The emptiness and uncertainty of all those systems, whether venerable
for their antiquity, or agreeable for their novelty, he has evidently
shown; and not only declared, but proved, that we are entirely
ignorant of the principles of things, and that all the knowledge we
have, is of such qualities alone as are discoverable by experience, or
such as may be deduced from them by mathematical demonstration.
This discourse, filled as it was with piety, and a true sense of the
greatness of the supreme being, and the incomprehensibility of his
works, gave such offence to a professor of Franeker, who professed the
utmost esteem for Des Cartes, and considered his principles as the
bulwark of orthodoxy, that he appeared in vindication of his darling
author, and spoke of the injury done him with the utmost vehemence,
declaring little less than that the cartesian system and the Christian
must inevitably stand and fall together; and that to say that we were
ignorant of the principles of things, was not only to enlist among the
skepticks, but to sink into atheism itself.
So far can prejudice darken the understanding, as to make it consider
precarious systems as the chief support of sacred and invariable
truth.
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