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70 talk and little knowledge, and I have nothing to say to it. But I am here inquiring into the conduct of the understanding in its progress towards knowledge; and to those who aim at that I may say, that he who fair and softly goes steadily forward in a course that points right, will sooner be at his journey’s end than he that runs after everyone he meets, though he gallop all day full speed.

To which let me add, that this way of thinking on and profiting by what we read will be a clog and rub to anyone only in the beginning: when custom and exercise have made it familiar, it will be dispatched on most occasions without resting or interruption in the course of our reading. The motions and views of a mind exercised that way are wonderfully quick, and a man used to such sort of reflections sees as much at one glimpse as would require a long discourse to lay before another, and make out in an entire and gradual deduction. Besides that, when the first difficulties are over, the delight and sensible advantage it brings mightily encourages and enlivens the mind in reading, which without this is very improperly called study.

21. Intermediate Principles.—As a help to this, I think it may be proposed that, for the saving the long progression of the thoughts to remote and first principles in every case, the mind should provide it several stages; that is to say intermediate principles which it might have recourse to in the examining those