is only this, That
there are such things, 'as eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath
it entered into the heart of man to conceive.' And supposing God should
discover to any one, supernaturally, a species of creatures inhabiting,
for example, Jupiter or Saturn, (for that it is possible there may be
such, nobody can deny,) which had six senses; and imprint on his mind
the ideas conveyed to theirs by that sixth sense: he could no more, by
words, produce in the minds of other men those ideas imprinted by that
sixth sense, than one of us could convey the idea of any colour, by the
sound of words, into a man who, having the other four senses perfect,
had always totally wanted the fifth, of seeing. For our simple ideas,
then, which are the foundation, and sole matter of all our notions and
knowledge, we must depend wholly on our reason, I mean our natural
faculties; and can by no means receive them, or any of them, from
traditional revelation. I say, TRADITIONAL REVELATION, in distinction to
ORIGINAL REVELATION. By the one, I mean that first impression which is
made immediately by God on the mind of any man, to which we cannot set
any bounds; and by the other, those impressions delivered over to others
in words, and the ordinary ways of conveying our conceptions one to
another.

4. Secondly, Traditional Revelation may make us know Propositions
knowable also by Reason, but not with the same Certainty that Reason
doth.

SECONDLY, I say that THE SAME TRUTHS MAY BE DISCOVERED, AND CONVEYED
DOWN FROM REVELATION, WHICH ARE DISCERNABLE TO US BY REASON, AND BY
THOSE IDEAS WE NATURALLY MAY HAVE. So God might, by revelation, discover
the truth of any proposition in Euclid; as well as men, by the natural
use of their faculties, come to make the discovery themselves. In all
things of this kind there is little need or use of revelation, God
having furnished us with natural and surer means to arrive at the
knowledge of them. For whatsoever truth we come to the clear discovery
of, from the knowledge and contemplation of our own ideas, will always
be certainer to us than those which are conveyed to us by TRADITIONAL
REVELATION. For the knowledge we have that this revelation came at first
from God, can never be so sure as the knowledge we have from the clear
and distinct perception of the agreement or disagreement of our own
ideas: v.g. if it were revealed some ages since, that the three angles
of a triangle were equal to two right one