their agreement, or disagreement, is shown. This is called demonstration, or rational knowledge. For instance: The inequality of the breadth of two windows, or two rivers, or any two bodies that cannot be put together, may be known by the intervention of the same measure, applied to them both; and so it is in our general ideas, whose agreement or disagreement may be often shown by the intervention of some other ideas, so as to produce demonstrative knowledge; where the ideas in question cannot be brought together, and immediately compared, so as to produce intuitive knowledge.

The understanding doth not know only certain truth but also judges of probability, which consists in the likely agreement, or disagreement, of ideas.

The assenting to any proposition as probable is called opinion, or belief.

We have hitherto considered the great and visible parts of the universe, and those great masses of matter, the stars, planets, and particularly this our earth, together with the inanimate parts, and animate inhabitants of it; it may be now fit to consider what these sensible bodies are made of, and that is of unconceivably small bodies, or atoms, out of whose various combinations bigger moleculæ are made; and so, by a greater and greater composition, bigger bodies; and out of these the whole material world is constituted.

By the figure, bulk, texture, and motion, of these small and insensible corpuscles, all the phænomena of bodies may be explained.

A

NEW METHOD

OF A

COMMON-PLACE-BOOK.

TRANSLATED OUT OF THE FRENCH,

FROM THE SECOND VOLUME OF THE BIBLIOTHEQUE

UNIVERSELLE.

EPISTOLA.] A leter from Mr. Locke to Mr. Toignard, contain2. ing a new and easy method of a common-place-book, to which an index of two pages is sufficient.

AT length, sir, in obedience to you, I publish my ❝ meth

od of a common-place-book." I am ashamed that I deferred so long complying with your request; but I esteemed it so mean a thing, as not to deserve publishing, in an age so full of useful inventions, as ours is. You may remember, that I freely communicated it to you, and several others, to whom I imagined it would not be unacceptable: so that it was not to reserve the sole use of it to myself, that I declined publishing it. But the regard I had to the public, discouraged me from presenting it with such a trifle. Yet my obligations to you, and the friendship between us, compel me now to follow your advice. Your last letter has perfectly determined me to it, and I am convinced that I ought not to delay publishing it, when you tell me, that an experience of several years has showed its usefulness, and several of your friends, to whom you have communicated it. There is no need I should tell you how useful it has been to me, after five and twenty years' experience, as I told you, eight years since, when I had the honor to wait on you at Paris, and when I might have been instructed, by your learned and agreeable discourse. What I aim at now, by this letter, is to testify publicly the esteem and respect I have for you, and to convince you how much I am, sir, your, &c.

Before I enter on my subject, it is fit to acquaint the reader, that this tract is disposed in the same manner that the common-place-book ought to be disposed. It will be understood by reading what follows, what is the meaning of the Latin titles on the top of the backside of each leaf, and at the bottom [at the top of the next] of this page.

EBIONITE.]