I find a frank acknowledgement of one's ignorance is not only the easiest way to get rid of a dificulty, but the likeliest way to obtain information, and therefore I practise it: I think it an honest policy. Those who affect to be thought to know everything, and so undertake to explain everything often remain long ignorant of many things that others could and would instruct them in, if they appeared less conceited. The fact is that Franklin had such a keen sense of the dignity and invincibility of truth that he could not be induced to enter into any personal controversy about it. His feelings with regard to such controversies are pointedly expressed in the _Autobiography_ in connection with the attack made by the Abbé Nollet upon his electrical experiments. I once purpos'd [he said] answering the abbé, and actually began the answer; but, on consideration that my writings contain'd a description of experiments which anyone might repeat and verify, and if not to be verifi'd, could not be defended; or of observations offer'd as conjectures, and not delivered dogmatically, therefore not laying me under any obligation to defend them; and reflecting that a dispute between two persons, writing in different languages, might be lengthened greatly by mistranslations, and thence misconceptions of one another's meaning, much of one of the abbé's letters being founded on an error in the translation, I concluded to let my papers shift for themselves, believing it was better to spend what time I could spare from public business in making new experiments, than in disputing about those already made. But in this instance, too, after all, he acted upon the principle, stated in one of his letters to Cadwallader Colden, that he who removes a prejudice, or an error from our minds contributes to their beauty, as he would do to that of our faces who should clear them of a wart or a wen. He went through his experiments again, and satisfied himself that the Abbé had not shaken his positions. At one time, when he was hesitating as to whether he should reply to him, he heard that D'Alibard was preparing to do so. "Perhaps," he wrote to his friend, James Bowdoin, "it may then appear unnecessary for me to do anything farther in it. And will not one's vanity be more gratified in seeing one's adversary confuted by a disciple, than even by one's self?" When Wilson published a pamphlet, contending that lightning rods should be blunt rather than pointed, he simply observed, "I have not answered it, being averse to Disputes."