Focusing the Mind

The mind’s keenness should:

• be turned entirely to the smallest and most easily understandable matters, and
• dwell on them longer until we become used to discerning truth clearly.

The 2 principal faculties of the mind are:

• perspicacity
  • This distinctly intuits individual things
• sagacity
  • This artfully deduces one thing from another.

We know how intuition should be used from the comparison of the eyes.

• When we look at many objects at the same time with the same glance, we see none of them distinctly

He who is used to attend to many things at once in a single act of thought has a confused mind.

But those craftsmen who are engaged in minute works and are used to direct their eye attentively to each point acquire the capacity by practice to perfectly distinguish things however minute and subtle they may be.

So too those who never distract their thoughts with various objects but always occupy themselves with considering each simplest and easiest thing become perspicacious.

Nature is Simple

Mortals commonly wrongly regard the more difficult things as being more beautiful.

Most people think they know nothing when they see a very clear and simple cause of something, while they admire lofty and deeply sought-after reasonings of philosophers, even if these mostly rest on foundations that have never been sufficiently examined by anyone, certainly not in good health who hold darkness more dear than light.

Those who truly know recognize truth with equal ease, whether they have derived it from a simple subject or from an obscure one: for they grasp each with a similar, unique, and distinct act, once they have arrived at it;

But there is an entire diversity in the path, which certainly must be longer if it leads to truth from the most remote and most absolute principles.

Therefore, everyone must accustom themselves to embrace as few and as simple things as possible in thought. In this way, they never think they know anything unless they see it as distinctly as they see that which they know most distinctly of all.

Some are born more suitable for this than others.

But minds can be made more suitable for this by skill and exercise.

Everyone firmly persuades themselves that the sciences, no matter how hidden, must be deduced not from great and obscure things, but only from easy and more obvious ones.

• This is the one thing that I want to emphasize the most

For example, if I wish to examine whether any natural power can travel instantly to a distant place through the whole medium, I will think of the local motions of bodies.

• This is because it is the most perceptible in this whole category. [3rd Element]
• I will not think of magnetism or the influences of the stars, nor even to the speed of light. [1st Element]

I see that a stone cannot move from one place to another instantly simply because it is a body.

Instead, the power that moves the stone can only be communicated instantly if that power passes from one subject to another without any body, as in the case of a stick.

If I move one end of a very long stick, the power that moves that part of the stick necessarily moves at the same time all its other parts.

This is because that power is communicated without a body, such as a stone from which it is carried.

Balance and Symmetry

From one simple cause, contrary effects can be produced simultaneously.

If I want to know why this is, then I will not:

• borrow from physicians the medicines that expel certain humors and retain others
• consult fortune-tellers about the moon, that it warms through light and cools through some hidden quality

Instead, I will look at a balance [symmetry in Physics], in which the same weight at one and the same instant raises one end of the beam while depressing the other, and the like.