To provide these things...

To provide these things, Nature furnishes us only with the material, for the most part rough, and unfitted to our use; it requires labour, art, and thought, to suit them to our occasions; and if the knowledge of man had not found out ways to shorten the labour, and improve several things which seem not, at first sight, to be of any use to us, we should spend all our time to make a scanty provision for a poor and miserable life: a sufficient instance whereof we have in the inhabitants of that large and fertile part of the world the West Indies, who lived a poor uncomfortable life, scarce able to subsist; and that, perhaps, only for want of knowing the use of that store out of which the inhabitants of the Old World had the skill to draw iron, and thereof make themselves utensils necessary for the carrying on and improvement of all other arts; no one of which can subsist well, if at all, without that one metal.

Here, then, is a large field for knowledge, proper for the use and advantage of men in this word; viz. to find out new inventions of despatch to shorten or ease our labour, or applying sagaciously together several agents and materials, to procure new and beneficial productions fit for our use, whereby our stock of riches (i. e.

things useful for the conveniences of our life) may be increased, or better preserved: and for such discoveries as these the mind of man is well fitted; though, perhaps, the essence of things, their first original, their secret way of working, and the whole extent of corporeal beings, be as far beyond our capacity as it is beside our use; and we have no reason to complain that we do not know the nature of the sun or stars, that the consideration of light itself leaves us in the dark, and a thousand other speculations in Nature, since, if we knew them, they would be of no solid advantage to us, nor help to make our lives the happier, they being but the useless employment of idle or over-curious brains, which amuse themselves about things out of which they can by no means draw any real benefit.