A State Is Better Governed

What Then Is The Source Of My Errors? They Are Owing Simply To The Fact That, Since The Will Extends Further Than The Intellect, I Do Not Contain The Will Within The Same Boundaries; Rather, I Also Extend It To Things I Do Not Understand. Because The Will Is Indifferent In Regard To Such Matters, It Easily Turns Away From The True And The Good; And In This Way I Am Deceived And I Sin.

I Concluded That I Might Take As A General Rule The Principle That All Things Which We Very Clearly And Obviously Conceive Are True: Only Observing, However, That There Is Some Difficulty In Rightly Determining The Objects Which We Distinctly Conceive.

Some Years Ago I Was Struck By The Large Number Of Falsehoods That I Had Accepted As True In My Childhood, And By The Highly Doubtful Nature Of The Whole Edifice That I Had Subsequently Based On Them. I Realized That It Was Necessary, Once In The Course Of My Life, To Demolish Everything Completely And Start Again Right From The Foundations If I Wanted To Establish Anything At All In The Sciences That Was Stable And Likely To Last.

These Long Chains Of Perfectly Simple And Easy Reasonings By Means Of Which Geometers Are Accustomed To Carry Out Their Most Difficult Demonstrations Had Led Me To Fancy That Everything That Can Fall Under Human Knowledge Forms A Similar Sequence; And That So Long As We Avoid Accepting As True What Is Not So, And Always Preserve The Right Order Of Deduction Of One Thing From Another, There Can Be Nothing Too Remote To Be Reached In The End, Or To Well Hidden To Be Discovered.

Neither The True Nor The False Roots Are Always Real; Sometimes They Are Imaginary; That Is, While We Can Always Imagine As Many Roots For Each Equation As I Have Assigned, Yet There Is Not Always A Definite Quantity Corresponding To Each Root We Have Imagined.