Quite a long while hath now slipped by since I initially ended up plainly mindful that I had acknowledged, even from nascence, numerous false feelings for fact, and that thusly what I later created in view of such standards was exceedingly dubious; and from that time I was persuaded of the need of setting about once in my life to free myself of the considerable number of sentiments I had embraced, and of starting over again the task of working from the establishment, in the event that I craved to set up a firm and withstanding superstructure in any domain of learning.

Yet, to this end, it won't be essential for me to demonstrate that the entirety of these are false — the accolade of completion, maybe, which I might never attain; yet as even now my reason persuades me that I should not the less precisely to withhold conviction from what is not so much certain and without doubt, than from what is plainly false, it will be adequate to legitimize the dismissal of the entirety in the event that I might discover in each some basis for uncertainty. Nor for this reason will it be fundamental even to manage every conviction independently, which would be genuinely a perpetual work; be that as it may, as the pulling of the proverbial rug from underneath the establishment essentially includes the destruction of the entire construction, I will without delay approach the feedback of the standards on which all my previous convictions rested.

All that I have heretofore acknowledged as based in the most elevated truth and conviction, I gleaned either from or through the faculties of the body. I watched, notwithstanding, that these occasionally deluded us; and it is the duty of rationality not to place total trust in that by which we have even once been so bamboozled.

However, it might be stated that, despite the fact that the faculties periodically delude us regarding minute items, and, for example, are so far expelled from us as to be past the span of close perception, there are yet numerous other of their representations of reality of which it is plainly difficult to question; as, that I am in this place, situated before the hearth, dressed in a heavy robe, that I grasp this bit of paper, with different insinuations of a similar sort. Be that as it may, how might I deny that I have these hands and this body, and yet escape being classed with people in a condition of deep delusion, whose brains are so scattered and obfuscated as to pertinaciously pertinaciously bring them about to state that they are rulers when they are in the deepest neediness, or dressed in regal metals and colors when possessed of not even modest covering; or that their head is made of mud, their limbs of glass, or that they are melons? I ought to unquestionably be not less odd than they, were I to control my system as indicated by illustrations so excessive.