to put him in possession of truth, and I would fain
know what truths these two propositions are able to
teach, and by their influence make us know which we
did not know before, or could not know without them.
Let us reason from them as well as we can, they are
only about identical predications, and influence,
if any at all, none but such. Each particular
proposition concerning identity or diversity is as
clearly and certainly known in itself, if attended
to, as either of these general ones: [only these
general ones, as serving in all cases, are therefore
more inculcated and insisted on.] As to other less
general maxims, many of them are no more than bare
verbal propositions, and teach us nothing but the
respect and import of names one to another. ‘The
whole is equal to all its parts:’ what real
truth, I beseech you, does it teach us? What
more is contained in that maxim, than what the signification
of the word TOTUM, or the whole, does of itself
import? And he that knows that the word
whole stands for what is made up of all its parts,
knows very little less than that the whole is equal
to all its parts. And, upon the same ground,
I think that this proposition, ’A hill is higher
than a valley’, and several the like, may also
pass for maxims. But yet [masters of mathematics,
when they would, as teachers of what they know, initiate
others in that science do not] without reason place
this and some other such maxims [at the entrance of
their systems]; that their scholars, having in the
beginning perfectly acquainted their thoughts with
these propositions, made in such general terms, may
be used to make such reflections, and have these more
general propositions, as formed rules and sayings,
ready to apply to all particular cases. Not that
if they be equally weighed, they are more clear and
evident than the particular instances they are brought
to confirm; but that, being more familiar to the mind,
the very naming them is enough to satisfy the understanding.
But this, I say, is more from our custom of using
them, and the establishment they have got in our minds
by our often thinking of them, than from the different
evidence of the things. But before custom has
settled methods of thinking and reasoning in our minds,
I am apt to imagine it is quite otherwise; and that
the child, when a part of his apple is taken away,
knows it better in that particular instance, than
by this general proposition, ’The whole is equal
to all its parts;’ and that, if one of these
have need to be confirmed to him by the other, the
general has more need to be let into his mind by the
particular, than the particular by the general.
For in particulars our knowledge begins, and
so spreads itself, by degrees, to generals
[Footnote: This is the order in time of the conscious
acquistion of knowledge that is human. The Essay
might be regarded as a commentary on this one sentence.
Our intellectual progress is from particulars and
involuntary recipiency, through reactive doubt and