Go boldly forth, my simple lay, Whose accents flow with artless ease, Like orient pearls at random strung. - William Jones

By science I mean an assemblage of transcendental propositions discoverable by human reason, and reducible to first principles, axioms, or maxims, from which they may all be derived in a regular succession; and there are consequently as many sciences as there are general objects of our intellectual powers: when man first exerts those powers, his objects are himself and the rest of nature; himself he perceives to be composed of body and mind... and in the leisure... his intellect is directed to nature at large, to the substance of natural bodies, to their several properties, and to their quantity... and... arrives at the demonstration of a first intelligent cause; whence his collected wisdom, being arranged in the form of science, chiefly consists of physiology and medicine, metaphysicks and logick, ethicks and jurisprudence, natural philosophy and mathematicks; from which the religion of nature (since revealed religion must be referred to history, as alone affording evidence of it) has in all ages and in all nations been the sublime and consoling result.

In the preface to his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), Jones again feels the need to plead for wider cultural sympathies: "Some men never heard of the Asiatick writings, and others will not be convinced that there is anything valuable in them; some pretend to be busy, and others are really idle; some detest the Persians, because they believe in Mahomed, and others despise their language, because they do not understand it: we all love to excuse, or conceal, our ignorance, and are seldom willing to allow any excellence beyond the limits of our own attainments: like savages, who thought the sun rose and set for them alone, and could not imagine that the waves, which surrounded their island, left coral and pearls upon any other shore."8'

As he wrote in "An Essay on Education," "[After] fixing the good of ourselves and our fellow-creatures as the primary end proposed by a liberal education; and considering the cultivation of our understanding, and the acquisition of knowledge, as the secondary objects of it: Now, as neither this knowledge can be perfectly obtained, nor the reason completely improved, in the short duration of human life, unless the accumulated experience and wisdom of all ages and all nations, be added to that which we gain by our own researches, it is necessary to understand the languages of those people who have been, in any period of the world, distinguished for their superior knowledge. It follows, therefore, that the more immediate object of education is, to learn the languages of celebrated nations both ancient and modern."85