Especially are you bound, in putting your questions, to accommodate yourself to a speaker’s range of knowledge or natural [Sidenote: C] ability—to his special _forte_. A philosopher who is more concerned with ethics should not be attacked with difficulties in natural science or mathematics, nor should one who prides himself upon his scientific knowledge be dragged into determining hypothetical syllogisms or solving fallacies. If you attempted to chop your wood with the key and to open your door with the axe, it would not be thought that you were making sport of these implements, but that you were depriving yourself of their respective powers and uses. In the same way, if you ask of a speaker a thing for which he has no gift or training, while you make no harvest of what he possesses and offers, [Sidenote: D] you not only do yourself harm to that extent, but you incur condemnation for malicious ill-nature. Be careful also not to propound difficulties yourself in too great numbers or too frequently. This is, in a sense, another way of showing off. Meanwhile, to listen equably when some one else is mooting them, shows that you are a clubbable person and a student. This is assuming you have no harassing and urgent trouble of your own, no mental disturbance to be controlled or malady to be comforted. It may not, after all, be (as Heracleitus says) ‘better to conceal ignorance’, but to bring it into the open and cure it. If your mind is upset by a fit of anger, an attack of superstition, a violent quarrel with your friends, or a mad amorous passion which _Stirreth the heart-strings that should rest unstirred_, [Sidenote: E] you must not run away from a discourse which searches it home, and fly to others of a different nature. On the contrary, these are the very topics to which you should listen, both at lectures and also by privately approaching the lecturer afterwards and asking for further light.