This often
happens, and is hardly avoidable in very complex moral ideas, where
the same name being retained, one angle, i.e. one simple idea, is left
out, or put in the complex one (still called by the same name) more at
one time than another. Secondly, From the complexedness of these moral
ideas there follows another inconvenience, viz. that the mind cannot
easily retain those precise combinations so exactly and perfectly as
is necessary in the examination of the habitudes and
correspondences, agreements or disagreements, of several of them one
with another; especially where it is to be judged of by long
deductions, and the intervention of several other complex ideas to
show the agreement or disagreement of two remote ones.
The great help against this which mathematicians find in diagrams
and figures, which remain unalterable in their draughts, is very
apparent, and the memory would often have great difficulty otherwise
to retain them so exactly, whilst the mind went over the parts of them
step by step to examine their several correspondences. And though in
casting up a long sum either in addition, multiplication, or division,
every part be only a progression of the mind taking a view of its
own ideas, and considering their agreement or disagreement, and the
resolution of the question be nothing but the result of the whole,
made up of such particulars, whereof the mind has a clear
perception: yet, without setting down the several parts by marks,
whose precise significations are known, and by marks that last, and
remain in view when the memory had let them go, it would be almost
impossible to carry so many different ideas in the mind, without
confounding or letting slip some parts of the reckoning, and thereby
making all our reasonings about it useless.
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