th your vain and foolish desires,
to promise yourselves those things which are not in her power to
confer, and to accuse her of falsehood. Wrongly men complain of
innocent experience, when they accuse her not seldom of false and lying
demonstrations.

33.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgements that err, ye who look
to her for effects which our experiments cannot produce. Because given
a principle, that which ensues from it is necessarily the true
consequence of that principle, unless it be impeded. Should there,
however, be any obstacle, the effect which should ensue from the
aforesaid principle will participate in the impediment as much or as
little as the impediment is operative in regard to the aforesaid
principle.

34.

Experience, the interpreter between creative nature and the human race,
teaches the action of nature among mortals: how under the constraint of
necessity she cannot act otherwise than as reason, who steers her helm,
teaches her to act.

35.

All our knowledge is the offspring of our perceptions.

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[Sidenote: Origin of Knowledge]

36.

The sense ministers to the soul, and not the soul sense; and where the
sense which ministers ceases to serve the soul, all the functions of
that sense are lacking in life, as is evident in those who are born
dumb and blind.

[Sidenote: Testimony of the Senses]

37.

And if thou sayest that sight impedes the security and subtlety of
mental meditation, by reason of which we penetrate into divine
knowledge, and that this impediment drove a philosopher to deprive
himself of his sight, I answer that the eye, as lord of the senses,
performs its duty in being an impediment to the confusion and lies of
that which is not science but discourse, by which with much noise and
gesticulation argument is constantly conducted; and hearing should do
the same, feeling, as it does, the offence more keenly, because it
seeks after harmony which devolves on all the senses. And if this
philosopher deprived himself of his sight to get rid of the obstacle to
his discourses, consider that his discourses and his brain were a party
to the act, because the whole was madness. Now could he not have
closed his eyes when this frenzy came upon him, and have kept them
closed until the frenzy consumed itself? But the man was mad, the
discourse insane, and egregious the folly of destroying his eye-sight.

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[Sidenote: Judgement prone to Error]