Few men have, I believe, consulted others, both the living and the dead, with less presumption, and in a greater spirit of docility, than I have done:  and the more I have consulted, the less have I found of that inward conviction on which a mind that is not absolutely implicit can rest.  I thought for a time that this must be my fault.  I distrusted myself, not my teachers—­men of the greatest name, ancient and modern.  But I found at last that it was safer to trust myself than them, and to proceed by the light of my own understanding than to wander after these ignes fatui of philosophy.  If I am able therefore to tell you easily, and at the same time so clearly and distinctly as to be easily understood, and so strongly as not to be easily refuted, how I have thought for myself, I shall be persuaded that I have thought enough on these subjects.  If I am not able to do this, it will be evident that I have not thought on them enough.  I must review my opinions, discover and correct my errors.

I have said that the subjects I mean, and which will be the principal objects of these essays, are those of the first philosophy; and it is fit, therefore, that I should explain what I understand by the first philosophy.  Do not imagine that I understand what has passed commonly under that name—­metaphysical pneumatics, for instance, or ontology.  The first are conversant about imaginary substances, such as may and may not exist.  That there is a God we can demonstrate; and although we know nothing of His manner of being, yet we acknowledge Him to be immaterial, because a thousand absurdities, and such as imply the strongest contradiction, result from the supposition that the Supreme Being is a system of matter.  But of any other spirits we neither have nor can have any knowledge:  and no man will be inquisitive about spiritual physiognomy, nor go about to inquire, I believe, at this time, as Evodius inquired of St. Austin, whether our immaterial part, the soul, does not remain united, when it forsakes this gross terrestrial body, to some ethereal body more subtile and more fine; which was one of the Pythagorean and Platonic whimsies:  nor be under any concern to know, if this be not the case of the dead, how souls can be distinguished after their separation—­that of Dives, for example, from that of Lazarus.  The second—­that is, ontology—­ treats most scientifically of being abstracted from all being ("de ente quatenus ens").  It came in fashion whilst Aristotle was in fashion, and has been spun into an immense web out of scholastic brains.  But it should be, and I think it is already, left to the acute disciples of Leibnitz, who dug for gold in the ordure of the schools, and to other German wits.  Let them darken by tedious definitions what is too plain to need any; or let them employ their vocabulary of barbarous terms to propagate an unintelligible jargon, which is supposed to express such abstractions as they cannot make, and according to which, however, they presume often to control the particular and most evident truths of experimental knowledge.  Such reputed science deserves no rank in philosophy, not the last, and much less the first.