We must, therefore, if we will proceed as reason
advises, adapt our methods of inquiry to the nature of the ideas we
examine, and the truth we search after. General and certain truths are
only founded in the habitudes and relations of abstract ideas. A
sagacious and methodical application of our thoughts. for the
finding out these relations, is the only way to discover all that
can be put with truth and certainty concerning them into general
propositions. By what steps we are to proceed in these, is to be
learned in the schools of the mathematicians, who, from very plain and
easy beginnings, by gentle degrees, and a continued chain of
reasonings, proceed to the discovery and demonstration of truths
that appear at first sight beyond human capacity. The art of finding
proofs, and the admirable methods they have invented for the
singling out and laying in order those intermediate ideas that
demonstratively show the equality or inequality of unapplicable
quantities, is that which has carried them so far, and produced such
wonderful and unexpected discoveries: but whether something like this,
in respect of other ideas, as well as those of magnitude, may not in
time be found out, I will not determine. This, I think, I may say,
that if other ideas that are the real as well as nominal essences of
their species, were pursued in the way familiar to mathematicians,
they would carry our thoughts further, and with greater evidence and
clearness than possibly we are apt to imagine.
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