Particular matters of fact are the undoubted foundations on which our civil and natural knowledge is built;the benefit the understanding makes of them is to draw from them conclusions which may be as standing rules of knowledge and consequently of practice.The mind often makes not that benefit it should of the information it receives from the accounts of civil or natural historians,in being too forward or too slow in making observations on the particular facts recorded in them.There are those who are very assiduous in reading and yet do not much advance their knowledge by it.
They are delighted with the stories that are told and perhaps can tell them again,for they make all they read nothing but history to themselves;but not reflecting on it,not making to themselves observations from what they read,they are very little improved by all that crowd of particulars that either pass through or lodge themselves in their understandings.They dream on in a constant course of reading and cramming themselves;but,not digesting anything,it produces nothing but a heap of crudities.
If their memories retain well,one may say they have the materials of knowledge,but,like those for building,they are of no advantage if there be no other use made of them but to let them lie heaped up together.Opposite to these there are others who lose the improvement they should make of matters of fact by a quite contrary conduct.They are apt to draw general conclusions and raise axioms from every particular they meet with.
These make as little true benefit of history as the other,nay,being of forward and active spirits receive more harm by it;it being of worse consequence to steer one's thoughts by a wrong rule than to have none at all,error doing to busy men much more harm than ignorance to the slow and sluggish.Between these,those seem to do best who,taking material and useful hints,sometimes from single matters of fact,carry them in their minds to be judged of by what they shall find in history to confirm or reverse these imperfect observations;which may be established into rules fit to be relied on when they are justified by a sufficient and wary induction of particulars.
He that makes no such reflections on what he reads only loads his mind with a rhapsody of tales fit in winter nights for the entertainment of others;and he that will improve every matter of fact into a maxim will abound in contrary observations that can be of no other use but to perplex and pudder him if he compares them;or else to misguide him,if he gives himself up to the authority of that which,for its novelty or for some other fancy,best pleases him.
