Page:Thoughts on art and life.djvu/49

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with great railing they accuse of falsehood. Leave experience alone, and turn your lamentation to your ignorance, which leads you, with your vain and foolish desires, to promise yourselves those things which are not in her power to confer, and to accuse her of falsehood. Wrongly men com- plain of innocent experience, when they accuse her not seldom of false and lying demonstrations.

33.

Experience never errs ; it is only your judgements that err, ye who look to her for effects which our experiments cannot produce. Because given a principle, that which ensues from it is necessarily the true consequence of that principle, unless it be impeded. Should there, however, be any ob- stacle, the effect which should ensue from the aforesaid principle will participate in the impedi- ment as much or as little as the impediment is operative in regard to the aforesaid principle.

34.

Experience, the interpreter between creative na- ture and the human race, teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of necessity she cannot act otherwise than as rea- son, who steers her helm, teaches her to act.

35.

All our knowledge is the offspring of our percep- tions.

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