Top Highlights

• The aim of our studies should be to direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgements about whatever comes before it.
• Thus they erroneously compare the sciences, which entirely consists in the cognitive exercise of the mind, with the arts, which depend upon an exercise and disposition of the body.
• We should attend only to those objects of which our minds seem capable of having certain and indubitable cognition.
• Thus in accordance with the above maxim we reject all such merely probable knowledge and make it a rule to trust only what is completely known and incapable of being doubted.
• We must note then that there are two ways by which we arrive at the knowledge of facts, viz. by experience and by deduction.