As to the mental essence, we find it in infants devoid of every
mental form. Then, later on in life, we find in it self-evident
axiomatic mentally-grasped notions, without effort of learning and
without reflection. So that the arising of them within it will not
fail of being either through sense and experience, or else through
divine outpouring reaching to it. But it is not licit to hold that
the arising of such primary mental form will be through experience,
seeing that experience does not afford and supply a necessary and
inevitable judgment, since experience does not go so far as to believe
or disbelieve definitively the existence of something different to
the judgment drawn from what it has perceived. Indeed experience,
although it shows us that every animal we perceive moves on chewing
the lower jaw, yet it does not supply us with a convincing judgment
that such is the case with every animal; for were this true, it would
not be licit for the crocodile to exist which moves his upper jaw on
chewing. Therefore not every judgment we have arrived at, as to things,
through our sensuous perception, is applicable to and holds good of
all that we have perceived or have not perceived of such things, but
it may so be that what we have not perceived differ from what we have
perceived. Whereas our conception that a whole is greater than a part
is not [formed] because we have sensuously felt every part and every
whole that are so related, seeing that even such an experience will
not guaranty to us that there will be no whole and no part differently
related.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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