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.