Mathematicians abstracting their
thoughts from names, and accustoming themselves to set before their
minds the ideas themselves that they would consider, and not sounds
instead of them, have avoided thereby a great part of that perplexity,
puddering, and confusion, which has so much hindered men's progress in
other parts of knowledge. For whilst they stick in words of
undetermined and uncertain signification, they are unable to
distinguish true from false, certain from probable, consistent from
inconsistent, in their own opinions. This having been the fate or
misfortune of a great part of men of letters, the increase brought
into the stock of real knowledge has been very little, in proportion
to the schools, disputes, and writings, the world has been filled
with; whilst students, being lost in the great wood of words, knew not
whereabouts they were, how far their discoveries were advanced, or
what was wanting in their own, or the general stock of knowledge.
Had men, in the discoveries of the material, done as they have in
those of the intellectual world, involved all in the obscurity of
uncertain and doubtful ways of talking, volumes writ of navigation and
voyages, theories and stories of zones and tides, multiplied and
disputed; nay, ships built, and fleets sent out, would never have
taught us the way beyond the line; and the Antipodes would be still as
much unknown, as when it was declared heresy to hold there were any.
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