Speculation is one of the most refined and delicious pleasures, but it is not to be followed only as a pleasure, but as an exercise and duty. There is as great variety in understandings as in faces, they have not all the same beauties nor the same defects, but every genius has its particular turn, and therefore the same course of study is not equally fit for everyone. The business is, to learn the weakness and strength of our minds; to form our judgments, and to render them always just; to know how to discover false reasonings, and to disentangle truth from those mazes of error into which men have hunted her; and whatever method tends to this end ought to be pursued.
[Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, as Professed by a Daughter of the Church of England, Broad, ed. Iter Inc. & Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (Toronto: 2013) p. 202.]
