But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law. For they are unprofitable and vain.
Tertullian
Unhappy Aristotle! who invented for these men dialectics, the art of building up and pulling down; an art so evasive in its propositions, so far-fetched in its conjectures, so harsh, in its arguments, so productive of contentions-embarrassing even to itself, retracting everything, and really treating of nothing! Whence spring those "fables and endless genealogies," and "unprofitable questions," and "words which spread like a cancer? " From all these, when the apostle would restrain us, he expressly names philosophy as that which he would have us be on our guard against.
Imported from an open dataset — not yet checked against the printed edition.