Discourse on the Method of Reasoning | Page 7

successively determined, and, as it were, forced
upon them simply by experience of the hurtfulness of particular crimes
and disputes, would by this process come to be possessed of less
perfect institutions than those which, from the commencement of their
association as communities, have followed the appointments of some
wise legislator. It is thus quite certain that the constitution of the true
religion, the ordinances of which are derived from God, must be
incomparably superior to that of every other. And, to speak of human
affairs, I believe that the pre-eminence of Sparta was due not to the
goodness of each of its laws in particular, for many of these were very
strange, and even opposed to good morals, but to the circumstance that,
originated by a single individual, they all tended to a single end. In the
same way I thought that the sciences contained in books (such of them
at least as are made up of probable reasonings, without demonstrations),
composed as they are of the opinions of many different individuals
massed together, are farther removed from truth than the simple
inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and
unprejudiced judgment draws respecting the matters of his experience.
And because we have all to pass through a state of infancy to manhood,
and have been of necessity, for a length of time, governed by our
desires and preceptors (whose dictates were frequently conflicting,
while neither perhaps always counseled us for the best), I farther
concluded that it is almost impossible that our judgments can be so
correct or solid as they would have been, had our reason been mature
from the moment of our birth, and had we always been guided by it
alone.
It is true, however, that it is not customary to pull down all the houses

of a town with the single design of rebuilding them differently, and
thereby rendering the streets more handsome; but it often happens that
a private individual takes down his own with the view of erecting it
anew, and that people are even sometimes constrained to this when
their houses are in danger of falling from age, or when the foundations
are insecure. With this before me by way of example, I was persuaded
that it would indeed be preposterous for a private individual to think of
reforming a state by fundamentally changing it throughout, and
overturning it in order to set it up amended; and the same I thought was
true of any similar project for reforming the body of the sciences, or the
order of teaching them established in the schools: but as for the
opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could
not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I
might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or
even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of reason.
I firmly believed that in this way I should much better succeed in the
conduct of my life, than if I built only upon old foundations, and leaned
upon principles which, in my youth, I had taken upon trust. For
although I recognized various difficulties in this undertaking, these
were not, however, without remedy, nor once to be compared with such
as attend the slightest reformation in public affairs. Large bodies, if
once overthrown, are with great difficulty set up again, or even kept
erect when once seriously shaken, and the fall of such is always
disastrous. Then if there are any imperfections in the constitutions of
states (and that many such exist the diversity of constitutions is alone
sufficient to assure us), custom has without doubt materially smoothed
their inconveniences, and has even managed to steer altogether clear of,
or insensibly corrected a number which sagacity could not have
provided against with equal effect; and, in fine, the defects are almost
always more tolerable than the change necessary for their removal; in
the same manner that highways which wind among mountains, by
being much frequented, become gradually so smooth and commodious,
that it is much better to follow them than to seek a straighter path by
climbing over the tops of rocks and descending to the bottoms of
precipices.
Hence it is that I cannot in any degree approve of those restless and

busy meddlers who, called neither by birth nor fortune to take part in
the management of public affairs, are yet always projecting reforms;
and if I thought that this tract contained aught which might justify the
suspicion that I was a victim of such folly, I would by no means permit
its publication. I have never contemplated anything higher than the
reformation of my own opinions, and basing them on a foundation
wholly my own.