"Treatise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Berkeley George)

2. The cause of this is thought to be the obscurity of things, or
the natural weakness and imperfection of our understandings. It is
said, the faculties we have are few, and those designed by nature
for the support and comfort of life, and not to penetrate into the
inward essence and constitution of things. Besides, the mind of man
being finite, when it treats of things which partake of infinity, it
is not to be wondered at if it run into absurdities and
contradictions, out of which it is impossible it should ever extricate
itself, it being of the nature of infinite not to be comprehended by
that which is finite.

3. But, perhaps, we may be too partial to ourselves in placing the
fault originally in our faculties, and not rather in the wrong use
we make of them. It is a hard thing to suppose that right deductions
from true principles should ever end in consequences which cannot be
maintained or made consistent. We should believe that God has dealt
more bountifully with the sons of men than to give them a strong
desire for that knowledge which he had placed quite out of their
reach. This were not agreeable to the wonted indulgent methods of
Providence, which, whatever appetites it may have implanted in the
creatures, doth usually furnish them with such means as, if rightly
made use of, will not fail to satisfy them. Upon the whole, I am
inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those
difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up
the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves- that we have
first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.

4. My purpose therefore is, to try if I can discover what those
Principles are which have introduced all that doubtfulness and
uncertainty, those absurdities and contradictions, into the several
sects of philosophy; insomuch that the wisest men have thought our
ignorance incurable, conceiving it to arise from the natural dulness
and limitation of our faculties. And surely it is a work well
deserving our pains to make a strict inquiry concerning the First
Principles of Human Knowledge, to sift and examine them on all
sides, especially since there may be some grounds to suspect that
those lets and difficulties, which stay and embarrass the mind in
its search after truth, do not spring from any darkness and
intricacy in the objects, or natural defect in the understanding, so
much as from false Principles which have been insisted on, and might
have been avoided.

5. How difficult and discouraging soever this attempt may seem, when
I consider how many great and extraordinary men have gone before me in
the like designs, yet I am not without some hopes- upon the
consideration that the largest views are not always the clearest,
and that he who is short-sighted will be obliged to draw the object
nearer, and may, perhaps, by a close and narrow survey, discern that
which had escaped far better eyes.