on us, cause no other ideas but of their natural sounds:  and it is by the custom of using them for signs, that they excite and revive in our minds latent ideas; but yet only such ideas as were there before.  For words, seen or heard, recal to our thoughts those ideas only which to us they have been wont to be signs of, but cannot introduce any perfectly new, and formerly unknown simple ideas.  The same holds in all other signs; which cannot signify to us things of which we have before never had any idea at all.

Thus whatever things were discovered to St. Paul, when he was rapt up into the third heaven; whatever new ideas his mind there received, all the description he can make to others of that place, is only this, That there are such things, ’as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.’  And supposing God should discover to any one, supernaturally, a species of creatures inhabiting, for example, Jupiter or Saturn, (for that it is possible there may be such, nobody can deny,) which had six senses; and imprint on his mind the ideas conveyed to theirs by that sixth sense:  he could no more, by words, produce in the minds of other men those ideas imprinted by that sixth sense, than one of us could convey the idea of any colour, by the sound of words, into a man who, having the other four senses perfect, had always totally wanted the fifth, of seeing.  For our simple ideas, then, which are the foundation, and sole matter of all our notions and knowledge, we must depend wholly on our reason, I mean our natural faculties; and can by no means receive them, or any of them, from traditional revelation.  I say, traditional revelation, in distinction to original revelation.  By the one, I mean that first impression which is made immediately by God on the mind of any man, to which we cannot set any bounds; and by the other, those impressions delivered over to others in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying our conceptions one to another.

4.  Secondly, Traditional Revelation may make us know Propositions knowable also by Reason, but not with the same Certainty that Reason doth.

Secondly, I say that the same truths may be discovered, and conveyed down from revelation, which are discernable to us by reason, and by those ideas we naturally may have.  So God might, by revelation, discover the truth of any proposition in Euclid; as well as men, by the natural use of their faculties, come to make the discovery themselves.  In all things of this kind there is little need or use of revelation, God having furnished us with natural and surer means to arrive at the knowledge of them.  For whatsoever truth we come to the clear discovery of, from the knowledge and contemplation of our own