ABSTRACT

Those ancient cities, which from being at first only villages have become, in course of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regularly constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned on an open plain.… When one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition … and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement.… In the same way I thought that the sciences contained in books (such of them at least as are made up of probable reasonings, without demonstrations) composed as they are of the opinions of many different individuals massed together, are farther removed from the truth than the simple inferences which a man of good sense using his natural and unprejudiced judgment draws respecting the matter of his experience.