He read an introduction to the Sciences, then he took an Encyclopaedia and tried to learn all things together, until he repented and resolved to study subjects apart.

This he found a better plan for one to whom long application was so fatiguing, that he could not with any effect occupy himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them with one another.

This was tedious, so he took up another method, on which he congratulated himself to the end of his life.

It consisted in simply adopting and following the ideas of each author, without comparing them either with one another or with those of other writers, and above all without any criticism of his own.

Let me begin, he said, by collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear, until my head is well enough stocked to enable me to compare and choose.
At the end of some years passed "in never thinking exactly, except after other people, without reflecting so to speak, and almost without reasoning," he found himself in a state to think for himself.