Mephistopheles monologue (Act 7) — Faust: A Tragedy

Redeem the time, for fast it fleets away, But order rules the hour it cannot stay. Therefore 'tis plain that you must pass First of all through the logic class. There will your mind be postured rightly, Laced up in Spanish buskins tightly, That with caution and care, as wisdom ought, It may creep along the path of thought, And not with fitful flickering glow Will o' the wisp it to and fro. There, too, if you hear the gentleman through The term, to every lecture true, You'll learn that a stroke of human thinking, Which you had practised once as free And natural as eating and drinking, Cannot be made without one! two! three! True, it should seem that the tissue of thought Is like a web by cunning master wrought, Where one stroke moves a thousand threads, The shuttle shoots backwards and forwards between, The slender threads flow together unseen, And one with the others thousand-fold weds: Then steps the philosopher forth to show How of necessity it must be so: If the first be so, the second is so, And therefore the third and the fourth is so; And unless the first and the second before be, The third and the fourth can never more be. So schoolmen teach and scholars believe, But none of them yet ever learned to weave. He who strives to know a thing well Must first the spirit within expel, Then can he count the parts in his hand, Only without the spiritual band. _Encheiresis naturæ_, 'tis clept in Chemistry, Thus laughing at herself, albeit she knows not why.