selves are not all perfect. And it is
evident that falsity or imperfection can no more come forth from God
than can perfection proceed from nothingness. But, did we not know that
all which is in us of the real and the true comes from a perfect and
infinite being, however clear and distinct our ideas might be, we should
have no reason for assurance that they possessed the final
perfection--truth.

Reason instructs us that all our ideas must have some foundation of
truth, for it could not be that the All-Perfect and the All-True should
otherwise have put them into us; and because our reasonings are never so
evident or so complete when we sleep as when we wake, although sometimes
during sleep our imagination may be more vivid and positive, it also
instructs us that such truth as our thoughts have will assuredly be in
our waking thoughts rather than in our dreams.

_V.--WHY I DO NOT PUBLISH "THE WORLD"_

I have always remained firm in my resolve to assume no other principle
than that which I have used to demonstrate the existence of God and of
the soul, and to receive nothing which did not seem to me clearer and
more certain than the demonstrations of the philosophers had seemed
before; yet not only have I found means of satisfying myself with regard
to the principal difficulties which are usually treated of in
philosophy, but also I have remarked certain laws which God has so
established in nature, and of which He has implanted such notions in our
souls, that we cannot doubt that they are observed in all which happens
in the world.

The principal truths which flow from these I have tried to unfold in a
treatise ("On the World, or on Light"), which certain considerations
prevent me from publishing. This I concluded three years ago, and had
begun to revise it for the printer when I learned that certain persons
to whom I defer had disapproved an opinion on physics published a short
time before by a certain person [Galileo, condemned by the Roman
Inquisition in 1633], in which opinion I had noticed nothing prejudicial
to religion; and this made me fear that there might be some among my
opinions in which I was mistaken.

I now believe that I ought to continue to write all the things which I
judge of importance, but ought in no wise to consent to their
publication during my life. For my experience of the objections which
might be made forbids me to hope for any profit from them. I have tried
both friends and enemies, y