In order to produce any mechanical instrument, he says, we require others with which to manufacture it; and others again to manufacture those; and it would seem thus as if the process must be an infinite one, and as if nothing could ever be made at all.  Nature, however, has provided for the difficulty in creating of her own accord certain rude instruments, with the help of which we can make others better; and others again with the help of those.  And so he thinks it must be with the mind, and there must be somewhere similar original instruments provided also as the first outfit of intellectual enterprise.  To discover them, he examines the various senses in which men are said to know anything, and he finds that these senses resolve themselves into three, or, as he elsewhere divides it, four:—­ We know a thing,

1. i.  Ex mero auditu:  because we have heard it from some person or persons whose veracity we have no reason to question. ii.  Ab experientia vaga:  from general experience:  for instance, all facts or phenomena which come to us through our senses as phenomena, but of the causes of which we are ignorant.

2.  These two in Ethics are classed together.

As we have correctly conceived the laws of such phenomena, and see them following in their sequence m the order of nature.

3.  Ex scientia intuitiva:  which alone is absolutely clear and certain.

To illustrate these divisions, suppose it be required to find a fourth proportional which shall stand to the third of three numbers as the second does to the first.  The merchant’s clerk knows his rule; he multiplies the second into the third and divides by the first.  He neither knows nor cares to know why the result is the number which he seeks, but he has learnt the fact that it is so, and he remembers it.

A person a little wiser has tried the experiment in a variety of simple cases; he has discovered the rule by induction, but still does not understand it.

A third has mastered the laws of proportion mathematically, as he has found them in Euclid or other geometrical treatise.

A fourth with the plain numbers of 1, 2, and 3, sees for himself by simple intuitive force that 1:2 = 3:6.

Of these several kinds of knowledge the third and fourth alone deserve to be called knowledge, the others being no more than opinions more or less justly founded.  The last is the only real insight, although the third, being exact in its form, may be depended upon as a basis of certainty.  Under this last, as Spinoza allows, nothing except the very simplest truths non nisi simplicissimae veritates can be perceived, but, such as they are, they are the foundation of all after science; and the true ideas, the verae ideae, which are apprehended by this faculty of intuition, are the primitive instruments with which nature has furnished us.  If we ask for a test by which to distinguish them, he has none to give us.  “Veritas,”