passion. It's much more effective to develop a "sense of smell", an ability to judge an arguer's honesty from a thousand clues, visible and invisible.

So how does one develop a sense of smell, an internal "bullshit detector"? I don't believe any amount of analysis can substitute for sheer experience here. First, live in a free country. Just as the background radiation detected by our telescopes has told us about the nature of our universe, so can the background din of all the crazies out there help you learn who's making sense and who isn't.

Second, spend a few thousand hours listening to people in any arena where they will come back over a period of time and you can slowly learn when they're being honest and when they're kidding themselves. In the late twentieth century, a good choice was discussion groups and counseling sessions. You will develop a "sixth sense" about when to trust them. We don't have a good vocabulary to describe why this is so, but it is. Experience teaches you things that reading books can't.

If you want to be really original, forget everything you ever read and look at the world with fresh eyes, as if you were being born again. Rethink everything. Your goal, after all, is to understand the world — not to understand what other men have said about it.

Despite what the philosophy professors will try to make you believe.

— Mortimer J. Adler, 1941

By now you will have noticed that the only human need we've addressed here is understanding the world, and why learning the opinions of others is never be enough to tell you whose opinions are worth trusting. It turns out that living in a library is no solution, for as Emerson noted: Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Fortunately, the more experienced you become, the better you're able to evaluate the opinions of others — particularly the opinions of people who write well but who you have not and maybe will not ever meet, such as most opinions found in books and on the internet. But there is another side of life that we all have to deal with no matter what kind of person we think we are. We all have to manipulate the world to get what we need from it. Only babies can entrust this job to others. So from our first explosive breath to our last failing gasp we are fighting for our lives, a fight which no subsequent overlay of gentleness (or gentility) can dismantle. We live on a planet of individuals struggling for survival, and each develops an arsenal of skills to triumph. These skills don't terminate in a nature red in tooth and claw — as Tennyson claimed (and Freud) — but, in social mammals at least, in communities of shared bounty, nourished by love and protected by power. And with these skills — which must be learned by each individual since the environments we live in vary so much — don't come built-in, we find ourselves containing from birth instincts like curiosity, playfulness, and competition, which make the acquisition of these skills quick, fun, and fool-proof. "How?" is as natural and important a question as "Why?" Asking why lets us understand and be secure in our world. Asking how sets us free to control our world.

Finding valid answers to our why questions requires not only observation but enough experience to know which observations are relevant and which second-hand opinions are trustworthy. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to see that finding answers to our how questions require an equivalent sophistication that usually requires many years to acquire. Great thinkers are not born overnight. Neither are world leaders. And please don't confuse the two.

The Codpiece of the Law.
The Slipshoe of the Decretals.
The Pomegranate of Vice.
The Churning Ballock of the Valiant.
and, my favorite: Quaestio subtilissima, utrum Chimaera in vacuo bonbinans possit comedere secundas intentiones. which translates as A Most Subtle Question: Whether a Chimera Bombinating in a Vacuum Can Devour Second Intentions. He was making fun of the nonsense theologians take seriously when they live in their heads and assiduously avoid experiencing the real world. Rabelais would be shocked, I fear, to find that these fools are still with us today. Because rhetoric is just cool, man! ("Cool" is a metaphor. "Man" is a synecdoche. See .) Actually, this problem was much worse when people still thought truth could only come from holy books and priests. The rise of experiential or "empirical" investigations which heralded the dawn of the Enlightenment generated many jokes and parables to explain why the old authorities were failing. Here are two of them about horse's teeth:

"There was once a part of Greek thinkers — this was around the time of Aristotle — who sat up all night having a furious argument about the number of teeth in a horse's mouth. Unable to agree, they went out and collared a passer-by — an Arab. He listened attentively to all their arguments, and then without saying a word, he walked away. He returned in a few moments, however, and told them the correct answer.

'How did you decide?' they cried. 'Whose was the better argument, the sounder logic?'

'Logic be damned,' he says, 'I've just been round the back to the stable and counted 'em.'"

— Ian Williamson, Chemical Plant

This more elaborate pastiche, often attributed to Francis Bacon, is almost certainly apocryphal: In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition such as was never before heard of in this region was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceeding wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him, hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife, the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down.