others. The inability I here speak of, is not any natural defect that makes men incapable of examining their own principles. To such, rules of conducting their understandings are useless, and that is the case of very few. The great number is of those whom the ill habit of never exerting their thoughts has disabled; the powers of their minds are starved by disuse and have lost that reach and strength which nature fitted them to receive from exercise. Those who are in a condition to learn the first rules of plain arithmetic, and could be brought to cast up an ordinary sum, are capable of this, if they had but accustomed their minds to reasoning; but they that have wholly neglected the exercise of their understandings in this way, will be very far at first from being able to do it, and as unfit for it as one unpracticed in figures to east up a shop-book, and perhaps think it as strange to be set about it. And yet it must nevertheless be confessed to be a wrong use of our understandings to build our tenets (in things where we are concerned to hold the truth) upon principles that may lead us into error. We take our principles at haphazard upon trust, and without ever having examined them, and then believe a whole system upon a presumption that they are true and solid: and what is all this but childish, shameful, senseless credulity?
In these two things, viz., an equal indifferency for all truth—I mean the receiving it, the love of it, as truth, but not loving it for any other reason, before we know it to be true—and in the examination of our principles, and not receiving any for such, nor building on them, till we are fully convinced as rational creatures of their solidity, truth, and certainty, consists that
