His work on the "Encyclopaidia "was interrupted when a donation of 800 books collected by Colonial Agent Jeremiah Dummer was sent to Yale late in 1714. He discovered Francis Bacon's "Advancement of Learning", the works of John Locke and Isaac Newton and other Enlightenment era authors not known to the tutors and graduates of Puritan Yale and Harvard. Johnson wrote in his "Autobiography", “All this was like a flood of day to his low state of mind”, and that “he found himself like one at once emerging out of the glimmer of twilight into the full sunshine of open day". Though he finished his Latin Ramist thesis, he now considered what he had learned at Yale “nothing but the scholastic cobwebs of a few little English and Dutch systems that would hardly now be taken up in the street.”