Nuovi saggi sull'intelletto umano

ence are not exempt (from error) when they depend too much upon their past experience, as has happened to many in civil and military affairs ; because they do not consider sufficiently that the world changes, and that men become more skilful by finding a thousand new dexterities, while the deer and hares of the present do not become more cunning than those of the past. The consecutions of the brutes are only a shadow of reasoning, i.e. are only connections of the imagination and passages from one image to another, because in a new juncture which appears similar to the preceding they expect anew that connection which they formerly met with, as if things were united in fact because their images are united in the memory. It is true that reason also counsels us to expect ordinarily to see that happen in the future which is conformed to a long past experience, but it is not on this account a necessary and infalli ble truth, and success may cease when least expected, when the reasons change which have sustained it. Therefore the wisest men do not so commit themselves to it as not to try to discover, if possible, something of the reason of this fact in order to judge when it is necessary to make exceptions. For reason is alone capable of establishing sure rules, and supply ing what is wanting to those which were not such by inserting their exceptions ; and of finding at length certain connections in the force of necessary consequences, which often furnish the means of foreseeing the result without the necessity of experiencing the sense-connections of images, to which the brutes are reduced, so that that which justifies the internal