SCALING LADDER OF THE INTELLECT. 425 



hope of effectually investigating truth, they have cut the 

 very sinews of human industry, and by a promiscuous 

 license of disquisition converted what should have been the 

 labour of discovery into a mere exercise of talent and dis 

 putation. 



We cannot however deny, that if there be any fellowship 

 between the ancients and ourselves, it is principally as con 

 nected with this species of philosophy : as we concur in 

 many things which they have judiciously observed and 

 stated about the varying nature of the senses, the weakness 

 of human judgment, and the propriety of withholding or 

 suspending assent; to which we might add innumerable 

 other remarks of a similar tendency. So that the only dif 

 ference between them and ourselves is that they affirm 

 &quot; nothing can be perfectly known by any method whatever ;&quot; 

 we, that &quot; nothing can be perfectly known by the methods 

 which mankind have hitherto pursued.&quot; Of this fellowship 

 we are not at all ashamed. For the aggregate, if it consists 

 not of those alone who lay down the abovementioned dogma 

 as their peremptory and unchangeable opinion, but of such 

 also as indirectly maintain it under the forms of objection 

 and interrogatory, or by their indignant complaints about 

 the obscurity of things, confess and, as it were, proclaim it 

 aloud, or suffer it only to transpire from their secret thoughts 

 in occasional and ambiguous whispers the aggregate, I 

 say, comprises, you will find, the far most illustrious and 

 profound of the ancient thinkers, with whom no modern 

 need blush to be associated ; a few of them may, perhaps, 

 too magisterially have assumed to decide the matter, yet 

 this tone of authority prevailed only during the late dark 

 ages, and now maintains its ground simply through a spirit 

 of party, the inveteracy of habit, or mere carelessness and 

 neglect. 



Yet in the fellowship here spoken of, it is easy to discover 

 that, agreeing as we do with the great men alluded to, as 

 to the premises of our opinions, in our conclusions we differ 

 from them most widely. Our discrepancies may indeed, 

 at first sight, appear to be but inconsiderable ; they asserting 

 the absolute, and we the modified incompetency of the 

 human intellect; but the practical result is this that as 

 they neither point out, nor in fact profess to expect any 

 remedy for the defect in question, they wholly give up the 

 business ; and thus, by denying the certainty of the senses, 

 pluck up science from its very foundation ; whereas we, by 

 the introduction of a new method, endeavour to regulate 



