The 4 Causes of our Errors

71. The chief cause of our errors is in the prejudices of our childhood.

This is how we acquired most of our errors.

During the early years of our life, our mind was so closely bound to the body.

• It only focused on the things that made impressions on the body.
• It did not yet consider whether those impressions were caused by things outside the mind.

The mind only felt:

• pain when the body was hurt
• pleasure when the body was benefitted

Most of the time, the mind felt faint impressions that neither benefited nor hurt the body.

Examples are taste, odor, sound, heat, cold, light, color, etc.

These represent nothing that exists outside our mind.

Rather, these sensations vary according to the differences in the movements [of the animal spirits] that pass from all parts of the body to the part of the brain that connects so intimately to the soul.

The mind also perceived sizes, shapes, and motions, which it did not take as sensations, but as properties of things that seemed to exist outside the mind.

Then, as we grew older, our body moved haphazardly by the arrangement of its organs and encountered beneficial things or avoided harmful ones.

Size, shape, and motion are properties that truly belong to bodies.

But colors, odors, etc belong to our minds.

The mind (united closely to the body) then began reflecting on what our body encountered or avoided.

It first noticed that size, shape, and motion existed externally.

It then attributed external existence to colors, odors, etc.

The mind was so clouded by the body that it regarded other things only in terms of their usefulness.

And so the mind judged that each object had a reality depending on how strongly each object impressed itself on the mind.*

Hence the mind came to believe there was more substance or body in stones and metals than in air or water because it felt more hardness and weight in stones and metals.

It did not consider air to be anything at all when it was calm, and seemed neither hot nor cold.

The mind was unable to think that the Earth can rotate on its axis, and that it was a sphere.

• So the mind initially judged that the Earth is motionless and flat.

In this way, we became so deeply influenced by countless other prejudices that we accepted as truth.

We had made these judgments at a time when we were not yet capable of sound judgment.

Instead of realizing that they might be false, we embraced them as certain.

72. 2. We cannot forget these prejudices

In our mature years, the mind is no longer wholly subject to the body.

• It strives to judge things well and understand their nature.

Even though we know that the judgments we made as children are full of error, we nevertheless find it difficult to free ourselves from them.

Unless we acknowledge that our early beliefs were possibly false, we are always at risk of falling back into some false preconception.

For example, as children, we imagined the stars to be very small. We find it difficult to believe that they are so large even if this is assured by astronomy.

Such is the power of our former beliefs.

73. 3. Our minds get tired whenever we contemplate things

Our mind cannot attentively contemplate a single thing for long without experiencing strain and fatigue.

• It has the greatest difficulty in contemplating abstract ideas.

This is the natural disposition of the mind caused by:

• its union with the body
• it getting used to easily sensing and imagining from bodily perceptions during the earliest years of life

This is why many people cannot believe that substance exists if it is not physical, imaginable, or even sensory.

The properties of extension, movement, and shape are imaginable.

But there are many other kinds of things that are intelligible but not imaginable.

Hence most people believe that:

• nothing can exist without a body
• there is no body which is not sensible

But it is only our reason that reveals the nature of anything, not our senses.

This is why most people perceive things very confusedly, especially since very few actually commit to the careful guidance of reason.

74. 4. We attach our thoughts to words which do not express them accurately

We remember words more easily than the things themselves.

We only be clear about something if we totally separate:

• our word for that thing and
• our understanding of that thing

People tend to focus more on words than on the things themselves.

This causes them to frequently agree to words that they:

• do not understand
• do not care much to understand

This is because they:

• think that they actually understood them, or
• trust that those who taught them knew their meaning

This can help us distinguish clear and distinct conceptions from those that are confused and unknown to us.

75. Summary of what must be observed in order to philosophize correctly.

If we sincerely wish to study of philosophy and seek the truth, we must:

1. Rid ourselves of prejudices, and reject all the opinions we previously accepted until we have reexamined them thoroughly.
2. Review our notions and accept only those which we clearly and distinctly understand.

If we do this, then we will first realize that we exist.

• This is because our nature is to think

Then we will realize that there is a God whom we depend on.

After contemplating His attributes, we can seek the truth of all other things, because He is the cause of them.

Beyond the notions we have of God and of our own thinking, we will also discover within us knowledge of many propositions that are eternally true, such as: nothingness cannot be the cause of anything, and so on.

We will discover:

• the idea of a physical or extended nature, which can be moved, divided, etc.,
• sensations that cause certain dispositions within us, such as pain, colors, and the like.

And by comparing what we have learned from systematically examining these things with what we previously thought, we will get used to forming clear and distinct conceptions of everything we can know.

These few precepts have all the most important principles of human knowledge.

76. We should prefer the Divine authority over our reasoning and believe nothing not revealed unless we know it very clearly

Above all, we shall hold as an infallible rule that what God has revealed is incomparably more certain than anything else.

So that, if ever a spark of reason suggests something contrary, we must always submit our judgment to what comes from Him.

But when it comes to non-spiritual truths, a philosopher should not:

• accept something as true without knowing it to be true.
• prefer trusting their senses (the rash judgments of childhood) over their reason, especially when they can guide reason well.