The third I ascribe to the giving of the names of the “accidents” of “bodies without us,” to the “accidents” of our “own bodies”; as they do that say, “the colour is in the body”; “the sound is in the air,” etc. The fourth, to the giving of the names of “bodies” to “names,” or “speeches”; as they do that say, that “there be things universal”; that “a living creature is genus,” or “a general thing,” etc. The fifth, to the giving of the names of “accidents” to “names” and “speeches”; as they do that say, “the nature of a thing is its definition; a man’s command is his will”; and the like. The sixth, to the use of metaphors, tropes, and other rhetorical figures, instead of words proper. For though it be lawful to say, for example, in common speech, “the way goeth, or leadeth hither or thither”; “the proverb says this or that,” whereas ways cannot go, nor proverbs speak; yet in reckoning, and seeking of truth, such speeches are not to be admitted. The seventh, to names that signify nothing; but are taken up and learned by rote from the schools, as “hypostatical,” “transubstantiate,” “consubstantiate,” “eternal-now,” and the like canting of schoolmen.
To him that can avoid these things it is not easy to fall into any absurdity, unless it be by the length of an account; wherein he may perhaps forget what went before. For all men by nature reason alike, and well, when they have good principles. For who is so stupid, as both to mistake in geometry, and also to persist in it, when another detects his error to him?
By this it appears that reason is not, as sense and memory, born with us; nor gotten by experience only, as prudence is; but attained by industry; first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connection of one of them to another; and so to syllogisms, which are the connections of one assertion to another, till we