CHAPTER XVI. 115 object would increase the confusion ; but method gives a speedy and short survey of them with ease and pleasure. Method is of admirable advantage to keep our ideas from a confused mixture, and to preserve them ready for every use. The science of onto- logy, which distributes all beings, and all the affections of being, whether absolute or relative, under proper classes, is of good ser- vice to keepour intellectual acquisitions in such order, as thatthe mind may survey them at once. V. As method is necessary for the improvement of the mind,, in order to make your treasure of ideas most useful; so in all your ,further pursuits of truth and acquirement of rational knowledge, observe a regular progressive method. Begin with the most simple, easy and obvious ideas ; then by degrees joist two, and three, and more of them together ; thus the complicated ideas growing up under your eye and observation, will not give the same confusion of thought as they would do if they were all offered to the mind at once without your observing the original and formation of them. An eminent example of this appears in the Study. of arithmetic. If a scholar just admitted into the school observes his master performing an operation in the rule of division, his head is at once disturbed and confounded with the manifold comparisons of the numbers of the divisor and dividend, and the multiplication of the one and subtraction of it from theother; but if he begin regularly at addition, and so proceed by subtraction and multiplication, he will then in a few weeks be able to take in an intelligent survey of all those operations in division, and to practise them himself with ease and pleasure, each of which at first seemed all intricacy and confusion. An illustration of the like nature may be borrowed from geometry and algebra, and other methematical practices : how easily does an expert geometrician with one glance of his eye, take in a complicated diagram ruade up of many lines and cir- cles, angles, and arches? How readily does he judge of it, whether the demonstration designed by it be true or false ? It was by degrees he arrived at this stretch of understanding ; he began with a single line or a point; he joined two lines in an angle; be advanced to triangle and square, polygons and cir- cles ; thus the powers of his understanding were stretched and augmented daily, till by diligence and regular application he acquired this extensive faculty of mind. But this advantage does not belong only to mathematical learning. If we apply ourselves at first in any science to clear and single ideas, and never hurry ourselves on to the following and more complicated parts of knowledge till we thoroughly understand the foregoing, . we may practise the same method of enlarging the capacity of m 2
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