The science of logic is a noble discipline—a standard for critical inquiry and reflection, a scale for research and contemplation, a polisher of the mind, and a whetstone for the intellect's faculty of thought. Through it, the clouds of illusion and fantasy are dispelled from the light of reason, and the correct paths of understanding and inference are made clear. It stands in relation to rational arguments much as prosody does to poetry, or grammar to the correct inflection of speech; just as one cannot distinguish metrically flawed poetry from the soundly composed without the scale of prosody, nor grammatically correct speech from the erroneous without the science of grammar, so too can one only distinguish between a flawed argument and a sound one—between the valid and the invalid—through logic. Imam al-Ghazali—may God sanctify his noble secret—said: "Any act of reasoning not weighed by this scale, nor measured by this standard, is of unsound quality and fraught with peril and error."