accept it, even if the second approach is sounder and more direct. They are like someone accustomed to travelling for Hajj along a long, waterless, dangerous route, although there are shorter, safe routes with water available. Yet because he is unaccustomed to them, he recoils from taking them.

Likewise, subtle, obscure, and abstruse arguments may benefit someone accustomed to pondering subtle matters, or someone who prefers acquiring knowledge through hidden paths that most people do not understand to acquiring it through clear paths shared by the general public.

Something similar occurs with food, drink, clothing, and customs, owing to people’s desire for preeminence.

Thus, these lengthy, obscure methods—which involve divisions, relations of necessary implication, or the subsumption of particulars under universals—may, in this respect, benefit certain thinkers and disputants. Others, however, whose natural dispositions are sound and whose minds are upright, have no need of them. Indeed, when such methods are mentioned in their presence, their ears reject them and their minds recoil from them. They see that the desired conclusion is too readily accessible and easily reached to require all this. For reason’s knowledge that whatever comes into being requires an originator is clearer