9. Because maxims or axioms are not the truths we first knew.
First, That they are not the truths first known to the
mind is evident to experience, as we have shown in another place. (Bk. I. chap. i.) Who perceives not that a child
certainly knows that a stranger is not its mother; that its sucking-bottle is not the rod, long before he knows that "it
is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be?" And how many truths are there about numbers, which it is
obvious to observe that the mind is perfectly acquainted with, and fully convinced of, before it ever thought on
these general maxims, to which mathematicians, in their arguings, do sometimes refer them? Whereof the reason
is very plain: for that which makes the mind assent to such propositions, being nothing else but the perception it
has of the agreement or disagreement of its ideas, according as it finds them affirmed or denied one of another in
words it understands; and every idea being known to be what it is, and every two distinct ideas being known not
to be the same; it must necessarily follow, that such self-evident truths must be first known which consist of ideas
that are first in the mind. And the ideas first in the mind, it is evident, are those of particular things, from whence,
by slow degrees, the understanding proceeds to some few general ones; which being taken from the ordinary and
familiar objects of sense, are settled in the mind, with general names to them. Thus particular ideas are first
received and distinguished, and so knowledge got about them; and next to them, the less general or specific,
which are next to particular. For abstract ideas are not so obvious or easy to children, or the yet unexercised mind,
as particular ones. If they seem so to grown men, it is only because by constant and familiar use they are made so.
For, when we nicely reflect upon them, we shall find that general ideas are fictions and contrivances of the mind,
that carry difficulty with them, and do not so easily offer themselves as we are apt to imagine. For example, does
it not require some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle, (which is yet none of the most abstract,
comprehensive, and difficult,) for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor
scalenon; but all and none of these at once. In effect, it is something imperfect, that cannot exist; an idea wherein
some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together. It is true, the mind, in this imperfect state,
has need of such ideas, and makes all the haste to them it can, for the conveniency of communication and
enlargement of knowledge; to both which it is naturally very much inclined. But yet one has reason to suspect
such ideas are marks of our imperfection; at least, this is enough to show that the most abstract and general ideas
are not those that the mind is first and most easily acquainted with, nor such as its earliest knowledge is
conversant about.
