Discourse on the Method, part 2, ¶ 4-1

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René Descartes

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Cle Elum — Thumbnail History (historylink.org) Cle Elum is a city in Kittitas County on the upper Yakima River, about 30 miles east of Snoqualmie Pass. For centuries, the land was inhabited by the Kittitas band of the Yakama Tribe, who used the word Tle-el-Lum, meaning swift water, for the nearby Cle Elum River.

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Discourse on the Method (Veitch translation)

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But I had become aware, even so early as during my college life, that no opinion, however absurd and incredible, can be imagined, which has not been maintained by some one of the philosophers; and afterwards in the course of my travels I remarked that all those whose opinions are decidedly repugnant to ours are not on that account barbarians and savages, but on the contrary that many of these nations make an equally good, if not a better, use of their Reason than we do.

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The majority of men is composed of two classes, for neither of which would this be at all a befitting resolution: in the first place, of those who with more than a due confidence in their own powers, are precipitate in their judgments and want the patience requisite for orderly and circumspect thinking; whence it happens, that if men of this class once take the liberty to doubt of their accustomed opinions, and quit the beaten highway, they will never be able to thread the byeway that would lead them by a shorter course, and will lose themselves and continue to wander for life; in the second place, of those who, possessed of sufficient sense or modesty to determine that there are others who excel them in the power of discriminating between truth and error, and by whom they may be instructed, ought rather to content themselves with the opinions of such than trust for more correct to their own Reason.