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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVOLUTION
of the methods which have been pursued. Men have sought to make the world from their own conception, and to draw from their own minds all the materials which they employed; but if, instead of doing so, they had consulted experience and observation, they would have had facts, and not opinions, to reason about, and might have ultimately arrived at the knowledge of the laws which govern the material world. As things are at present conducted, a sudden transition is made from sensible objects and particular facts, to general propositions which are accepted principles, and round which, as round so many fixed poles, disputations and arguments continually revolve. From the propositions thus hastily assumed, all things are derived by a process compendious and precipitate, ill suited to discovery, but wonderfully accommodated to debate. The way that promises success is the reverse of this. It requires that we should generalise slowly, going from particular things to those that are but one step more general; from those to others of still greater extent, and soon to such as are universal. By such means we may hope to arrive at principles, not vague and obscure, but luminous and well-defined, such as nature herself will not refuse to accept. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain; but the mental operation which follows the act of sense, I, for
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