h man, though they neither owe him
anything, nor are in any sort dependent on his bounty, yet, merely
because he is rich, give him little less than divine honours, even though
they know him to be so covetous and base-minded that, notwithstanding all
his wealth, he will not part with one farthing of it to them as long as
he lives!

"These and such like notions have that people imbibed, partly from their
education, being bred in a country whose customs and laws are opposite to
all such foolish maxims, and partly from their learning and studies--for
though there are but few in any town that are so wholly excused from
labour as to give themselves entirely up to their studies (these being
only such persons as discover from their childhood an extraordinary
capacity and disposition for letters), yet their children and a great
part of the nation, both men and women, are taught to spend those hours
in which they are not obliged to work in reading; and this they do
through the whole progress of life. They have all their learning in
their own tongue, which is both a copious and pleasant language, and in
which a man can fully express his mind; it runs over a great tract of
many countries, but it is not equally pure in all places. They had never
so much as heard of the names of any of those philosophers that are so
famous in these parts of the world, before we went among them; and yet
they had made the same discoveries as the Greeks, both in music, logic,
arithmetic, and geometry. But as they are almost in everything equal to
the ancient philosophers, so they far exceed our modern logicians for
they have never yet fallen upon the barbarous niceties that our youth are
forced to learn in those trifling logical schools that are among us. They
are so far from minding chimeras and fantastical images made in the mind
that none of them could comprehend what we meant when we talked to them
of a man in the abstract as common to all men in particular (so that
though we spoke of him as a thing that we could point at with our
fingers, yet none of them could perceive him) and yet distinct from every
one, as if he were some monstrous Colossus or giant; yet, for all this
ignorance of these empty notions, they knew astronomy, and were perfectly
acquainted with the motions of the heavenly bodies; and have many
instruments, well contrived and divided, by which they very accurately
compute the course and positions of the sun, moon, and stars. But