I dare not promise that the sections or members of these essays will bear that nice proportion to one another and to the whole which a severe critic would require.  All I dare promise you is that my thoughts, in what order soever they flow, shall be communicated to you just as they pass through my mind, just as they use to be when we converse together on these or any other subjects when we saunter alone, or, as we have often done with good Arbuthnot and the jocose Dean of St. Patrick’s, among the multiplied scenes of your little garden.  That theatre is large enough for my ambition.  I dare not pretend to instruct mankind, and I am not humble enough to write to the public for any other purpose.  I mean by writing on such subjects as I intend here, to make some trial of my progress in search of the most important truths, and to make this trial before a friend in whom I think I may confide.  These epistolary essays, therefore, will be written with as little regard to form and with as little reserve as I used to show in the conversations which have given occasion to them, when I maintained the same opinions and insisted on the same reasons in defence of them.

It might seem strange to a man not well acquainted with the world, and in particular with the philosophical and theological tribe, that so much precaution should be necessary in the communication of our thoughts on any subject of the first philosophy, which is of common concern to the whole race of mankind, and wherein no one can have, according to nature and truth, any separate interest.  Yet so it is.  The separate interests we cannot have by God’s institutions, are created by those of man; and there is no subject on which men deal more unfairly with one another than this.  There are separate interests, to mention them in general only, of prejudice and of profession.  By the first, men set out in the search of truth under the conduct of error, and work up their heated imaginations often to such a delirium that the more genius, and the more learning they have, the madder they grow.  By the second, they are sworn, as it were, to follow all their lives the authority of some particular school, to which “tanquam scopulo, adhaerescunt;” for the condition of their engagement is to defend certain doctrines, and even mere forms of speech, without examination, or to examine only in order to defend them.  By both, they become philosophers as men became Christians in the primitive Church, or as they determined themselves about disputed doctrines; for says Hilarius, writing to St. Austin, “Your holiness knows that the greatest part of the faithful embrace, or refuse to embrace, a doctrine for no reason but the impression which the name and authority of some body or other makes on them.”  What now can a man who seeks truth for the sake of truth, and is indifferent where he finds it, expect from any communication of his thoughts to such men as these?  He will be much deceived if he expects anything better than imposition or altercation.