But yet one has reason to suspect such ideas are marks of our imperfection; at least, this is enough to show that the most abstract and general ideas are not those that the mind is first and most easily acquainted with, nor such as its earliest knowledge is conversant about.
10.

Because on perception of them the other Parts of our Knowledge do not depend.
Secondly, from what has been said it plainly follows, that these magnified maxims are not the principles and foundations of all our other knowledge.

For if there be a great many other truths, which have as much self-evidence as they, and a great many that we know before them, it is impossible they should be the principles from which we deduce all other truths.

Is it impossible to know that one and two are equal to three, but by virtue of this, or some such axiom, viz.

'the whole is equal to all its parts taken together ?' Many a one knows that one and two are equal to three, without having heard, or thought on, that or any other axiom by which it might be proved; and knows it as certainly as any other man knows, that 'the whole is equal to all its parts,' or any other maxim; and all from the same reason of self-evidence: the equality of those ideas being as visible and certain to him without that or any other axiom as with it, it needing no proof to make it perceived.