[6]
And
seeing that they, who had none to teach them anything, have handed down such store of knowledge
to posterity, shall we refuse to employ the experience
which we possess of some things, to discover yet
other things, and possess nought that is not owed to
the beneficent activity of others? Shall we follow
the example of those painters whose sole aim is to
be able to copy pictures by using the ruler and the
measuring rod?1
1 The reference is to copying by dividing the surface of the picture to be copied, and of the material on which the copy is to be made, into a number of equal squares.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.