Full and easy satisfaction which is the true and safe religion in a conference…Full and easie satisfaction which is the true and safe religion in a conference…

P. Then mad men cease to be men, if they judge otherwise.

R. Mad men are your fittest presidents: But, 1. I told you how mans nature is made by God to judge of ⟨p. 78⟩things: I told you not that this nature may not be vitiated, and hindered from right action. Did I ever say, that the eye may not be blinded, or the understanding distracted? Blind men and mad men judge not according to the tendency of Nature, and therefore misjudge. The Connection of the Intellect to the sense is essential to man as man; but so is not the soundness or right exercise of his faculties. Reason II. Hence I argue, that sensation and the understandings perception thereby, is the first perception of mans soul, and all that follow are but the rational improvements of it, and therefore ever presuppose it: The natural order of the souls apprehensions is this, beyond all controversy. First Sense perceiveth things sensible, and the Imagination the Images of them. Next the Understanding by a simple perception conceiveth of them as it findeth them in the imagination. Thirdly, then by this Thinking or Knowing, we perceive also our own Act, that we do so Think or Know. And then Fourthly, We compound our conceptions, and form organical notions, and spin out conclusions from what we first perceive. Now if the first perceptions be uncertain or false, it must needs follow, that all those following thoughts, and reasonings which do but improve them, are at least as uncertain and false, if not more. So that there can be no more certainty in any of the Conclusions as such, than there is in the premises and principles. Therefore if mans first and most natural necessary perceptions are false, all the following actions or reasonings of his mind must be no better. All being finally resolved into these perceptions by sense, there is no Truth or Certainty in mans mind at all, if there be none in these. ⟨p. 79⟩Reason III. Else you would infer, that God is not at all to be Believed, and that there is no such thing as Divine Faith and Religion in Certainty in the world: And so you would bring in, by unavoidable consequence, far worse Impiety, and Irreligiousness than Mahomet or Julian, or any Idolaters that I hear of on the earth. For you directly will overthrow the Divine Veracity, or Truth of Gods Revelations, which is the Formal Object of Faith, without which, it is no Faith.