He could distinguish and divide
A hair ’twixt south and southwest side,
On either which he would dispute,
Confute, change hands, and still confute.

These lines are from Samuel Butler’s satirical mock-epic poem *Hudibras* (1663–1678), which lampoons Puritan zealotry and pedantic “school” disputation in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars. Butler targets a type of learned controversialist—skilled in hair-splitting logic and endless argument—by attributing to him the absurd ability to distinguish a “hair” between points of the compass. The poem’s protagonist, Sir Hudibras, is repeatedly characterized through such comic exaggerations, reflecting Restoration-era skepticism toward the casuistical reasoning and doctrinal wrangling associated (fairly or not) with Puritan and sectarian polemic.

Butler ridicules intellectual vanity and sophistry: the speaker can make impossibly fine distinctions (“a hair ’twixt south and southwest”) and then use them to argue endlessly, even switching sides midstream (“change hands”) while continuing to “confute.” The joke is that such disputants treat argument as a game of victory rather than a pursuit of truth. The compass-point image suggests precision without substance—minute differentiation applied to matters that do not warrant it. In a broader sense, the passage critiques a culture of polemics in which rhetorical agility and contrarianism replace moral or practical judgment.