Low Quality Knowledge

In determining of the truth of knowledge, men have put themselves on incompetent trials.

The following are not absolute nor infallible evidence of truth:

• antiquity and authority
• common and confessed notions
• the natural and yielding consent of the mind
• the harmony and coherence of a knowledge in itself
• the establishing of principles with the touch and reduction of other propositions unto them
• inductions without contradictory instances and the report of the senses

These bring no security sufficient for effects and operations.

The discovery of new works or active directions not known before, is the only trial to be accepted of.

Yet not that neither, in case where one particular giveth light to another; but where particulars induce an axiom or observation, which axiom found out discovereth and designeth new particulars.

That the nature of this trial is not only upon the point, whether the knowledge be profitable or no, but even upon the points whether the knowledge be true or no. Not because you may always conclude, that the axiom which discovereth new instances is true; but contrariwise you may safely conclude, that if it discover not any new instance, it is in vain and untrue.

That by new instances are not always to be understood new recipes, but new assignations; and of the diversity between these two.

That the subtilty of words, arguments, notions, yea of the senses themselves, is but rude and gross in comparison of the subtilty of things.

And of the slothful and flattering opinions of those which pretend to honour the mind of man in withdrawing and abstracting it from particulars; and of the inducements and motives whereupon such opinions have been conceived and received.