elenchus

Wallis’s Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae, published in 1655 about three months after the De corpore, contained also an elaborate criticism of Hobbes’s whole attempt to relay the foundations of mathematical science in its place within the general body of reasoned knowledge—a criticism which, if it failed to allow for the merit of the conception, exposed only too effectually the utter inadequacy of the result.

Swift as before to strike, in three months’ time he had deftly turned his own word against the would-be master by administering Due Correction for Mr Hobbes, or School Discipline for not saying his Lessons right, in a piece that differed from the Elenchus only in being more biting and unrestrained.

In Hegel's own phrase, it is an immanent and an incessant dialectic, which from first to last allows finality to no dogmatic rest, but carries out Kant's description of an Age of Criticism, in which nothing, however majestic and sacred its authority, can plead for exception from the all-testing Elenchus.

Elench, e-lengk′, Elenchus, e-lengk′us, n. refutation: a sophism.—adjs.

He settled at Colchester, but, instead of confining himself to his profession, entered keenly into theological controversy, and was condemned by the Star Chamber for his books against Prelacy: Elenchus Religionis Papistic�, Flagellum Pontificis, and The Letanie of Dr. J. Bastwick.