"One may safely say... that if we consider these sciences in the proper light, their advantages and disadvantages nearly compensate each other, and reduce both of them to a state of equality. If the mind, with greater facility, retains the ideas of geometry clear and determinate, it must carry on a much larger and more intricate chain of reasoning, and compare ideas much wider of each other, in order to reach the abstruser truths of that science. And if moral ideas are apt, without extreme care, to fall into obscurity and confusion, the inferences are always much shorter... and the intermediate steps, which lead to the conclusion, much fewer than in the sciences which treat of quantity and number."
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An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
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