y need but turn their eyes that way. We know some
men will not read a letter which is supposed to bring ill news; and many
men forbear to cast up their accounts, or so much as think upon their
estates, who have reason to fear their affairs are in no very good
posture. How men, whose plentiful fortunes allow them leisure to improve
their understandings, can satisfy themselves with a lazy ignorance, I
cannot tell: but methinks they have a low opinion of their souls, who
lay out all their incomes in provisions for the body, and employ none of
it to procure the means and helps of knowledge; who take great care to
appear always in a neat and splendid outside, and would think themselves
miserable in coarse clothes, or a patched coat, and yet contentedly
suffer their minds to appear abroad in a piebald livery of coarse
patches and borrowed shreds, such as it has pleased chance, or their
country tailor (I mean the common opinion of those they have conversed
with) to clothe them in. I will not here mention how unreasonable this
is for men that ever think of a future state, and their concernment in
it, which no rational man can avoid to do sometimes: nor shall I take
notice what a shame and confusion it is to the greatest contemners of
knowledge, to be found ignorant in things they are concerned to
know. But this at least is worth the consideration of those who call
themselves gentlemen, That, however they may think credit, respect,
power, and authority the concomitants of their birth and fortune, yet
they will find all these still carried away from them by men of lower
condition, who surpass them in knowledge. They who are blind will
always be led by those that see, or else fall into the ditch: and he
is certainly the most subjected, the most enslaved, who is so in his
understanding. In the foregoing instances some of the causes have been
shown of wrong assent, and how it comes to pass, that probable doctrines
are not always received with an assent proportionable to the reasons
which are to be had for their probability: but hitherto we have
considered only such probabilities whose proofs do exist, but do not
appear to him who embraces the error.

7. Fourth cause of Error, Wrong Measures of Probability: which are--

FOURTHLY, There remains yet the last sort, who, even where the real
probabilities appear, and are plainly laid before them, do not admit
of the conviction, nor yield unto manifest reasons, but do either
suspend the