13. Judgment of probability concerning substances may reach further:
but that is not knowledge. We are not therefore to wonder, if
certainty be to be found in very few general propositions made
concerning substances: our knowledge of their qualities and properties
goes very seldom further than our senses reach and inform us. Possibly
inquisitive and observing men may, by strength of judgment,
penetrate further, and, on probabilities taken from wary
observation, and hints well laid together, often guess right at what
experience has not yet discovered to them. But this is but guessing
still; it amounts only to opinion, and has not that certainty which is
requisite to knowledge. For all general knowledge lies only in our own
thoughts, and consists barely in the contemplation of our own abstract
ideas. Wherever we perceive any agreement or disagreement amongst
them, there we have general knowledge; and by putting the names of
those ideas together accordingly in propositions, can with certainty
pronounce general truths. But because the abstract ideas of
substances, for which their specific names stand, whenever they have
any distinct and determinate signification, have a discoverable
connexion or inconsistency with but a very few other ideas, the
certainty of universal propositions concerning substances is very
narrow and scanty, in that part which is our principal inquiry
concerning them; and there are scarce any of the names of
substances, let the idea it is applied to be what it will, of which we
can generally, and with certainty, pronounce, that it has or has not
this or that other quality belonging to it, and constantly co-existing
or inconsistent with that idea, wherever it is to be found.
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