The Religion of Nature Delineated

and single judgments. In respect of such things as are private, and concern themselves only, or such as are left open and subject to every man’s own sense, they may and ought, only preserving a due deference to them who differ from them, and are known upon other occasions to have more knowledge and literature than themselves; but when a society is concerned, and has determined anything, it may be considered as one person of which he, who dissents from the rest, is only perhaps a small particle; and then his judgment will be in a manner absorbed and drowned in that of the majority, or of them to whom the power of judging is entrusted. But I must not digress too far from the main business, the ways of coming at truth.

XIII. The reports of sense are not of equal authority with the clear demonstrations of reason, when they happen to differ. It is true, the ideas caused by the impression of sensible objects are real ideas, and truly known to the mind as they are in themselves; and the mind may use them, and reason truly upon them: that is, the mind may make a right use of the ideas which it finds in itself. But then, whether these are the true ectypes of their originals, and drawn to the life, is many times a question⁠—and many times it is evident they are not. For that which has been anticipated under proposition III, but properly belongs to this, must be acknowledged. They are conveyed through media and by instruments susceptive of different dispositions and alterations, and may consequently produce different representations; and these cannot all be right. But suppose those instruments and media to be as entire and pure as when entirest and purest; yet still there may be, in many respects, an incapacity in the faculty to notify things just as they are. How mightily are the shape and size of a visible object varied upon us according to its distance, and the situation of the place from whence the prospect is taken? Now, these things cannot be said of the reports, or rather determinations, of reason. For in pure reasoning we use our own ideas for themselves, and such as the mind knows them to be, not as representatives of things that may be falsely exhibited. This internal reasoning may indeed be wrongly applied to external things, if we reason about them as being what they are not; but then this is the fault not of reason, but of sense, which reports the case wrong, or perhaps of the person, who has not been sufficiently industrious to inform himself.

The same familiar instance of vision proves further, that reason may be applied to overrule and correct sense. For when the pictures of objects are pricked out by the pencils of rays upon the retina of the eye, and do not give the true figure of those objects (as they not always do, being diversely projected, as the lines proceeding from the several points happen to fall upon that concave surface); this, though it might impose upon a being that has no faculty superior to sense, does not impose upon our reason, which knows how the appearance is altered, and why. To think the sun139 is not bigger than it appears to the eye to be,140 seems to be the last degree of stupidity. He must be a brute (so far from being a philosopher), who does not know that the same line (e.g. the diameter of the sun) at different distances subtends different angles at the eye. A small matter of reason may serve to confute sense in this and the like cases.

Objection: How can reason be more certain than sense, since reason is founded in abstractions which are originally taken from sensible objects? Answer: Perhaps the mind may, by being exercised at first about particular objects, by degrees find in itself this capacity of considering things by their species, making abstractions, etc. which it would not have done, had it never known any of these particulars. But then, after it has found this capacity in itself, and attained to the knowledge of abstract and general ideas, I do not see why this capacity of reasoning by the help of them may not be tried, upon this proficience, to censure and correct the advices of sense concerning even such particulars as first gave occasion to the mind to exert this capacity and raise itself. Is it a new thing for a scholar, to make such a progress in learning as to be able afterward to teach the master, from whom he received his first rudiments? May not the modern philosophers correct the ancients, because these first showed them the way, and led them into the study of nature? If we look impartially into the history of learning, and even of religion, we shall find that truth has generally advanced by degrees, and many times (very many; as if that was the method of introducing knowledge among men) risen out of fable and error, which gave occasion to those inquiries by which themselves were detected. Thus, blind ignorance was succeeded by a twilight of sense; this brightend by degrees; at last the sun, as it were, rose upon some parts of the commonwealth of learning, and cleared up many things; and I believe many more will in time be cleared, which, whatever men think, are yet in their dark and uncultivated state. The understanding, though it starts from particulars, in time makes a further progress, taking in generals, and such notions logical, metaphysical, etc., as never could possibly come in by the senses.141 Besides, further, the capacity itself, of admitting and considering general ideas, was originally in the mind, and is not derived from without. The intelligences communicated by sense are only an occasion of using what it had before.142