LETTERS FROM THE CABALA. 85 



and the crafts-masters are not only despised, but named with 

 derision. Whereupon to make good your principal asser 

 tion, methinks you should have drawn the most of your 

 examples from that which is taught in the liberal sciences, 

 not by picking out cases that happen very seldom, and may 

 by all confession be subject to reproof, but by controlling 

 the generals, and grounds, and eminent positions and apho 

 risms, which the greatest artists and philosophers have from 

 time to time defended; for it goeth for current among all 

 men of learning, that those kinds of arts which clerks in 

 times past did term Quadrivials, confirm their propositions 

 by infallible demonstrations. And likewise in Trivials, such 

 lessons and directions are delivered unto us, as will effect 

 very near, or as much altogether, as every faculty doth 

 promise. Now in case we should concur to do as you 

 advise, which is, to renounce our common notions, and 

 cancel all our theorems, axioms^ rules, and tenets, and 

 so to come babes &quot; adregnum naturae,&quot; as we are willed by 

 scriptures to come &quot; ad regnum coelorum.&quot; There is nothing 

 more certain, in my understanding, than that it would 

 instantly bring us to barbarism, and after many thousand 

 years, leave us more unprovided of theorical furniture, 

 than we are at this present : For thai were indeed to 

 become &quot;Tabula rasa,&quot; when we shall leave no impression of 

 any former principles, but be driven to begin the world 

 again, to travel by trials of actions and sense, (which are 

 your proofs by particulars) what to place in &quot; intellectu&quot; for 

 our general conceptions, it being a maxim o (&amp;gt; all men s 

 approving; &quot; in intellectu nihil esse quod non prius fuit in 

 sensu.&quot; And so in appearance it would befail us, that till 

 Plato s year be come about, our insight in learning would be 

 of less reckoning than now it is accounted. As for that 

 which you inculcate, of a knowledge more excellent than 

 now is among us, which experience might produce, if we 

 would but essay to extract it out of nature by particular 



