Had we senses acute enough to discern the minute particles of bodies, and the real constitution on which their sensible qualities depend, I doubt not but they would produce quite different ideas in us:  and that which is now the yellow colour of gold, would then disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts, of a certain size and figure.  This microscopes plainly discover to us; for what to our naked eyes produces a certain colour, is, by thus augmenting the acuteness of our senses, discovered to be quite a different thing; and the thus altering, as it were, the proportion of the bulk of the minute parts of a coloured object to our usual sight, produces different ideas from what it did before.  Thus, sand or pounded glass, which is opaque, and white to the naked eye, is pellucid in a microscope; and a hair seen in this way, loses its former colour, and is, in a great measure, pellucid, with a mixture of some bright sparkling colours, such as appear from the refraction of diamonds, and other pellucid bodies.  Blood, to the naked eye, appears all red; but by a good microscope, wherein its lesser parts appear, shows only some few globules of red, swimming in a pellucid liquor, and how these red globules would appear, if glasses could be found that could yet magnify them a thousand or ten thousand times more, is uncertain.

12.  Our Faculties for Discovery of the Qualities and powers of Substances suited to our State.

The infinite wise Contriver of us, and all things about us, hath fitted our senses, faculties, and organs, to the conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here.  We are able, by our senses, to know and distinguish things:  and to examine them so far as to apply them to our uses, and several ways to accommodate the exigences of this life.  We have insight enough into their admirable contrivances and wonderful effects, to admire and magnify the wisdom, power and goodness of their Author.  Such a knowledge as this which is suited to our present condition, we want not faculties to attain.  But it appears not that God intended we should have a perfect, clear, and adequate knowledge of them:  that perhaps is not in the comprehension of any finite being.  We are furnished with faculties (dull and weak as they are) to discover enough in the creatures to lead us to the knowledge of the Creator, and the knowledge of our duty; and we are fitted well enough with abilities to provide for the conveniences of living:  these are our business in this world.  But were our senses altered, and made much quicker and acuter, the appearance and outward scheme of things would have quite another face to us; and, I am apt to think, would be inconsistent with our being, or at least wellbeing, in the part of the universe which we inhabit.  He that considers how little our constitution is able to bear a remove into part of this air, not much higher than that we commonly breathe in, will have reason to be satisfied, that in this globe of earth allotted