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His faculties being innate and unadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms; he will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What contradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict reason, beauty, and necessity.
It is not enough, perhaps, to reach the ear of his auditor: 'peradventure' he too 'will also pierce it. It is not enough to draw diagrams in chalk on a black board in this kind of mathematics, where the will and the affections are the pupils, and standing ready to defy axioms, prepared at any moment to demonstrate practically, that the part is greater than the whole, and face down the universe with it, 'murdering impossibility to make what cannot be, slight work. It is not enough to have a tradition that is clear, or as clear a one as will pass muster with the government and with the preconceptions of the people themselves.
The ideas first known are not general axioms and abstract concepts, but particular impressions of the senses. Would nature write so illegible a hand that the mind must wait a long time before becoming able to read what had been inscribed upon it?
Little wonder that the more logical the American argument became the less intelligible it appeared to most Englishmen, and what seemed at last the very axioms of politics to the colonial radical struck the conservative British mind as the sophistry of men bent on revolution.
But that isn't a very healthy frame of mind, always to be suppressing and guarding yourself." Peter didn't know about that. He was inclined to argue the matter, but Cissie wouldn't argue. She seemed to assume that all of her statements were axioms, truths reduced to the simplest possible mental terms, and that proof was unnecessary, if not impossible. So the topic went into the discard.
To accomplish the change was like a reflux of being, and this when the plasticity of youth was no longer his; when the fibre of him had become tough and knotty; when the warp and the woof of him had made of him an adamantine texture, harsh and unyielding; when the face of his spirit had become iron and all his instincts and axioms had crystallised into set rules, cautions, dislikes, and desires.
He came down to more ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me," he said, "but salvage!" He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings "It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.
'For on account of the rawness and unskilfulness of the hands through which they pass, there is no difficulty in inserting such intimations as to the latitude of the axioms which these particular instances adduced here, and 'others which might perhaps be added, are expected to yield.
Bacon declares three things indispensable for the attainment of this power-giving knowledge: the mind must understand the instruments of knowledge; it must turn to experience, deriving the materials of knowledge from perception; and it must not rise from particular principles to the higher axioms too rapidly, but steadily and gradually through middle axioms.
For one who is convinced of the untrustworthiness of the reason and her lack of competence in things supernatural, it is in no wise contradictory or impossible to receive as true things which she declares to be false; he will thank God for the gift of a faith which is entirely independent of the clearness of its objects and of its agreement with the axioms of philosophy.
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