custom has rendered too familiar to it. A correct _Judgement_ observes a
contrary method, and avoiding all distant and high enquiries, confines
itself to common life, and to such subjects as fall under daily practice
and experience; leaving the more sublime topics to the embellishment of
poets and orators, or to the arts of priests and politicians. To bring
us to so salutary a determination, nothing can be more serviceable, than
to be once thoroughly convinced of the force of the Pyrrhonian doubt,
and of the impossibility, that anything, but the strong power of natural
instinct, could free us from it. Those who have a propensity to
philosophy, will still continue their researches; because they reflect,
that, besides the immediate pleasure, attending such an occupation,
philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life,
methodized and corrected. But they will never be tempted to go beyond
common life, so long as they consider the imperfection of those
faculties which they employ, their narrow reach, and their inaccurate
operations. While we cannot give a satisfactory reason, why we believe,
after a thousand experiments, that a stone will fall, or fire burn; can
we ever satisfy ourselves concerning any determination, which we may
form, with regard to the origin of worlds, and the situation of nature,
from, and to eternity?

This narrow limitation, indeed, of our enquiries, is, in every respect,
so reasonable, that it suffices to make the slightest examination into
the natural powers of the human mind and to compare them with their
objects, in order to recommend it to us. We shall then find what are the
proper subjects of science and enquiry.

131. It seems to me, that the only objects of the abstract science or of
demonstration are quantity and number, and that all attempts to extend
this more perfect species of knowledge beyond these bounds are mere