PREFACE. 481 to think, speak or write, ranged in a set of regular classes, no that we know where to find and place them all, is of unspeakable advantage in explaining, defining, dividing, distinguishing, illustrating, and arguingupon every sub- ject we take in hand. Nor does this serve only the purposes of the college, and direct, assist, and facilitate the laboursof students and the learned world, but gentlemen and persons in every degree of common lifemight be taught to enlarge the number of their ideas, to extend their reasonings far wider, and dispose their thoughts in more useful order by the assistance of this part of knowledge, Wit were displayed in a happy and perspicuous manner, with the exclusion of thorns and straws, and all the perplexing trifles that bad over-run theacademies of former ages. 1 wish some skilful handwould undertake this work : If I was ever able to perform it according to myown idea, yet it is too late in life for me nowto return to these studies. What I have here written has in part lain long by me : It pretends to nothing more than a brief and compendious sketchof notions that relate to this science, and a mere arrangement of the most useful themes which should here be treated of, in a contracted view : and though it may be of chief advantage for the recollection of those who have been ac- quainted with the matters, yet I hope it will not be unserviceable for the in- struction of such as have known nothing of them if they will read with ,at- tention and care. In some places I define not only the general theme but the particular kinds of it also ; in a few others I only just mention the terms of the particular distinctions, and neither add any definitions or examples to them, where the very terms areso plain that a common reader mayknow the meaningof them without explication : but in most places I give such ex- amples as may sufficiently explain and illustrate the subject and the several divisions and branches of it, without laborious and disputable definitions. What the metaphysical writers have called axioms or canons, are very numerous almost under every head or theme of discourse ; but many of them are so false in the most obvious sense of them, and want such a number of limitations and learned distinctions to reduce them to truth, that I thought it needless to stuffthis epitome with them. Many others are so useless to any valuable purposes, that theydeserve no room in the mind or memory. Those few which are useful I have placed in their proper chapters as notes, and several others I have added which seemed tome notunprofitable. It is not often that I divert out of my way to tell theworldparticularly what the moderns or the ancients have said on these subjects, nor bow far agree with them, or differ from them ; but in the main I directly pursue my own track of thoughts, air: range this infinitevariety of ideas collected from the universeof beings in such a method as appears to me the moat compre- hensive and natural, plain and easy.
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