See what use they make of this irreverent way of speaking; in the

present disputes about our religion, if you press its adversaries too

hard, they will roundly tell you, “that it is not in the power of God to

make it so, that his body should be in paradise and upon earth, and in

several places at once.” And see, too, what advantage the old scoffer

made of this. “At least,” says he, “it is no little consolation to man

to see that God cannot do all things; for he cannot kill himself, though

he would; which is the greatest privilege we have in our condition; he

cannot make mortal immortal, nor revive the dead; nor make it so, that

he who has lived has not; nor that he who has had honours has not had

them; having no other right to the past than that of oblivion.” And that

the comparison of man to God may yet be made out by jocose examples: “He

cannot order it so,” says he, “that twice ten shall not be twenty.”

This is what he says, and what a Christian ought to take heed shall not

escape his lips. Whereas, on the contrary, it seems as if men studied

this foolish daring of language, to reduce God to their own measure:--

Cras vel atrâ Nube polum, Pater, occupato,

Vel sole puro; non tamen irritum

Quodcumque retro est efficiet, neque

Diffinget infectumque reddet

Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.

“To-morrow, let it shine or rain,

Yet cannot this the past make vain:

Nor uncreate and render void

That which was yesterday enjoyed.”

When we say that the infinity of ages, as well past as to come, are but

one instant with God; that his goodness, wisdom, and power are the same

with his essence; our mouths speak it, but our understandings apprehend

it not; and yet, such is our vain opinion of ourselves, that we must

make the Divinity to pass through our sieve; and thence proceed all the

dreams and errors with which the world abounds, whilst we reduce and

weigh in our balance a thing so far above our poise. _Mirum quo procédat

improbitas cordis humani, parvulo aliquo intritata successu._ “‘Tis

wonderful to what the wickedness of man’s heart will proceed, if

elevated with the least success.” How magisterially and insolently does

Epicurus reprove the Stoics, for maintaining that the truly good and

happy being appertained only to God, and that the wise man had nothing

but a shadow and resemblance of it! How temerariously have they bound

God to destiny (a thing which, by my consent, none that bears the name

of a Christian shall ever do again)! and Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras

have enslaved him to necessity. This arrogance of attempting to discover

God with our eyes has been the cause that an eminent person among us has

attributed to the Divinity a corporal form; and is the reason of what

happens to us every day, of attributing to God important events, by a

particular assignment. Because they weigh with us, they conclude that

they also weigh with him, and that he has a more intent and vigilant

regard to them than to others of less moment to us or of ordinary

course: _Magna Dii curant, parva negligunt:_ “The gods are concerned at

great matters, but slight the small.” Listen to him; he will clear this

to you by his reason: _Nec in regnis quidem reges omnia minima curant:_

“Neither indeed do kings in their administration take notice of all the

least concerns.” As if to that King of kings it were more or less

to subvert a kingdom, or to move the leaf of a tree; or as if his

providence acted after another manner in inclining the event of a battle

than in the leap of a flea. The hand of his government is laid upon

every thing after the same manner, with the same power and order; our

interest does nothing towards it; our inclinations and measures sway

nothing with him. _Deus ita artifex magnus in magnis, ut minor non sit

in parvis:_ “God is so great an artificer in great things, that he is no

less in the least” Our arrogancy sets this blasphemous comparison

ever before us. Because our employments are a burden to us, Strato has

courteously been pleased to exempt the gods from all offices, as their

priests are; he makes nature produce and support all things; and

with her weights and motions make up the several parts of the world,

discharging human nature from the awe of divine judgments: _Quod beatum

æterumque sit, id nec habere negotii quicquam, nec exhibere alteri:_

“What is blessed and eternal has neither any business itself nor gives

any to another.” Nature will that in like things there should be a like

relation. The infinite number of mortals, therefore, concludes a

like number of immortals; the infinite things that kill and destroy

presupposes as many that preserve and profit. As the souls of the

gods, without tongue, eye, or ear, do every one of them feel amongst

themselves what the other feels, and judge our thoughts; so the souls of

men, when at liberty and loosed from the body, either by sleep or some

ecstacy, divine, foretell, and see things, which, whilst joined to the

body, they could not see. “Men,” says St. Paul, “professing themselves

to be wise, they become fools; and change the glory of the uncorruptible

God into an image made like corruptible man.” Do but take notice of the

juggling in the ancient deifications. After the great and stately pomp

of the funeral, so soon as the fire began to mount to the top of the

pyramid, and to catch hold of the couch where the body lay, they at the

same time turned out an eagle, which flying upward, signified that the

soul went into Paradise. We have a thousand medals, and particularly

of the worthy Faustina, where this eagle is represented carrying these

deified souls to heaven with their heels upwards. ‘Tis pity that we

should fool ourselves with our own fopperies and inventions,

Quod finxere, timent,

“They fear their own inventions,”

like children who are frighted with the same face of their playfellow,

that they themselves have smeared and smutted. _Quasi quicquam

infelicius sit homine, cui sua figmenta dominantur:_

“As if any thing could be more unhappy than man, who is insulted over by

his own imagination.” ‘Tis far from honouring him who made us, to honour

him that we have made. Augustus had more temples than Jupiter, served

with as much religion and belief of miracles. The Thracians, in return

of the benefits they had received from Agesilaus, came to bring him word

that they had canonized him: “Has your nation,” said he to them, “the

power to make gods of whom they please? Pray first deify some one

amongst yourselves, and when I shall see what advantage he has by it,

I will thank you for your offer.” Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot

make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. Hear Trismegistus

in praise of our sufficiency: “Of all the wonderful things, it surmounts

all wonder that man could find out the divine nature and make it.” And

take here the arguments of the school of philosophy itself:--

Nosse cui divos et coli munina soli,

Aut soli nescire, datum.

“To whom to know the deities of heaven,

Or know he knows them not, alone ‘tis given.”

“If there is a God, he is a living creature; if he be a living creature,

he has sense; and if he has sense, he is subject to corruption. If he

be without a body he is without a soul, and consequently without action;

and if he has a body, it is perishable.” Is not here a triumph? we

are incapable of having made the world; there must then be some more

excellent nature that has put a hand to the work. It were a foolish and

ridiculous arrogance to esteem ourselves the most perfect thing of the

universe. There must then be something that is better, and that must be

God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not

know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for

rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial

palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some

possessor, who is much greater than we? Is not the most supreme always

the most worthy? but we are in the lowest form. Nothing without a soul

and without reason can produce a living creature capable of reason. The

world produces us, the world then has soul and reason. Every part of us

is less than we. We are part of the world, the world therefore is endued

with wisdom and reason, and that more abundantly than we. ‘Tis a fine

thing to have a great government; the government of the world then

appertains to some happy nature. The stars do us no harm; they are then

full of goodness. We have need of nourishment; then so have the gods

also, and feed upon the vapours of the earth. Worldly goods are not

goods to God; therefore they are not goods to us; offending and being

offended are equally testimonies of imbecility; ‘tis therefore folly to

fear God. God is good by his nature; man by his industry, which is more.

The divine and human wisdom have no other distinction, but that the

first is eternal; but duration is no accession to wisdom, therefore we

are companions. We have life, reason, and liberty; we esteem goodness,

charity, and justice; these qualities are then in him. In conclusion,

building and destroying, the conditions of the Divinity, are forged by

man, according as they relate to himself. What a pattern, and what a

model! let us stretch, let us raise and swell human qualities as much as

we please; puff up thyself, poor man, yet more and more, and more:--

Non, si tu ruperis, inquit.

“Not if thou burst,” said he.

_Profecto non Deum, quern cogitare non possunt, sed semetip pro illo

cogitantes, non ilium, sed seipsos, non illi, sed sibi comparant?_

“Certainly they do not imagine God, whom they cannot imagine; but

they imagine themselves in his stead; they do not compare him, but

themselves, not to him, but to themselves.” In natural things the

effects do but half relate to their causes. What’s this to the purpose?

His condition is above the order of nature, too elevated, too remote,

and too mighty, to permit itself to be bound and fettered by our

conclusions. ‘Tis not through ourselves that we arrive at that place;

our ways lie too low. We are no nearer heaven on the top of Mount Cenis

than at the bottom of the sea; take the distance with your astrolabe.

They debase God even to the carnal knowledge of women, to so many times,

and so many generations. Paulina, the wife of Satuminus, a matron of

great reputation at Rome, thinking she lay with the god Serapis, found

herself in the arms of an amoroso of hers, through the panderism of the

priests of his temple. Varro, the most subtle and most learned of all

the Latin authors, in his book of theology, writes, that the sexton of

Hercules’s temple, throwing dice with one hand for himself, and with the

other for Hercules, played after that manner with him for a supper and

a wench; if he won, at the expense of the offerings; if he lost, at his

own. The sexton lost, and paid the supper and the wench. Her name was

Laurentina, who saw by night this god in her arms, who moreover told

her, that the first she met the next day, should give her a heavenly

reward; which proved to be Taruncius, a rich young man, who took her

home to his house, and in time left her his inheritrix. She, in her

turn, thinking to do a thing that would be pleasing to the god, left the

people of Rome heirs to her; and therefore had divine honours attributed

to her. As if it had not been sufficient that Plato was originally

descended from the gods by a double line, and that he had Neptune for

the common father of his race, it was certainly believed at Athens, that

Aristo, having a mind to enjoy the fair Perictione, could not, and

was warned by the god Apollo, in a dream, to leave her unpolluted and

untouched, till she should first be brought to bed. These were the

father and mother of Plato. How many ridiculous stories are there of

like cuckoldings, committed by the gods against poor mortal men! And how

many husbands injuriously scandaled in favour of the children! In the

Mahometan religion there are Merlins enough found by the belief of the

people; that is to say, children without fathers, spiritual, divinely

conceived in the wombs of virgins, and carry names that signify so much

in their language.

We are to observe that to every thing nothing is more dear and estimable

than its being (the lion, the eagle the dolphin, prize nothing above

their own kind); and that every thing assimilates the qualities of all

other things to its own proper qualities, which we may indeed extend

or contract, but that’s all; for beyond that relation and principle our

imagination cannot go, can guess at nothing else, nor possibly go out

thence, nor stretch beyond it; whence spring these ancient conclusions:

of all forms the most beautiful is that of man; therefore God must be

of that form. No one can be happy without virtue, nor virtue be without

reason, and reason cannot inhabit anywhere but in a human shape; God is

therefore clothed in a human figure. _Ita est informatum et anticipatum

mentibus nostris, ut homini, quum de Deo cogitet, forma occurrat

hu-mana._ “It is so imprinted in our minds, and the fancy is so

prepossessed with it, that when a man thinks of God, a human figure ever

presents itself to the imagination.” Therefore it was that Xenophanes

pleasantly said, “That if beasts frame any gods to themselves, as ‘tis

likely they do, they make them certainly such as themselves are, and

glorify themselves in it, as we do. For why may not a goose say thus;

“All the parts of the universe I have an interest in; the earth serves

me to walk upon; the sun to light me; the stars have their influence

upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters;

there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me;

I am the darling of nature! Is it not man that keeps, lodges, and serves

me? ‘Tis for me that he both sows and grinds; if he eats me he does the

same by his fellow-men, and so do I the worms that kill and devour him.”

As much might be said by a crane, and with greater confidence, upon the

account of the liberty of his flight, and the possession of that high

and beautiful region. _Tam blanda conciliatrix, et tam sui est lena ipsa

natura._ “So flattering and wheedling a bawd is nature to herself.”

Now by the same consequence, the destinies are then for us; for us the

world; it shines it thunders for us; creator and creatures, all are for

us; ‘tis the mark and point to which the universality of things aims.

Look into the records that philosophy has kept for two thousand years

and more, of the affairs of heaven; the gods all that while have

neither acted nor spoken but for man. She does not allow them any other

consultation or occupation. See them here against us in war:--

Domitosque Herculeâ manu

Telluris juvenes, unde periculum

Fulgens contre mu it domus

Saturai veteris.

“The brawny sons of earth, subdu’d by hand

Of Hercules on the Phlegræan strand,

Where the rude shock did such an uproar make,

As made old Saturn’s sparkling palace shake.”

And here you shall see them participate of our troubles, to make a

return for our having so often shared in theirs:--

Neptunus muros, magnoque emota tridenti

Fundamenta quatit, totamque à sedibus urbem

Emit: hie Juno Scæas sævissima portas Prima tenet.

“Amidst that smother Neptune holds his place,

Below the walls’ foundation drives his mace,

And heaves the city from its solid base.

See where in arms the cruel Juno stands,

Full in the Scæan gate.”

The Caunians, jealous of the authority of their own proper gods, armed

themselves on the days of their devotion, and through the whole of their

precincts ran cutting and slashing the air with their swords, by that

means to drive away and banish all foreign gods out of their territory.

Their powers are limited according that the plague, that the scurf, that

the phthisic; one cures one sort of itch, another another: _Adeo minimis

etiam rebus prava religio inserit Deos?_ “At such a rate does false

religion create gods for the most contemptible uses.” This one makes

grapes grow, that onions; this has the presidence over lechery, that

over merchandise; for every sort of artisan a god; this has his province

and reputation in the east; that his in the west:--

“Here lay her armour, here her chariot stood.”

O sancte Apollo, qui umbilicum certum terrarum obtines!

“O sacred Phoebus, who with glorious ray,

From the earth’s centre, dost thy light display.”

Pallada Cecropidæ, Minola Creta Dianam,

Vulcanum tellus Hypsipylea colit,

Junonem Sparte, Pelopeladesque Mycenæ;

Pinigerum Fauni Mænalis ora caput;

Mars Latio venerandus.

“Th’ Athenians Pallas, Cynthia Crete adore,

Vulcan is worshipped on the Lemnian shore.

Proud Juno’s altars are by Spartans fed,

Th’ Arcadians worship Faunus, and ‘tis said

To Mars, by Italy, is homage paid.”

to our necessity; this cures horses, that men,

Hic illius arma, Hic currus fuit.

This has only one town or family in his possession; that lives alone;

that in company, either voluntary or upon necessity:--

Junctaque sunt magno templa nepotis avo.

“And temples to the nephew joined are,

To those were reared to the great-grandfather.”

In here are some so wretched and mean (for the number amounts to six and

thirty thousand) that they must pack five or six together, to produce

one ear of corn, and thence take their several names; three to a

door--that of the plank, that of the hinge, and that of the threshold.

Four to a child--protectors of his swathing-clouts, his drink, meat, and

sucking. Some certain, some uncertain and doubtful, and some that are

not yet entered Paradise:--

Quos, quoniam coli nondum dignamur honore,

Quas dedimus certè terras habitare sinanras:

“Whom, since we yet not worthy think of heaven,

We suffer to possess the earth we’ve given.”

There are amongst them physicians, poets, and civilians. Some of a

mean betwixt the divine and human nature; mediators betwixt God and us,

adorned with a certain second and diminutive sort of adoration; infinite

in titles and offices; some good; others ill; some old and decrepit,

and some that are mortal. For Chrysippus was of opinion that in the last

conflagration of the world all the gods were to die but Jupiter. Man

makes a thousand pretty societies betwixt God and him; is he not his

countryman?

Jovis incunabula Creten.

“Crete, the cradle of Jupiter.”

And this is the excuse that, upon consideration of this subject,

Scævola, a high priest, and Varro, a great theologian in their times,

make us: “That it is necessary that the people should be ignorant of

many things that are true, and believe many things that are false.”

_Quum veritatem qua liberetur inquirat credatur ei expedire quod

fallitur._ “Seeing he inquires into the truth, by which he would be

made free, ‘tis fit he should be deceived.” Human eyes cannot perceive

things but by the forms they know; and we do not remember what a leap

miserable Phæton took for attempting to guide his father’s horses with

a mortal hand. The mind of man falls into as great a depth, and is after

the same manner bruised and shattered by his own rashness. If you ask of

philosophy of what matter the heavens and the sun are? what answer will

she return, if not that it is iron, or, with Anaxagoras, stone, or some

other matter that she makes use of? If a man inquire of Zeno what nature

is? “A fire,” says he, “an artisan, proper for generation, and regularly

proceeding.” Archimedes, master of that science which attributes to

itself the precedency before all others for truth and certainty;

“the sun,” says he, “is a god of red-hot iron.” Was not this a fine

imagination, extracted from the inevitable necessity of geometrical

demonstrations? Yet not so inevitable and useful but that Socrates

thought it was enough to know so much of geometry only as to measure the

land a man bought or sold; and that Polyænus, who had been a great

and famous doctor in it, despised it, as full of falsity and manifest

vanity, after he had once tasted the delicate fruits of the lozelly

gardens of Epicurus. Socrates in Xenophon, concerning this affair,

says of Anaxagoras, reputed by antiquity learned above all others in

celestial and divine matters, “That he had cracked his brain, as all

other men do who too immoderately search into knowledges which nothing

belong to them:” when he made the sun to be a burning stone, he did not

consider that a stone does not shine in the fire; and, which is worse,

that it will there consume; and in making the sun and fire one, that

fire does not turn the complexions black in shining upon them; that

we are able to look fixedly upon fire; and that fire kills herbs and

plants. ‘Tis Socrates’s opinion, and mine too, that the best judging

of heaven is not to judge of it at all. Plato having occasion, in his

_Timous_, to speak of the demons, “This undertaking,” says he, “exceeds

my ability.” We are therefore to believe those ancients who said they

were begotten by them; ‘tis against all reason to refuse a man’s faith

to the children of the gods, though what they say should not be proved

by any necessary or probable reasons; seeing they engage to speak of

domestic and familiar things.

Let us see if we have a little more light in the knowledge of human and

natural things. Is it not a ridiculous attempt for us to forge for those

to whom, by our own confession, our knowledge is not able to attain,

another body, and to lend a false form of our own invention; as is

manifest in this motion of the planets; to which, seeing our wits

cannot possibly arrive, nor conceive their natural conduct, we lend them

material, heavy, and substantial springs of our own by which to move:--

Temo aureus, aurea summæ

Curvatura rotæ, radiorum argenteus ordo.

“Gold was the axle, and the beam was gold;

The wheels with silver spokes on golden circles roll’d.”

You would say that we had had coachmakers, carpenters, and painters,

that went up on high to make engines of various motions, and to range

the wheelwork and interfacings of the heavenly bodies of differing

colours about the axis of necessity, according to Plato:--

Mundus domus est maxima rerum,

Quam quinque altitonæ fragmine zonæ

Cingunt, per quam limbus pictus bis sex signis

Stellimicantibus, altus in obliquo æthere, lunæ

Bigas acceptat.

“The world’s a mansion that doth all things hold,

Which thundering zones, in number five, enfold,

Through which a girdle, painted with twelve signs,

And that with sparkling constellations, shines,

In heaven’s arch marks the diurnal course

For the sun’s chariot and his fiery horse.”

These are all dreams and fanatic follies. Why will not nature please for

once to lay open her bosom to us, and plainly discover to us the means

and conduct of her movements, and prepare our eyes to see them? Good

God, what abuse, what mistakes should we discover in our poor science!

I am mistaken if that weak knowledge of ours holds any one thing as it

really is, and I shall depart hence more ignorant of all other things

than my own ignorance.

Have I not read in Plato this divine saying, that “nature is nothing

but enigmatic poesy!” As if a man might perhaps see a veiled and shady

picture, breaking out here and there with an infinite variety of false

lights to puzzle our conjectures: _Latent ista omnia crassis occullata

et circumfusa tenebris; ut nulla acies humani ingenii tanta sit, quæ

penetrare in coelum, terram intrare, possit._ “All those things lie

concealed and involved in so dark an obscurity that no point of human

wit can be so sharp as to pierce heaven or penetrate the earth.” And

certainly philosophy is no other than sophisticated poetry. Whence do

the ancient writers extract their authorities but from the poets? and

the first of them were poets themselves, and writ accordingly. Plato is

but a poet unripped. Timon calls him, insultingly, “a monstrous forger

of miracles.” All superhuman sciences make use of the poetic style. Just

as women make use of teeth of ivory where the natural are wanting, and

instead of their true complexion make one of some artificial matter; as

they stuff themselves out with cotton to appear plump, and in the sight

of every one do paint, patch, and trick up themselves with a false and

borrowed beauty; so does science (and even our law itself has, they say,

legitimate fictions, whereon it builds the truth of its justice);

she gives us in presupposition, and for current pay, things which she

herself informs us were invented; for these _epicycles, eccentrics, and

concentrics_, which astrology makes use of to carry on the motions of

the stars, she gives us for the best she could invent upon that subject;

as also, in all the rest, philosophy presents us not that which really

is, or what she really believes, but what she has contrived with the

greatest and most plausible likelihood of truth, and the quaintest

invention. Plato, upon the discourse of the state of human bodies and

those of beasts, says, “I should know that what I have said is truth,

had I the confirmation of an oracle; but this I will affirm, that what I

have said is the most likely to be true of any thing I could say.”

‘Tis not to heaven only that art sends her ropes, engines, and wheels;

let us consider a little what she says of us ourselves, and of our

contexture.

There is not more retrogradation, trepidation, accession, recession, and

astonishment, in the stars and celestial bodies, than they have found

out in this poor little human body. In earnest, they have good reason,

upon that very account, to call it the little world, so many tools and

parts have they employed to erect and build it. To assist the motions

they see in man, and the various functions that we find in ourselves, in

how many parts have they divided the soul, in how many places lodged it?

in how many orders have they divided, and to how many stories have they

raised this poor creature, man, besides those that are natural and to

be perceived? And how many offices and vocations have they assigned him?

They make it an imaginary public thing. ‘Tis a subject that they hold

and handle; and they have full power granted to them to rip, place,

displace, piece, and stuff it, every one according to his own fancy, and

yet they possess it not They cannot, not in reality only, but even in

dreams, so govern it that there will not be some cadence or sound that

will escape their architecture, as enormous as it is, and botched with

a thousand false and fantastic patches. And it is not reason to excuse

them; for though we are satisfied with painters when they paint heaven,

earth, seas, mountains, and remote islands, that they give us some

slight mark of them, and, as of things unknown, are content with a faint

and obscure description; yet when they come and draw us after life, or

any other creature which is known and familiar to us, we then require of

them a perfect and exact representation of lineaments and colours, and

despise them if they fail in it.

I am very well pleased with the Milesian girl, who observing the

philosopher Thales to be always contemplating the celestial arch, and

to have his eyes ever gazing upward, laid something in his way that he

might stumble over, to put him in mind that it would be time to take up

his thoughts about things that are in the clouds when he had provided

for those that were under his feet. Doubtless she advised him well,

rather to look to himself than to gaze at heaven; for, as Democritus

says, by the mouth of Cicero,--

Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: coeli scrutantur plagas.

“No man regards what is under his feet;

They are always prying towards heaven.”

But our condition will have it so, that the knowledge of what we have in

hand is as remote from us, and as much above the clouds, as that of the

stars. As Socrates says, in Plato, “That whoever meddles with philosophy

may be reproached as Thales was by the woman, that he sees nothing of

that which is before him. For every philosopher is ignorant of what his

neighbour does; aye, and of what he does himself, and is ignorant of

what they both are, whether beasts or men.”

Those people, who find Sebond’s arguments too weak, that are ignorant of

nothing, that govern the world, that know all,--

Quæ mare compescant causæ; quid temperet annum;

Stellæ sponte suâ, jussæve, vagentur et errent;

Quid premat obscurum lunæ, quid proférât orbem;

Quid velit et posait rerum concordia discors;

“What governs ocean’s tides,

And through the various year the seasons guides;

Whether the stars by their own proper force,

Or foreign power, pursue their wand’ring course;

Why shadows darken the pale queen of night;

Whence she renews her orb and spreads her light;--

What nature’s jarring sympathy can mean;”

have they not sometimes in their writings sounded the difficulties they

have met with of knowing their own being? We see very well that the

finger moves, that the foot moves, that some parts assume a voluntary

motion of themselves without our consent, and that others work by our

direction; that one sort of apprehension occasions blushing; another

paleness; such an imagination works upon the spleen only, another upon

the brain; one occasions laughter, another tears; another stupefies and

astonishes all our senses, and arrests the motion of all our members;

at one object the stomach will rise, at another a member that lies

something lower; but how a spiritual impression should make such a

breach into a massy and solid subject, and the nature of the connection

and contexture of these admirable springs and movements, never yet

man knew: _Omnia incerta ratione, et in naturæ majestate abdita._ “All

uncertain in reason, and concealed in the majesty of nature,” says

Pliny. And St Augustin, _Modus quo corporibus adhorent spiritus....

omnino minis est, nec comprehendi ab homine potest; et hoc ipse

homo est,_ “The manner whereby souls adhere to bodies is altogether

wonderful, and cannot be conceived by man, and yet this is man.” And

yet it is not so much as doubted; for the opinions of men are received

according to the ancient belief, by authority and upon trust, as if

it were religion and law. ‘Tis received as gibberish which is commonly

spoken; this truth, with all its clutter of arguments and proofs, is

admitted as a firm and solid body, that is no more to be shaken, no more

to be judged of; on the contrary, every one, according to the best of

his talent, corroborates and fortifies this received belief with the

utmost power of his reason, which is a supple utensil, pliable, and to

be accommodated to any figure; and thus the world comes to be filled

with lies and fopperies. The reason that men doubt of divers things is

that they never examine common impressions; they do not dig to the root,

where the faults and defects lie; they only debate upon the branches;

they do not examine whether such and such a thing be true, but if it

has been so and so understood; it is not inquired into whether Galen has

said any thing to purpose, but whether he has said so or so. In truth it

was very good reason that this curb to the liberty of our judgments and

that tyranny over our opinions, should be extended to the schools and

arts. The god of scholastic knowledge is Aristotle; ‘tis irreligion to

question any of his decrees, as it was those of Lucurgus at Sparta;

his doctrine is a magisterial law, which, peradventure, is as false as

another. I do not know why I should not as willingly embrace either the

ideas of Plato, or the atoms of Epicurus, or the plenum or vacuum of

Leucippus and Democritus, or the water of Thales, or the infinity

of nature of Anaximander, or the air of Diogenes, or the numbers and

symmetry of Pythagoras, or the infinity of Parmenides, or the One of

Musæus, or the water and fire of Apollodorus, or the similar parts of

Anaxagoras, or the discord and friendship of Empedocles, or the fire of

Heraclitus, or any other opinion of that infinite confusion of opinions

and determinations, which this fine human reason produces by its

certitude and clearsightedness in every thing it meddles withal, as I

should the opinion of Aristotle upon this subject of the principles

of natural things; which principles he builds of three pieces--matter,

form, and privation. And what can be more vain than to make inanity

itself the cause of the production of things? Privation is a negative;

of what humour could he then make the cause and original of things that

are? And yet that were not to be controverted but for the exercise of

logic; there is nothing disputed therein to bring it into doubt, but to

defend the author of the school from foreign objections; his authority

is the non-ultra, beyond which it is not permitted to inquire.

It is very easy, upon approved foundations, to build whatever we please;

for, according to the law and ordering of this beginning, the other

parts of the structure are easily carried on without any failure. By

this way we find our reason well-grounded, and discourse at a venture;

for our masters prepossess and gain beforehand as much room in our

belief as is necessary towards concluding afterwards what they

please, as geometricians do by their granted demands, the consent and

approbation we allow them giving them wherewith to draw us to the right

and left, and to whirl us about at their pleasure. Whatever springs from

these presuppositions is our master and our God; he will take the level

of his foundations so ample and so easy that by them he may mount us

up to the clouds, if he so please. In this practice and negotiation

of science we have taken the saying of Pythagoras, “That every expert

person ought to be believed in his own art” for current pay. The

logician refers the signification of words to the grammarians; the

rhetorician borrows the state of arguments from the logician; the poet

his measure from the musician: the geometrician his proportions from

the arithmetician, and the metaphysicians take physical conjectures for

their foundations; for every science has its principle presupposed, by

which human judgment is everywhere kept in check. If you come to rush

against the bar where the principal error lies, they have presently this

sentence in their mouths, “That there is no disputing with persons who

deny principles.” Now men can have no principles if not revealed to them

by the divinity; of all the rest the beginning, the middle, and the

end, is nothing but dream and vapour. To those that contend upon

presupposition we must, on the contrary, presuppose to them the same

axiom upon which the dispute is. For every human presupposition and

declaration has as much authority one as another, if reason do not make

the difference. Wherefore they are all to be put into the balance, and

first the generals and those that tyrannize over us. The persuasion of

certainty is a certain testimony of folly and extreme incertainty;

and there are not a more foolish sort of men, nor that are less

philosophers, than the Philodoxes of Plato; we must inquire whether fire

be hot? whether snow be white? if there be any such things as hard or

soft within our knowledge?

And as to those answers of which they make old stories, as he that

doubted if there was any such thing as heat, whom they bid throw himself

into the fire; and he that denied the coldness of ice, whom they bid

to put ice into his bosom;--they are pitiful things, unworthy of the

profession of philosophy. If they had let us alone in our natural

being, to receive the appearance of things without us, according as they

present themselves to us by our senses, and had permitted us to follow

our own natural appetites, governed by the condition of our birth, they

might then have reason to talk at that rate; but ‘tis from them we have

learned to make ourselves judges of the world; ‘tis from them that we

derive this fancy, “That human reason is controller-general of all that

is without and within the roof of heaven; that comprehends every thing,

that can do every thing; by the means of which every thing is known and

understood.” This answer would be good among the cannibals, who enjoy

the happiness of a long, quiet, and peaceable life, without Aristotle’s

precepts, and without the knowledge of the name of physics; this answer

would perhaps be of more value and greater force than all those they

borrow from their reason and invention; of this all animals, and all

where the power of the law of nature is yet pure and simple, would be

as capable as we, but as for them they have renounced it. They need not

tell us, “It is true, for you see and feel it to be so;” they must tell

me whether I really feel what I think I do; and if I do feel it, they

must then tell me why I feel it, and how, and what; let them tell me the

name, original, the parts and junctures of heat and cold, the qualities

of the agent and patient; or let them give up their profession, which is

not to admit or approve of any thing but by the way of reason; that is

their test in all sorts of essays; but, certainly, ‘tis a test full of

falsity, error, weakness, and defect.

Which way can we better prove it than by itself? If we are not to

believe her when speaking of herself, she can hardly be thought fit to

judge of foreign things; if she know any thing, it must at least be her

own being and abode; she is in the soul, and either a part or an effect

of it; for true and essential reason, from which we by a false colour

borrow the name, is lodged in the bosom of the Almighty; there is her

habitation and recess; ‘tis thence that she imparts her rays, when God

is pleased to impart any beam of it to mankind, as Balias issued from

her father’s head, to communicate herself to the world.

Now let us see what human reason tells us of herself and of the soul,

not of the soul in general, of which almost all philosophy makes the

celestial and first bodies participants; nor of that which Thales

attributed to things which themselves are reputed inanimate, lead

thereto by the consideration of the loadstone; but of that which

appertains to us, and that we ought the best to know:--

Ignoratur enim, quæ sit natura animai;

Nata sit; an, contra, nascentibus insinuetur;

Et simnl intereat nobiscum morte dirempta;

An tenebras Orci visat, vastasque lacunas,

An pecudes alias divinitns insinuet se.

“For none the nature of the soul doth know,

Whether that it be born with us, or no;

Or be infused into us at our birth,

And dies with us when we return to earth,

Or then descends to the black shades below,

Or into other animals does go.”

Crates and Dicæarchus were of opinion that there was no soul at all,

but that the body thus stirs by a natural motion; Plato, that it was a

substance moving of itself; Thales, a nature without repose; Aedepiades,

an exercising of the senses; Hesiod and Anaximander, a thing composed of

earth and water; Parmenides, of earth and fire; Empedocles, of blood:--

Sanguineam vomit ille animam;

“He vomits up his bloody soul.”

Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Galen, that it was heat or a hot complexion--

Igneus est ollis vigor, et colestis origo;

“Their vigour of fire and of heavenly race.”

Hippocrates, a spirit diffused all over the body; Varro, that it was an

air received at the mouth, heated in the lungs, moistened in the heart,

and diffused throughout the whole body; Zeno, the quintessence of the

four elements; Heraclides Ponticus, that it was the light; Zenocrates

and the Egyptians, a mobile number; the Chaldeans, a virtue without any

determinate form:--

Habitum quemdam vitalem corporis esse,

Harmoniam Græci quam dicunt.

“A certain vital habit in man’s frame,

Which harmony the Grecian sages name.”

Let us not forget Aristotle, who held the soul to be that which

naturally causes the body to move, which he calls entelechia, with

as cold an invention as any of the rest; for he neither speaks of the

essence, nor of the original, nor of the nature of the soul, but

only takes notice of the effect Lactantius, Seneca, and most of the

Dogmatists, have confessed that it was a thing they did not understand;

after all this enumeration of opinions, _Harum sententiarum quo vera

sit, Deus aliquis viderit:_ “Of these opinions which is the true, let

some god determine,” says Cicero. “I know by myself,” says St Bernard,

“how incomprehensible God is, seeing I cannot comprehend the parts of my

own being.”

Heraclitus, who was of opinion that every being was full of souls and

demons, did nevertheless maintain that no one could advance so far

towards the knowledge of the soul as ever to arrive at it; so profound

was the essence of it.

Neither is there less controversy and debate about seating of it.

Hippocrates and Hierophilus place it in the ventricle of the brain;

Democritus and Aristotle throughout the whole body;--

Ut bona sæpe valetudo cum dicitur esse

Corporis, et non est tamen hæc pars ulla ralentis;

“As when the body’s health they do it call,

When of a sound man, that’s no part at all.”

Epicurus in the stomach;

Hic exsultat enim pavor ac metus;

Hæc loca circum Lætitiæ mulcent.

“For this the seat of horror is and fear,

And joys in turn do likewise triumph here.”

The Stoics, about and within the heart; Erasistratus, adjoining the

membrane of the epicranium; Empedocles, in the blood; as also Moses,

which was the reason why he interdicted eating the blood of beasts,

because the soul is there seated; Galen thought that every part of the

body had its soul; Strato has placed it betwixt the eyebrows; _Quâ facie

quidem sit animus, aut ubi habitet, ne quorendum quidem est:_ “What

figure the soul is of, or what part it inhabits, is not to be inquired

into,” says Cicero. I very willingly deliver this author to you in his

own words; for should I alter eloquence itself? Besides, it were but a

poor prize to steal the matter of his inventions; they are neither

very frequent, nor of any great weight, and sufficiently known. But the

reason why Chrysippus argues it to be about the heart, as all the rest

of that sect do, is not to be omitted; “It is,” says he, “because when

we would affirm any things we lay our hand upon our breasts; and when

we would pronounce èyù, which signifies I, we let the lower jaw fall

towards the stomach.” This place ought not to be passed over without

a remark upon the vanity of so great a man; for besides that these

considerations are infinitely light in themselves, the last is only a

proof to the Greeks that they have their souls lodged in that part. No

human judgment is so sprightly and vigilant that it does not sometimes

sleep. Why do we fear to say? The Stoics, the fathers of human prudence,

think that the soul of a man, crushed under a ruin, long labours

and strives to get out, like a mouse caught in a trap, before it can

disengage itself from the burden. Some hold that the world was made to

give bodies, by way of punishment, to the spirits fallen, by their own

fault, from the purity wherein they had been created, the first creation

having been incorporeal; and that, according as they are more or less

depraved from their spirituality, so are they more or less jocundly or

dully incorporated; and that thence proceeds all the variety of so much

created matter. But the spirit that for his punishment was invested

with the body of the sun must certainly have a very rare and particular

measure of change.

The extremities of our perquisition do all fall into astonishment

and blindness; as Plutarch says of the testimony of histories, that,

according to charts and maps, the utmost bounds of known r countries are

taken up with marshes, impenetrable forests, deserts, and uninhabitable

places; this is the reason why the most gross and childish ravings were

most found in those authors who treat of the most elevated subjects, and

proceed the furthest in them, losing themselves in their own curiosity

and presumption. The beginning and end of knowledge are equally foolish;

observe to what a pitch Plato flies in his poetic clouds; do but take

notice there of the gibberish of the gods; but what did he dream of when

he defined a man to be “a two-legged animal without feathers: giving

those who had a mind to deride him a pleasant occasion; for, having

pulled a capon alive, they went about calling it the man of Plato.”

And what did the Epicureans think of, out of what simplicity did they

first imagine that their _atoms_ that they said were bodies having some

weight, and a natural motion downwards, had made the world; till

they were put in mind, by their adversaries, that, according to this

description, it was impossible they should unite and join to one

another, their fall being so direct and perpendicular, and making so

many parallel lines throughout? Wherefore there was a necessity that

they should since add a fortuitous and sideways motion, and that they

should moreover accoutre their atoms with hooked tails, by which they

might unite and cling to one another. And even then do not those that

attack them upon this second consideration put them hardly to it? “If

the atoms have by chance formed so many sorts of figures, why did it

never fall out that they made a house or a shoe? Why at the same rate

should we not believe that an infinite number of Greek letters,

strewed all over a certain place, might fall into the contexture of the

_Iliad?_”--“Whatever is capable of reason,” says Zeno, “is better than

that which is not capable; there is nothing better than the world;

the world is therefore capable of reason.” Cotta, by this way of

argumentation, makes the world a mathematician; ‘and tis also made a

musician and an organist by this other argumentation of Zeno: “The

whole is more than a part; we are capable of wisdom, and are part of the

world; therefore the world is wise.” There are infinite like examples,

not only of arguments that are false in themselves, but silly ones, that

do not hold in themselves, and that accuse their authors not so much

of ignorance as imprudence, in the reproaches the philosophers dash one

another in the teeth withal, upon their dissensions in their sects and

opinions.

Whoever should bundle up a lusty faggot of the fooleries of human wisdom

would produce wonders. I willingly muster up these few for a pattern,

by a certain meaning not less profitable to consider than the most sound

and moderate instructions. Let us judge by these what opinion we are to

have of man, of his sense and reason, when in these great persons that

have raised human knowledge so high, so many gross mistakes and manifest

errors are to be found.

For my part, I am apt to believe that they have treated of knowledge

casually, and like a toy, with both hands; and have contended about

reason as of a vain and frivolous instrument, setting on foot all sorts

of fancies and inventions, sometimes more sinewy, and sometimes weaker.

This same Plato, who defines man as if he were a cock, says elsewhere,

after Socrates, “That he does not, in truth, know what man is, and that

he is a member of the world the hardest to understand.” By this variety

and instability of opinions, they tacitly lead us, as it were by the

hand, to this resolution of their irresolution. They profess not always

to deliver their opinions barefaced and apparent to us; they have one

while disguised them in the fabulous shadows of poetry, and at another

in some other vizor; for our imperfection carries this also along with

it, that crude meat is not always proper for our stomachs; we must dry,

alter, and mix it; they do the same; they sometimes conceal their real

opinions and judgments, and falsify them to accommodate themselves to

the public use. They will not make an open profession of ignorance, and

of the imbecility of human reason, that they may not fright children;

but they sufficiently discover it to us under the appearance of a

troubled and inconstant science.

I advised a person in Italy, who had a great mind to speak Italian, that

provided he only had a desire to make himself understood, without being

ambitious in any other respect to excel, that he should only make use

of the first word that came to the tongue’s end, whether Latin, French,

Spanish, or Gascon, and that, by adding the Italian termination, he

could not fail of hitting upon some idiom of the country, either Tuscan,

Roman, Venetian, Piedmontese, or Neapolitan, and so fall in with some

one of those many forms. I say the same of Philosophy; she has so many

faces, so much variety, and has said so many things, that all our dreams

and ravings are there to be found. Human fancy can conceive nothing

good or bad that is not there: _Nihil tam absurde did potest, quod non

dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum._ “Nothing can be said so absurd, that

has not been said before by some of the philosophers.” And I am the more

willing to expose my whimsies to the public; forasmuch as, though they

are spun out of myself, and without any pattern, I know they will be

found related to some ancient humour, and some will not stick to say,

“See whence he took it!” My manners are natural, I have not called in

the assistance of any discipline to erect them; but, weak as they are,

when it came into my head to lay them open to the world’s view, and that

to expose them to the light in a little more decent garb I went to adorn

them with reasons and examples, it was a wonder to myself accidentally

to find them conformable to so many philosophical discourses and

examples. I never knew what regimen my life was of till it was near

worn out and spent; a new figure--an unpremeditated and accidental

philosopher.

But to return to the soul. Inasmuch as Plato has placed reason in the

brain, anger in the heart, and concupiscence in the liver; ‘tis likely

that it was rather an interpretation of the movements of

the soul, than that he intended a division and separation of it, as of

a body, into several members. And the most likely of their opinions

is that ‘tis always a soul, that by its faculty, reasons, remembers,

comprehends, judges, desires, and exercises all its other operations by

divers instruments of the body; as the pilot guides his ship according

to his experience, one while straining or slacking the cordage, one

while hoisting the mainyard, or removing the rudder, by one and the same

power carrying on several effects; and that it is lodged in the brain;

which appears in that the wounds and accidents that touch that part do

immediately offend the faculties of the soul; and ‘tis not incongruous

that it should thence diffuse itself through the other parts of the body

Medium non deserit unquam

Coeli Phoebus iter; radiis tamen omnia lustrât.

“Phoebus ne’er deviates from the zodiac’s way;

Yet all things doth illustrate with his ray.”

As the sun sheds from heaven its light and influence, and fills the

world with them:--

Cætera pars animas, per totum dissita corpus,

Paret, et ad numen mentis momenque movetur.

“The other part o’ th’ soul diffus’d all o’er

The body, does obey the reason’s lore.”

Some have said that there was a general soul, as it were a great body,

whence all the particular souls were extracted, and thither again

return, always restoring themselves to that universal matter:--

Deum namque ire per omnes

Terrasque, tractusque maris, columque profundum;

Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,

Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas:

Scilicet hue reddi deinde, ac resoluta referri

Omnia; nec morti esse locum:

“For God goes forth, and spreads throughout the whole

Heaven, earth, and sea, the universal soul;

Each at its birth, from him all beings share,

Both man and brute, the breath of vital air;

To him return, and, loos’d from earthly chain,

Fly whence they sprung, and rest in God again,

Spurn at the grave, and, fearless of decay,

Dwell in high heaven, and star th’ ethereal way.”

Others, that they only rejoined and reunited themselves to it; others,

that they were produced from the divine substance; others, by the angels

of fire and air; others, that they were from all antiquity; and some

that they were created at the very point of time the bodies wanted

them; others make them to descend from the orb of the moon, and return

thither; the generality of the ancients believed that they were begotten

from father to son, after a like manner, and produced with all other

natural things; taking their argument from the likeness of children to

their fathers;

Instillata patris virtus tibi;

Fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;

“Thou hast thy father’s virtues with his blood:

For still the brave spring from the brave and good;”

and that we see descend from fathers to their children not only

bodily marks, but moreover a resemblance of humours, complexions, and

inclinations of the soul:--

Denique cur acris violentia triste leonum

Seminium sequitur? dolus vulpibus, et fuga, cervis

A patribus datur, et patrius pavor incitât artus?

Si non certa suo quia semine seminioque

Vis animi pariter crescit cum corpore toto.

“For why should rage from the fierce lion’s seed,

Or from the subtle fox’s craft, proceed;

Or why the tim’rous and flying hart

His fear and trembling to his race impart;

But that a certain force of mind does grow,

And still increases as the bodies do?”

That thereupon the divine justice is grounded, punishing in the children

the faults of their fathers; forasmuch as the contagion of paternal

vices is in some sort imprinted in the soul of children, and that the

ill government of their will extends to them; moreover, that if souls

had any other derivation than a natural consequence, and that they had

been some other thins out of the body, they would retain some memory

of their first being, the natural faculties that are proper to them of

discoursing, reasoning, and remembering, being considered:--

Si in corpus nascentibus insinuatur,

Cur super anteactam ætatem meminisse nequimus,

Nec vestigia gestarum rerum ulla tenemus?

“For at our birth if it infused be,

Why do we then retain no memory

Of our foregoing life, and why no more

Remember any thing we did before?”

for, to make the condition of our souls such as we would have it to be,

we must suppose them all-knowing, even in their natural simplicity and

purity; by these means they had been such, being free from the prison of

the body, as well before they entered into it, as we hope they shall be

after they are gone out of it; and from this knowledge it should follow

that they should remember, being got in the body, as Plato said, “That

what we learn is no other than a remembrance of what we knew before;” a

thing which every one by experience may maintain to be false. Forasmuch,

in the first place, as that we do not justly remember any thing but

what we have been taught, and that if the memory did purely perform its

office it would at least suggest to us something more than what we have

learned. Secondly, that which she knew being in her purity, was a

true knowledge, knowing things as they are by her divine intelligence;

whereas here we make her receive falsehood and vice when we instruct

her; wherein she cannot employ her reminiscence, that image and

conception having never been planted in her. To say that the corporal

prison does in such sort suffocate her natural faculties, that they

are there utterly extinct, is first contrary to this other belief of

acknowledging her power to be so great, and the operations of it that

men sensibly perceive in this life so admirable, as to have thereby

concluded that divinity and eternity past, and the immortality to

come:--

Nam si tantopere est anirai mutata potestas,

Omnia ut actarum exciderit retinentia rerum,

Non, ut opinor, ea ab letho jam longior errat.

“For if the mind be changed to that degree

As of past things to lose all memory,

So great a change as that, I must confess,

Appears to me than death but little less.”

Furthermore, ‘tis here with us, and not elsewhere, that the force

and effects of the soul ought to be considered; all the rest of her

perfections are vain and useless to her; ‘tis by her present condition

that all her immortality is to be rewarded and paid, and of the life of

man only that she is to render an account It had been injustice to have

stripped her of her means and powers; to have disarmed her in order, in

the time of her captivity and imprisonment in the flesh, of her weakness

and infirmity in the time wherein she was forced and compelled, to pass

an infinite and perpetual sentence and condemnation, and to insist upon

the consideration of so short a time, peradventure but an hour or two,

or at the most but a century, which has no more proportion with infinity

than an instant; in this momentary interval to ordain and definitively

to determine of her whole being; it were an unreasonable disproportion,

too, to assign an eternal recompense in consequence of so short a life.

Plato, to defend himself from this inconvenience, will have future

payments limited to the term of a hundred years, relatively to human

duration; and of us ourselves there are enough who have given them

temporal limits. By this they judged that the generation of the soul

followed the common condition of human things, as also her life,

according to the opinion of Epicurus and Democritus, which has been the

most received; in consequence of these fine appearances that they saw

it bom, and that, according as the body grew more capable, they saw it

increase in vigour as the other did; that its feebleness in infancy was

very manifest, and in time its better strength and maturity, and after

that its declension and old age, and at last its decrepitude:--

Gigni pariter cum corpore, et una

Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem.

“Souls with the bodies to be born we may

Discern, with them t’ increase, with them decay.”

They perceived it to be capable of divers passions, and agitated with

divers painful motions, whence it fell into lassitude and uneasiness;

capable of alteration and change, of cheerfulness, of stupidity and

languor, and subject to diseases and injuries, as the stomach or the

foot;

Mentem sanari, corpus ut ægrum,

Ceraimus, et flecti medicinâ posse videmus;

“Sick minds, as well as bodies, we do see

By Med’cine’s virtue oft restored to be;”

dazzled and intoxicated with the fumes of wine, jostled from her seat by

the vapours of a burning fever, laid asleep by the application of some

medicaments, and roused by others,--

Corpoream naturam animi esse necesse est,

Corporeis quoniam telis ictuque laborat;

“There must be of necessity, we find,

A nature that’s corporeal of the mind,

Because we evidently see it smarts

And wounded is with shafts the body darts;”

they saw it astonished and overthrown in all its faculties through the

mere bite of a mad dog, and in that condition to have no stability

of reason, no sufficiency, no virtue, no philosophical resolution, no

resistance that could exempt it from the subjection of such accidents;

the slaver of a contemptible cur shed upon the hand of Socrates, to

shake all his wisdom and all his great and regulated imaginations, and

so to annihilate them, ad that there remained no trace of his former

knowledge,--

Vis.... animal Conturbatur, et.... divisa seorsum

Disjectatur, eodem illo distracta veneno;

“The power of the soul’s disturbed; and when

That once is but sequestered from her, then

By the same poison ‘tis dispersed abroad;”

and this poison to find no more resistance in that great soul than in an

infant of four years old; a poison sufficient to make all philosophy, if

it were incarnate, become furious and mad; insomuch that Cato, who

ever disdained death and fortune, could not endure the sight of a

looking-glass, or of water, overwhelmed with horror and affright at

the thought of falling, by the contagion of a mad dog, into the disease

called by physicians hydrophobia:--

Vis morbi distracta per artus

Turbat agens animam, spumantes æquore salso

Ventorum ut validis fervescunt viribus undæ.

“Throughout the limbs diffused, the fierce disease

Disturbs the soul, as in the briny seas,

The foaming waves to swell and boil we see,

Stirred by the wind’s impetuosity.”

Now, as to this particular, philosophy has sufficiently armed man to

encounter all other accidents either with patience, or, if the search

of that costs too dear, by an infallible defeat, in totally depriving

himself of all sentiment; but these are expedients that are only of use

to a soul being itself, and in its full power, capable of reason and

deliberation; but not at all proper for this inconvenience, where, in

a philosopher, the soul becomes the soul of a madman, troubled,

overturned, and lost; which many occasions may produce, as a too

vehement agitation that any violent passion of the soul may beget in

itself; or a wound in a certain part of the person, or vapours from the

stomach, any of which may stupefy the understanding and turn the brain.

Morbis in corporis avius errat

Sæpe animus; dementit enim, deliraque fatur;

Interdumque gravi lethargo fertur in altum

Æternumque soporem, oculis mi tuque cadenti:

“For when the body’s sick, and ill at ease,

The mind doth often share in the disease;

Wonders, grows wild, and raves, and sometimes by

A heavy and a stupid lethargy,

Is overcome and cast into a deep,

A most profound and everlasting sleep.”

The philosophers, methinks, have not much touched this string, no more

than another of equal importance; they have this dilemma continually

in their mouths, to console our mortal condition: “The soul is either

mortal or immortal; if mortal, it will suffer no pain; if immortal, it

will change for the better.”--They never touch the other branch, “What

if she change for the worse?” and leave to the poets the menaces of

future torments. But thereby they make themselves a good game. These are

two omissions that I often meet with in their discourses. I return to

the first.

This soul loses the use of the sovereign stoical good, so constant and

so firm. Our fine human wisdom must here yield, and give up her arms. As

to the rest, they also considered, by the vanity of human reason, that

the mixture and association of two so contrary things as the mortal and

the immortal, was unimaginable:--

Quippe etenim mortale æterao jungere, et una

Consentire putare, et fungi mutua posse,

Desipere est. Quid enim diversius esse putandum est,

Aut magis inter se disjunctum discrepitansque,

Quam, mortale quod est, immortali atque perenni

Junctum, in concilio, sævas tolerare procellas?

“The mortal and th’ eternal, then, to blend,

And think they can pursue one common end,

Is madness: for what things more diff’rent are.

Distinct in nature, and disposed to jar?

How can it then be thought that these should bear,

When thus conjoined, of harms an equal share?”

Moreover, they perceived the soul tending towards death as well as the

body:--

Simul ovo fessa fatiscit:

“Fatigued together with the weight of years:”

which, according to Zeno, the image of sleep does sufficiently

demonstrate to us; for he looks upon it “as a fainting and fall of the

soul, as well as of the body:” _Contrahi animum et quasi labi putat

atque decidere:_ and, what they perceived in some, that the soul

maintained its force and vigour to the last gasp of life, they

attributed to the variety of diseases, as it is observable in men at the

last extremity, that some retain one sense, and some another; one

the hearing, and another the smell, without any manner of defect or

alteration; and that there is not so universal a deprivation that some

parts do not remain vigorous and entire:--

Non alio pacto, quam si, pes cum dolet ægri,

In nullo caput interea sit forte dolore.

“So, often of the gout a man complains,

Whose head is, at the same time, free from pains.”

The sight of our judgment is, to truth, the same that the owl’s eyes

are to the splendour of the sun, says Aristotle. By what can we better

convince him, than by so gross blindness in so apparent a light? For the

contrary opinion of the immortality of the soul, which, Cicero says,

was first introduced, according to the testimony of books at least, by

Pherecydes

Syrius, in the time of King Tullus (though some attribute it to Thales,

and others to others), ‘tis the part of human science that is treated of

with the greatest doubt and

reservation. The most positive dogmatists are fain, in this point

principally, to fly to the refuge of the Academy. No one doubts what

Aristotle has established upon this subject, no more than all the

ancients in general, who handle it with a wavering belief: _Rem

gratissimam promittentium magis quam probantium:_ “A thing more

acceptable in the promisors than the provers.” He conceals himself in

clouds of words of difficult, unintelligible sense, and has left to

those of his sect as great a dispute about his judgment as about the

matter itself.

Two things rendered this opinion plausible to them; one, that, without

the immortality of souls, there would be nothing whereon to ground the

vain hopes of glory, which is a consideration of wonderful

repute in the world; the other, that it is a very profitable impression,

as Plato says, that vices, when they escape the discovery and cognizance

of human justice, are still within the reach of the divine, which will

pursue them even after the death of the guilty. Man is excessively

solicitous to prolong his being, and has to the utmost of his power

provided for it; there are monuments for the conservation of the body,

and glory to preserve the name. He has employed all his wit and opinion

to the rebuilding of himself, impatient of his fortune, and to prop

himself by his inventions. The soul, by reason of its anxiety and

impotence, being unable to stand by itself, wanders up and down to seek

out consolations, hopes, and foundations, and alien circumstances, to

which she adheres and fixes; and how light or fantastic soever invention

delivers them to her, relies more willingly, and with greater assurance,

upon them than upon herself. But ‘tis wonderful to observe how the most

constant and obstinate maintainers of this just and clear persuasion

of the immortality of the soul fall short, and how weak their arguments

are, when they go about to prove it by human reason: _Somnia sunt non

docentis, sed optantis:_ “They are dreams, not of the teacher, but

wisher,” says one of the ancients. By which testimony man may know that

he owes the truth he himself finds out to fortune and accident; since

that even then, when it is fallen into his hand, he has not wherewith to

hold and maintain it, and that his reason has not force to make use of

it. All things produced by our own meditation and understanding, whether

true or false, are subject to incertitude and controversy. ‘Twas for

the chastisement of our pride, and for the instruction of our miserable

condition and incapacity, that God wrought the perplexity and confusion

of the tower of Babel. Whatever we undertake without his assistance,

whatever we see without the lamp of his grace, is but vanity and folly.

We corrupt the very essence of truth, which is uniform and constant,

by our weakness, when fortune puts it into our possession. What course

soever man takes of himself, God still permits it to come to the same

confusion, the image whereof he so lively represents to us in the just

chastisement wherewith he crushed Nimrod’s presumption, and frustrated

the vain attempt of his proud structure; _Perdam sapientiam sapientium,

et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo._ “I will destroy the wisdom of the

wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” The

diversity of idioms and tongues, with which he disturbed this work,

what are they other than this infinite and perpetual alteration and

discordance of opinions and reasons, which accompany and confound the

vain building of human wisdom, and to very good effect too; for what

would hold us, if we had but the least grain of knowledge? This saint

has very much obliged me: _Ipsa veritatis occultatio ant humili-tatis

exercitatio est, aut elationis attritio_ “The very concealment of the

truth is either an exercise of humility or a quelling of presumption.”

To what a pitch of presumption and insolence do we raise our blindness

and folly!

But to return to my subject. It was truly very good reason that we

should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the

truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive

the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal

beatitude. Let us ingenuously confess that God alone has dictated it

to us, and faith; for ‘tis no lesson of nature and our own reason.

And whoever will inquire into his own being and power, both within

and without, without this divine privilege; whoever shall consider

man impartially, and without flattery, will see in him no efficacy or

faculty that relishes of any thing but death and earth. The more we

give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater

Christianity. That which this Stoic philosopher says he holds from the

fortuitous consent of the popular voice; had it not been better that he

had held it from God? _Cum de animarum otemitate disserimus, non leve

momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos, aut

colentium. Utor hâc publicâ persuasione._ “When we discourse of the

immortality of souls, the consent of men that either fear or adore the

infernal powers, is of no small advantage. I make use of this public

persuasion.” Now the weakness of human arguments upon this subject

is particularly manifested by the fabulous circumstances they have

superadded as consequences of this opinion, to find out of what

condition this immortality of ours was. Let us omit the Stoics, (_usuram

nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus; diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper,

negant._ “They give us a long life, as also they do to crows; they say

our soul shall continue long, but that it shall continue always they

deny,”) who give to souls a life after this, but finite. The most

universal and received fancy, and that continues down to our times in

various places, is that of which they make Pythagoras the author; not

that he was the original inventor, but because it received a great deal

of weight and repute by the authority of his approbation: “That souls,

at their departure out of us, did nothing but shift from one body to

another, from a lion to a horse, from a horse to a king, continually

travelling at this rate from habitation to habitation;” and he himself

said that he remembered he had been Ætha-lides, since that Euphorbus,

afterwards Hermotimus, and, finally, from Pyrrhus was passed into

Pythagoras; having a memory of himself of two hundred and six years. And

some have added that these very souls sometimes mount up to heaven, and

come down again:--

O pater, aime aliquas ad colum hinc ire putandum est

Sublimes animas, iterumque ad tarda reverti

Corpora? Quæ lucis miseris tam dira cupido?

“O, father, is it then to be conceiv’d

That any of these spirits, so sublime,

Should hence to the celestial regions climb,

And thence return to earth to reassume

Their sluggish bodies rotting in a tomb?

For wretched life whence does such fondness come?”

Origen makes them eternally to go and come from a better to a worse

estate. The opinion that Varro mentions is that, after four hundred and

forty years’ revolution, they should be reunited to their first bodies;

Chrysippus held that this would happen after a certain space of time

unknown and unlimited. Plato, who professes to have embraced this belief

from Pindar and the ancient poets, that we are to undergo infinite

vicissitudes of mutation, for which the soul is prepared, having neither

punishment nor reward in the other world but what is temporal, as its

life here is but temporal, concludes that it has a singular knowledge of

the affairs of heaven, of hell, of the world, through all which it has

passed, repassed, and made stay in several voyages, are matters for her

memory. Observe her progress elsewhere: “The soul that has lived well

is reunited to the stars to which it is assigned; that which has lived

ill removes into a woman, and if it do not there reform, is again

removed into a beast of condition suitable to its vicious manners, and

shall see no end of its punishments till it be returned to its natural

constitution, and that it has, by the force of reason, purged itself

from those gross, stupid, and elementary qualities it was polluted

with.” But I will not omit the objection the Epicureans make against

this transmigration from one body to another; ‘tis a pleasant one; they

ask what expedient would be found out if the number of the dying should

chance to be greater than that of those who are coming into the world.

For the souls, turned out of their old habitation, would scuffle and

crowd which should first get possession of their new lodging; and they

further demand how they shall pass away their time, whilst waiting

till new quarters are made ready for them? Or, on the contrary, if more

animals should be born than die, the body, they say, would be but in an

ill condition whilst waiting for a soul to be infused into it; and it

would fall out that some bodies would die before they had been alive.

Denique comrabia ad Veneris, partusque ferarum

Esse animas præsto, deridiculum esse videtur;

Et spectare immortales mortalia membra

Innumero numéro, certareque præproperanter

Inter se, quæ prima potissimaqæ insinueter.

“Absurd to think that whilst wild beasts beget,

Or bear their young, a thousand souls do wait,

Expect the falling body, fight and strive

Which first shall enter in and make it live.”

Others have arrested the soul in the body of the deceased, with it to

animate serpents, worms, and other beasts, which are said to be bred

out of the corruption of our members, and even out of our ashes; others

divide them into two parts, the one mortal, the other immortal; others

make it corporeal, and nevertheless immortal. Some make it immortal,

without

sense or knowledge. There are others, even among ourselves, who have

believed that devils were made of the souls of the damned; as Plutarch

thinks that gods were made of those that were saved; for there are few

things which that author is so positive in as he is in this; maintaining

elsewhere a doubtful and ambiguous way of expression. “We are told,”

says he, “and steadfastly should believe, that the souls of virtuous

men, both according to nature and the divine justice, become saints, and

from saints demigods, and from demigods, after they are perfectly, as in

sacrifices of purgation, cleansed and purified, being delivered from all

passibility and all mortality, they become, not by any civil decree, but

in real truth, and according to all probability of reason, entire and

perfect gods, in receiving a most happy and glorious end.” But who

desires to see him--him, who is yet the most sober and moderate of the

whole gang of philosophers, lay about him with greater boldness, and

relate his miracles upon this subject, I refer him to his treatise _of

the Moon,_ and _of the Demon of Socrates_, where he may, as evidently

as in any other place whatever, satisfy himself that the mysteries of

philosophy have many strange things in common with those of poetry;

human understanding losing itself in attempting to sound and search all

things to the bottom; even as we, tired and worn out with a long course

of life, return to infancy and dotage. See here the fine and certain

instructions which we extract from human knowledge concerning the soul.

Neither is there less temerity in what they teach us touching our

corporal parts. Let us choose out one or two examples; for otherwise we

should lose ourselves in this vast and troubled ocean of medical errors.

Let us first know whether, at least, they agree about the matter whereof

men produce one another; for as to their first production it is

no wonder if, in a thing so high and so long since past, human

understanding finds itself puzzled and perplexed. Archelaus, the

physician, whose disciple and favourite Socrates was, according to

Aristoxenus, said that both men and beasts were made of a lacteous

slime, expressed by the heat of the earth; Pythagoras says that our

seed is the foam or cream of our better blood; Plato, that it is the

distillation of the marrow of the backbone; raising his argument from

this, that that part is first sensible of being weary of the work;

Alcmeon, that it is part of the substance of the brain, and that it

is so, says he, is proved by the weakness of the eyes in those who

are immoderate in that exercise; Democritus, that it is a substance

extracted from the whole mass of the body; Epicurus, an extract from

soul and body; Aristotle, an excrement drawn from the aliment of the

blood, the last which is diffused over our members; others, that it is

a blood concocted and digested by the heat of the genitals, which they

judge, by reason that in excessive endeavours a man voids pure blood;

wherein there seems to be more likelihood, could a man extract any

appearance from so infinite a confusion. Now, to bring this seed to do

its work, how many contrary opinions do they set on foot? Aristotle

and Democritus are of opinion that women have no sperm, and that ‘tis

nothing but a sweat that they distil in the heat of pleasure and

motion, and that contributes nothing at all to generation. Galen, on

the contrary, and his followers, believe that without the concurrence

of seeds there can be no generation. Here are the physicians, the

philosophers, the lawyers, and divines, by the ears with our wives about

the dispute, “For what term women carry their fruit?” and I, for my

part, by the example of myself, stick with those that maintain a woman

goes eleven months with child. The world is built upon this experience;

there is no so commonplace a woman that cannot give her judgment in all

these controversies; and yet we cannot agree.

Here is enough to verify that man is no better instructed in the

knowledge of himself, in his corporal than in his spiritual part We have

proposed himself to himself, and his reason to his reason, to see what

she could say. I think I have sufficiently demonstrated how little

she understands herself in herself; and who understands not himself in

himself, in what can he? _Quasi vero mensuram ullius rei possit agere,

qui sui nesciat._ “As if he could understand the measure of any other

thing, that knows not his own.” In earnest, Protagoras told us a pretty

flam in making man the measure of all things, that never knew so much as

his own; and if it be not he, his dignity will not permit that any

other creature should have this advantage; now he being so contrary

in himself, and one judgment so incessantly subverting another, this

favourable proposition was but a mockery, which induced us necessarily

to conclude the nullity of the compass and the compasser. When Thales

reputes the knowledge of man very difficult for man to comprehend, he

at the same time gives him to understand that all other knowledge is

impossible.

You,* for whom I have taken the pains, contrary to my custom, to write

so long a discourse, will not refuse to support your Sebond by the

ordinary forms of arguing, wherewith you are every day instructed, and

in this will exercise both your wit and learning; for this last fencing

trick is never to be made use of but as an extreme remedy; ‘tis a

desperate thrust, wherein you are to quit your own arms to make your

adversary abandon his; and a secret sleight, which must be very rarely,

and then very reservedly, put in practice. ‘Tis great temerity to lose

yourself that you may destroy another; you must not die to be revenged,

as Gobrias did; for, being closely grappled in combat with a lord of

Persia, Darius coming in sword in hand, and fearing to strike lest he

should kill Gobrias, he called out to him boldly to fall on,

* The author, as we have already mentioned, is addressing

Margaret de Valois.

though he should run them both through at once. I have known desperate

weapons, and conditions of single combat, and wherein he that offered

them put himself and his adversary upon terms of inevitable death to

them both, censured for unjust. The Portuguese, in the Indian Sea, took

certain Turks prisoners, who, impatient of their captivity, resolved,

and it succeeded, by striking the nails of the ship one against another,

and making a spark to fall into the barrels of powder that were set in

the place where they were guarded, to blow up and reduce themselves,

their masters, and the vessel to ashes. We here touch the out-plate

and utmost limits of sciences, wherein the extremity is vicious, as

in virtue. Keep yourselves in the common road; it is not good to be so

subtle and cunning. Remember the Tuscan proverb:--

Chi troppo s’assottiglia, si scavezza.

“Who makes himself too wise, becomes a fool.”

I advise you that, in all your opinions and discourses, as well as

in your manners and all other things, you keep yourself moderate and

temperate, and avoid novelty; I am an enemy to all extravagant ways.

You, who by the authority of your grandeur, and yet more by the

advantages which those qualities give you that are more your own, may

with the twinkle of an eye command whom you please, ought to have given

this charge to some one who made profession of letters, who might after

a better manner have proved and illustrated these things to you. But

here is as much as you will stand in need of.

Epicurus said of the laws, “That the worst were so necessary for us that

without them men would devour one another.” And Plato affirms, “That

without laws we should live like beasts.” Our wit is a wandering,

dangerous, and temerarious utensil; it is hard to couple any order or

measure to it; in those of our own time, who are endued with any rare

excellence above others, or any extraordinary vivacity of understanding,

we see them almost all lash out into licentiousness of opinions and

manners; and ‘tis almost a miracle to find one temperate and sociable.

‘Tis all the reason in the world to limit human wit within the strictest

limits imaginable; in study, as in all the rest, we ought to have

its steps and advances numbered and fixed, and that the limits of its

inquisition be bounded by art. It is curbed and fettered by religions,

laws, customs, sciences, precepts, mortal and immortal penalties. And

yet we see that it escapes from all these bonds by its volubility and

dissolution; *tis a vain body which has nothing to lay hold on or to

seize; a various and difform body, incapable of being either bound

or held. In earnest, there are few souls so regular, firm, and well

descended, as are to be trusted with their own conduct, and that can

with moderation, and without temerity, sail in the liberty of their own

judgments, beyond the common and received opinions; *tis more expedient

to put them under pupilage. Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the

possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly; and there is not a

beast to whom a headboard is more justly to be given, to keep his looks

down and before his feet, and to hinder him from wandering here and

there out of the tracks which custom and the laws have laid before him.

And therefore it will be better for you to keep yourself in the beaten

path, let it be what it will, than to fly out at a venture with this

unbridled liberty. But if any of these new doctors will pretend to be

ingenious in your presence, at the expense both of your soul and his

own, to avoid this dangerous plague, which is every day laid in your

way to infect you, this preservative, in the extremest necessity,

will prevent the danger and hinder the contagion of this poison from

offending either you or your company.

The liberty, then, and frolic forwardness of these ancient wits produced

in philosophy and human sciences several sects of different opinions,

every one undertaking to judge and make choice of what he would stick

to and maintain. But now that men go all one way, _Qui certis quibusdam

destinatisque sententiis addicti et consecrati sunt, ut etiam, quæ non

probant, cogantur defendere,_ “Who are so tied and obliged to certain

opinions that they are bound to defend even those they do not approve,”

and that we receive the arts by civil authority and decree, so that the

schools have but one pattern, and a like circumscribed institution and

discipline, we no more take notice what the coin weighs, and is really

worth, but every one receives it according to the estimate that common

approbation and use puts upon it; the alloy is not questioned, but how

much it is current for. In like manner all things pass; we take

physic as we do geometry; and tricks of hocus-pocus, enchantments,

and love-spells, the correspondence of the souls of the dead,

prognostications, domifications, and even this ridiculous pursuit of the

philosophers’ stone, all things pass for current pay, without any manner

of scruple or contradiction. We need to know no more but that Mars’

house is in the middle of the triangle of the hand, that of Venus in

the thumb, and that of Mercury in the little finger; that when the

table-line cuts the tubercle of the forefinger ‘tis a sign of cruelty,

that when it falls short of the middle finger, and that the natural

median-line makes an angle with the vital in the same side, ‘tis a sign

of a miserable death; that if in a woman the natural line be open, and

does not close the angle with the vital, this denotes that she shall not

be very chaste. I leave you to judge whether a man qualified with such

knowledge may not pass with reputation and esteem in all companies.

Theophrastus said that human knowledge, guided by the senses, might

judge of the causes of things to a certain degree; but that being

arrived to first and extreme causes, it must stop short and retire, by

reason either of its own infirmity or the difficulty of things. ‘Tis a

moderate and gentle opinion, that our own understandings may conduct

us to the knowledge of some things, and that it has certain measures

of power, beyond which ‘tis temerity to employ it; this opinion is

plausible, and introduced by men of well composed minds, but ‘tis hard

to limit our wit, which is curious and greedy, and will no more stop

at a thousand than at fifty paces; having experimentally found that,

wherein one has failed, the other has hit, and that what was unknown to

one age, the age following has explained; and that arts and sciences are

not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often

handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form;

what my force cannot discover, I do not yet desist to sound and to try;

and by handling and kneading this new matter over and over again, by

turning and heating it, I lay open to him that shall succeed me, a kind

of facility to enjoy it more at his ease, and make it more maniable and

supple for him,

Ut hymettia sole

Cera remollescit, tractataque poll ice multas

Vertitur in facies, ipsoque fit utilis usu;

“As wax doth softer in the sun become,

And, tempered ‘twixt the finger and the thumb,

Will varions forms, and several shapes admit,

Till for the present use ‘tis rendered fit;”

as much will the second do for the third; which is the cause that

the difficulty ought not to make me despair, and my own incapacity as

little; for ‘tis nothing but my own.

Man is as capable of all things as of some; and if he confesses, as

Theophrastus says, the ignorance of first causes, let him at once

surrender all the rest of his knowledge; if he is defective in

foundation, his reason is aground; disputation and inquiry have no other

aim nor stop but principles; if this aim do not stop his career, he

runs into an infinite irresolution. _Non potest aliud alio magis minusve

comprehendi, quoniam omnium rerum una est dejinitio comprehendendi:_

“One thing can no more or less be comprehended than another, because

the definition of comprehending all things is the same.” Now ‘tis very

likely that, if the soul knew any thing, it would in the first place

know itself; and if it knew any thing out of itself, it would be its own

body and case, before any thing else. If we see the gods of physic to

this very day debating about our anatomy,

Mulciber in Trojam, pro Trojâ stabat Apollo;

“Vulcan against, for Troy Apollo stood;”

when are we to expect that they will be agreed? We are nearer neighbours

to ourselves than whiteness to snow, or weight to stones. If man do not

know himself, how should he know his force and functions? It is not,

perhaps, that we have not some real knowledge in us; but ‘tis by chance;

forasmuch as errors are received into our soul by the same way, after

the same manner, and by the same conduct, it has not wherewithal to

distinguish them, nor wherewithal to choose the truth from falsehood.

The Academics admitted a certain partiality of judgment, and thought it

too crude to say that it was not more likely to say that snow was white

than black; and that we were no more assured of the motion of a stone,

thrown by the hand, than of that of the eighth sphere. And to avoid

this difficulty and strangeness, that can in truth hardly lodge in our

imagination, though they concluded that we were in no sort capable of

knowledge, and that truth is engulfed in so profound an abyss as is not

to be penetrated by human sight; yet they acknowledged some things to be

more likely than others, and received into their judgment this faculty,

that they had a power to incline to one appearance more than another,

they allowed him this propension, interdicting all resolution. The

Pyrrhonian opinion is more bold, and also somewhat more likely; for this

academic inclination, and this propension to one proposition rather than

another, what is it other than a recognition of some more apparent

truth in this than in that? If our understanding be capable of the form,

lineaments, port, and face of truth, it might as well see it entire as

by halves, springing and imperfect This appearance of likelihood,

which makes them rather take the left hand than the right, augments

it; multiply this ounce of verisimilitude that turns the scales to

a hundred, to a thousand, ounces; it will happen in the end that the

balance will itself end the controversy, and determine one choice, one

entire truth. But why do they suffer themselves to incline to and be

swayed by verisimilitude, if they know not the truth? How should they

know the similitude of that whereof they do not know the essence? Either

we can absolutely judge, or absolutely we cannot If our intellectual and

sensible faculties are without foot or foundation, if they only pull

and drive, ‘tis to no purpose that we suffer our judgments to be carried

away with any part of their operation, what appearance soever they

may seem to present us; and the surest and most happy seat of our

understanding would be that where it kept itself temperate, upright, and

inflexible, without tottering, or without agitation: _Inter visa, vera

aut falsa, ad animi assensum, nihil interest:_ “Amongst things that

seem, whether true or false, it signifies nothing to the assent of the

mind.” That things do not lodge in us in their form and essence, and

do not there make their entry by their own force and authority, we

sufficiently see; because, if it were so, we should receive them after

the same manner; wine would have the same relish with the sick as with

the healthful; he who has his finger chapt or benumbed would find the

same hardness in wood or iron that he handles that another does; foreign

subjects then surrender themselves to our mercy, and are seated in us as

we please. Now if on our part we received any thing without alteration,

if human grasp were capable and strong enough to seize on truth by our

own means, these means being common to all men, this truth would be

conveyed from hand to hand, from one to another; and at least there

would be some one thing to be found in the world, amongst so many as

there are, that would be believed by men with an universal consent;

but this, that there is no one proposition that is not debated and

controverted amongst us, or that may not be, makes it very manifest that

our natural judgment does not very clearly discern what it embraces; for

my judgment cannot make my companions approve of what it approves; which

is a sign that I seized it by some other means than by a natural power

that is in me and in all other men.

Let us lay aside this infinite confusion of opinions, which we see even

amongst the philosophers themselves, and this perpetual and universal

dispute about the knowledge of things; for this is truly presupposed,

that men, I mean the most knowing, the best bom, and of the best parts,

are not agreed about any one thing, not that heaven is over our heads;

for they that doubt of every thing, do also doubt of that; and they

who deny that we are able to comprehend any thing, say that we have not

comprehended that the heaven is over our heads, and these two opinions

are, without comparison, the stronger in number.

Besides this infinite diversity and division, through the trouble that

our judgment gives ourselves, and the incertainty that every one is

sensible of in himself, ‘tis easy to perceive that its seat is very

unstable and insecure. How variously do we judge of things?--How often

do we alter our opinions? What I hold and believe to-day I hold and

believe with my whole belief; all my instruments and engines seize and

take hold of this opinion, and become responsible to me for it, at least

as much as in them lies; I could not embrace nor conserve any truth

with greater confidence and assurance than I do this; I am wholly and

entirely possessed with it; but has it not befallen me, not only once,

but a hundred, a thousand times, every day, to have embraced some other

thing with all the same instruments, and in the same condition, which

I have since judged to be false? A man must at least become wise at his

own expense; if I have often found myself betrayed under this colour; if

my touch proves commonly false, and my balance unequal and unjust, what

assurance can I now have more than at other times? Is it not stupidity

and madness to suffer myself to be so often deceived by my guide?

Nevertheless, let fortune remove and shift us five hundred times from

place to place, let her do nothing but incessantly empty and fill into

our belief, as into a vessel, other and other opinions; yet still the

present and the last is the certain and infallible one; for this we must

abandon goods, honour, life, health, and all.

Posterior.... res ilia reperta

Perdit, et immutat sensus ad pristina qnæqne.

“The last things we find out are always best,

And make us to disrelish all the rest.”

Whatever is preached to us, and whatever we learn, we should still

remember that it is man that gives and man that receives; ‘tis a mortal

hand that presents it to us; ‘tis a mortal hand that accepts it The

things that come to us from heaven have the sole right and authority of

persuasion, the sole mark of truth; which also we do not see with our

own eyes, nor receive by our own means; that great and sacred image

could not abide in so wretched a habitation if God for this end did not

prepare it, if God did not by his particular and supernatural grace and

favour fortify and reform it. At least our frail and defective condition

ought to make us behave ourselves with more reservedness and moderation

in our innovations and changes; we ought to remember that, whatever we

receive into the understanding, we often receive things that are false,

and that it is by the same instruments that so often give themselves the

lie and are so often deceived.

Now it is no wonder they should so often contradict themselves, being

so easy to be turned and swayed by very light occurrences. It is certain

that our apprehensions, our judgment, and the faculties of the soul in

general, suffer according to the movements and alterations of the body,

which alterations are continual. Are not our minds more sprightly, ouï

memories more prompt and quick, and our thoughts more lively, in health

than in sickness? Do not joy and gayety make us receive subjects

that present themselves to our souls quite otherwise than care and

melancholy? Do you believe that Catullus’s verses, or those of Sappho,

please an old doting miser as they do a vigorous, amorous young man?

Cleomenes, the son of Anexandridas, being sick, his friends reproached

him that he had humours and whimsies that were new and unaccustomed;

“I believe it,” said he; “neither am I the same man now as when I am in

health; being now another person, my opinions and fancies are also other

than they were before.” In our courts of justice this word is much in

use, which is spoken of criminals when they find the judges in a good

humour, gentle, and mild, _Gaudeat de bonâ fortunâ _; “Let him rejoice

in his good fortune;” for it is most certain that men’s judgments are

sometimes more prone to condemnation, more sharp and severe, and at

others more facile, easy, and inclined to excuse; he that carries with

him from his house the pain of the gout, jealousy, or theft by his man,

having his whole soul possessed with anger, it is not to be doubted

but that his judgment will lean this way. That venerable senate of the

Areopagites used to hear and determine by night, for fear lest the sight

of the parties might corrupt their justice. The very air itself, and the

serenity of heaven, will cause some mutation in us, according to these

verses in Cicero:--

Tales sunt hominnm mentes, quali pater ipse

Jupiter auctiferâ lustravit lampade terras.

“Men’s minds are influenc’d by th’ external air,

Dark or serene, as days are foul or fair.”

‘Tis not only fevers, debauches, and great accidents, that overthrow our

judgments,--the least things in the world will do it; and we are not to

doubt, though we may not be sensible of it, that if a continued fever

can overwhelm the soul, a tertian will in some proportionate measure

alter it; if an apoplexy can stupefy and totally extinguish the sight of

our understanding, we are not to doubt but that a great cold will dazzle

it; and consequently there is hardly one single hour in a man’s whole

life wherein our judgment is in its due place and right condition, our

bodies being subject to so many continual mutations, and stuffed with so

many several sorts of springs, that I believe the physicians, that it is

hard but that there must be always some one or other out of order.

As to what remains, this malady does not very easily discover itself,

unless it be extreme and past remedy; forasmuch as reason goes always

lame, halting, and that too as well with falsehood as with truth; and

therefore ‘tis hard to discover her deviations and mistakes. I always

call that appearance of meditation which every one forges in himself

reason; this reason, of the condition of which there may be a hundred

contrary ones about one and the same subject, is an instrument of lead

and of wax, ductile, pliable, and accommodate to all sorts of biases,

and to all measures; so that nothing remains but the art and skill how

to turn and mould it. How uprightly soever a judge may mean, if he

does not look well to himself, which few care to do, his inclination to

friendship, to relationship, to beauty or revenge, and not only things

of that weight, but even the fortuitous instinct that makes us favour

one thing more than another, and that, without reason’s permission, puts

the choice upon us in two equal subjects, or some shadow of like

vanity, may insensibly insinuate into his judgment the recommendation or

disfavour of a cause, and make the balance dip.

I, that watch myself as narrowly as I can, and that have my eyes

continually bent upon myself, like one that has no great business to do

elsewhere,

Quis sub Arcto Rex gelidæ metuatur oræ,

Quid Tyridatem terreat, unice Securus,

“I care not whom the northern clime reveres,

Or what’s the king that Tyridates fears,”

dare hardly tell the vanity and weakness I find in myself My foot is so

unstable and unsteady, I find myself so apt to totter and reel, and my

sight so disordered, that, fasting, I am quite another man than when

full; if health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very affable,

good-natured man; if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humour,

and not to be seen. The same pace of a horse seems to me one while

hard, and another easy; and the same way one while shorter, and another

longer; and the same form one while more, another less agreeable: I am

one while for doing every thing, and another for doing nothing at all;

and what pleases me now would be a trouble to me at another time. I

have a thousand senseless and casual actions within myself; either I

am possessed by melancholy or swayed by choler; now by its own private

authority sadness predominates in me, and by and by, I am as merry as

a cricket. When I take a book in hand I have then discovered admirable

graces in such and such passages, and such as have struck my soul; let

me light upon them at another time, I may turn and toss, tumble

and rattle the leaves to no purpose; ‘tis then to me an inform and

undiscovered mass. Even in my own writings I do not always find the air

of my first fancy; I know not what I would have said, and am often put

to it to correct and pump for a new sense, because I have lost the first

that was better. I do nothing but go and come; my judgment does not

always advance--it floats and roams:--

Velut minuta magno

Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento.

“Like a small bark that’s tost upon the main.

When winds tempestuous heave the liquid plain.”

Very often, as I am apt to do, having for exercise taken to maintain an

opinion contrary to my own, my mind, bending and applying itself that

way, does so engage me that way that I no more discern the reason of my

former belief, and forsake it I am, as it were, misled by the side to

which I incline, be it what it will, and carried away by my own weight.

Every one almost would say the same of himself, if he considered himself

as I do. Preachers very well know that the emotions which steal upon

them in speaking animate them towards belief; and that in passion we

are more warm in the defence of our proposition, take ourselves a deeper

impression of it, and embrace it with greater vehemence and approbation

than we do in our colder and more temperate state. You only give your

counsel a simple brief of your cause; he returns you a dubious and

uncertain answer, by which you find him indifferent which side he takes.

Have you feed him well that he may relish it the better, does he begin

to be really concerned, and do you find him interested and zealous in

your quarrel? his reason and learning will by degrees grow hot in your

cause; behold an apparent and undoubted truth presents itself to his

understanding; he discovers a new light in your business, and does in

good earnest believe and persuade himself that it is so. Nay, I do not

know whether the ardour that springs from spite and obstinacy, against

the power and violence of the magistrate and danger, or the interest of

reputation, may not have made some men, even at the stake, maintain the

opinion for which, at liberty, and amongst friends, they would not have

burned a finger. The shocks and jostles that the soul receives from the

body’s passions can do much in it, but its own can do a great deal more;

to which it is so subjected that perhaps it may be made good that it has

no other pace and motion but from the breath of those winds, without the

agitation of which it would be becalmed and without action, like a

ship in the middle of the sea, to which the winds hare denied

their assistance. And whoever should maintain this, siding with the

Peripatetics, would do us no great wrong, seeing it is very well known

that the greatest and most noble actions of the soul proceed from, and

stand in need of, this impulse of the passions. Valour, they say,

cannot be perfect without the assistance of anger; _Semper Ajax fortis,

fortissimus tamen in furore;_ “Ajax was always brave, but most when in

a fury:” neither do we encounter the wicked and the enemy vigorously

enough if we be not angry; nay, the advocate, it is said, is to inspire

the judges with indignation, to obtain justice.

Irregular desires moved Themistocles, and Demosthenes, and have pushed

on the philosophers to watching, fasting, and pilgrimages; and lead us

to honour, learning, and health, which are all very useful ends. And

this meanness of soul, in suffering anxiety and trouble, serves to breed

remorse and repentance in the conscience, and to make us sensible of

the scourge of God, and politic correction for the chastisement of

our offences; compassion is a spur to clemency; and the prudence of

preserving and governing ourselves is roused by our fear; and how many

brave actions by ambition! how many by presumption! In short, there is

no brave and spiritual virtue without some irregular agitation. May not

this be one of the reasons that moved the Epicureans to discharge God

from all care and solicitude of our affairs; because even the effects of

his goodness could not be exercised in our behalf without disturbing its

repose, by the means of passions which are so many spurs and instruments

pricking on the soul to virtuous actions; or have they thought

otherwise, and taken them for tempests, that shamefully hurry the soul

from her tranquillity? _Ut maris tranquillitas intettigitur, nullâ, ne

minima quidem, aura fluctus commovente: Sic animi quietus et placatus

status cemitur, quum perturbatis nulla est, qua moveri queat.._ “As it

is understood to be a calm sea when there is not the least breath of air

stirring; so the state of the soul is discerned to be quiet and appeased

when there is no perturbation to move it.”

What varieties of sense and reason, what contrariety of imaginations

does the diversity of our passions inspire us with! What assurance then

can we take of a thing so mobile and unstable, subject by its condition

to the dominion of trouble, and never going other than a forced and

borrowed pace? If our judgment be in the power even of sickness and

perturbation; if it be from folly and rashness that it is to receive the

impression of things, what security can we expect from it?

Is it not a great boldness in philosophy to believe that men perform the

greatest actions, and nearest approaching the Divinity, when they

are furious, mad, and beside themselves? We better ourselves by the

privation of our reason, and drilling it. The two natural ways to

enter into the cabinet of the gods, and there to foresee the course of

destiny, are fury and sleep.

This is pleasant to consider; by the dislocation that passions cause

in our reason, we become virtuous; by its extirpation, occasioned by

madness or the image of death, we become diviners and prophets. I was

never so willing to believe philosophy in any thing as this. ‘Tis a pure

enthusiasm wherewith sacred truth has inspired the spirit of philosophy,

which makes it confess, contrary to its own proposition, that the most

calm, composed, and healthful estate ef the soul that philosophy can

seat it in is not its best condition; our waking is more a sleep than

sleep itself, our wisdom less wise than folly; our dreams are worth more

than our meditation; and the worst place we can take is in ourselves.

But does not philosophy think that we are wise enough to consider

that the voice that the spirit utters, when dismissed from man, so

clear-sighted, so great, and so perfect, and whilst it is in man so

terrestrial, ignorant, and dark, is a voice proceeding from the spirit

of dark, terrestrial, and ignorant man, and for this reason a voice not

to be trusted and believed?

I, being of a soft and heavy complexion, have no great experience of

these vehement agitations, the most of which surprise the soul on a

sudden, without giving it leisure to recollect itself. But the passion

that is said to be produced by idleness in the hearts of young men,

though it proceed leisurely, and with a measured progress, does

evidently manifest, to those who have tried to oppose its power, the

violence our judgment suffers in this alteration and conversion. I have

formerly attempted to withstand and repel it; for I am so far from being

one of those that invite vices, that I do not so much as follow them, if

they do not haul me along; I perceived it to spring, grow, and increase,

in spite of my resistance; and at last, living and seeing as I was,

wholly to seize and possess me. So that, as if rousing from drunkenness,

the images of things began to appear to me quite other than they used

to be; I evidently saw the advantages of the object I desired, grow,

and increase, and expand by the influence of my imagination, and the

difficulties of my attempt to grow more easy and smooth; and both my

reason and conscience to be laid aside; but this fire being evaporated

in an instant, as from a flash of lightning, I was aware that my soul

resumed another kind of sight, another state, and another judgment;

the difficulties of retreat appeared great and invincible, and the same

things had quite another taste and aspect than the heat of desire had

presented them to me; which of the two most truly? Pyrrho knows nothing

about it. We are never without sickness. Agues have their hot and cold

fits; from the effects of an ardent passion we fall again to shivering;

as much as I had advanced, so much I retired:--

Qualis ubi alterno procurrens gurgite pontus,

Nunc ruit ad terras, scopulosque superjacit undam

Spumeus, extremamque sinu perfundit arenam;

Nunc rapidus retro, atque æstu revoluta resorbens

Saxa, fugit, littusque vado labente relihquit.

“So swelling surges, with a thundering roar,

Driv’n on each others’ backs, insult the shore,

Bound o’er the rocks, encroach upon the land,

And far upon the beach heave up the sand;

Then backward rapidly they take their way,

Repulsed from upper ground, and seek the sea.”

Now, from the knowledge of this volubility of mine, I have accidentally

begot in myself a certain constancy of opinions, and have not much

altered those that were first and natural in me; for what appearance

soever there may be in novelty, I do not easily change, for fear of

losing by the bargain; and, as I am not capable of choosing, I take

other men’s choice, and keep myself in the station wherein God has

placed me; I could not otherwise keep myself from perpetual rolling.

Thus have I, by the grace of God, preserved myself entire, without

anxiety or trouble of conscience, in the ancient faith of our religion,

amidst so many sects and divisions as our age has produced. The writings

of the ancients, the best authors I mean, being full and solid, tempt

and carry me which way almost they will; he that I am reading seems

always to have the most force; and I find that every one in his turn is

in the right, though they contradict one another. The facility that good

wits have of rendering every thing likely they would recommend, and

that nothing is so strange to which they do not undertake to give colour

enough to deceive such simplicity as mine, this evidently shows the

weakness of their testimony. The heavens and the stars have been

three thousand years in motion; all the world were of that belief

till Cleanthes the Samian, or, according to Theophrastus, Nicetas of

Syracuse, took it into his head to maintain that it was the earth that

moved, turning about its axis by the oblique circle of the zodiac.

And Copernicus has in our times so grounded this doctrine that it very

regularly serves to all astrological consequences; what use can we

make of this, if not that we ought not much to care which is the true

opinion? And who knows but that a third, a thousand years hence, may

over throw the two former.

Sic volvenda ætas commutât tempora rerum:

Quod fuit in pretio, fit nullo denique honore;

Porro aliud succedit, et e contemptibus exit,

Inque dies magis appetitur, floretque repertum

Laudibus, et miro est mortales inter honore.

“Thus ev’ry thing is changed in course of time,

What now is valued passes soon its prime;

To which some other thing, despised before,

Succeeds, and grows in vogue still more and more;

And once received, too faint all praises seem,

So highly it is rais’d in men’s esteem.”

So that when any new doctrine presents itself to us, we have great

reason to mistrust, and to consider that, before that was set on foot,

the contrary had been generally received; and that, as that has been

overthrown by this, a third invention, in time to come, may start

up which may damn the second. Before the principles that Aristotle

introduced were in reputation, other principles contented human reason,

as these satisfy us now. What patent have these people, what particular

privilege, that the career of our invention must be stopped by them, and

that the possession of our whole future belief should belong to them?

They are no more exempt from being thrust out of doors than their

predecessors were. When any one presses me with a new argument, I ought

to believe that what I cannot answer another can; for to believe all

likelihoods that a man cannot confute is great simplicity; it would

by that means come to pass that all the vulgar (and we are all of the

vulgar) would have their belief as tumable as a weathercock; for their

souls, being so easy to be imposed upon, and without any resistance,

must of force incessantly receive other and other impressions, the last

still effacing all footsteps of that which went before. He that finds

himself weak ought to answer, according to practice, that he will speak

with his counsel, or refer himself to the wiser, from whom he received

his instruction. How long is it that physic has been practised in the

world? ‘Tis said that a new comer, called Paracelsus, changes and

overthrows the whole order of ancient rules, and maintains that, till

now, it has been of no other use but to kill men. I believe he will

easily make this good, but I do not think it were wisdom to venture my

life in making trial of his own experience. We are not to believe every

one, says the precept, because every one can say all things. A man of

this profession of novelties and physical reformations not long since

told me that all the ancients were notoriously mistaken in the nature

and motions of the winds, which he would evidently demonstrate to me if

I would give him the hearing. After I had with some patience heard his

arguments, which were all full of likelihood of truth: “What, then,”

said I, “did those that sailed according to Theophrastus make way

westward, when they had the prow towards the east? did they go sideward

or backward?” “That’s fortune,” answered he, “but so it is that they

were mistaken.” I replied that I had rather follow effects than reason.

Now these are things that often interfere with one another, and I have

been told that in geometry (which pretends to have gained the highest

point of certainty of all science) there are inevitable demonstrations

found which subvert the truth of all experience; as Jacques Pelletier

told me, at my own house, that he had found out two lines stretching

themselves one towards the other to meet, which nevertheless he

affirmed, though extended to infinity, could never arrive to touch one

another. And the Pyrrhonians make no other use of their arguments and

their reason than to ruin the appearance of experience; and ‘tis a

wonder how far the suppleness of our reason has followed them in this

design of controverting the evidence of effects; for they affirm that we

do not move, that we do not speak, and that there is neither weight nor

heat, with the same force of argument that we affirm the most likely

things. Ptolemy, who was a great man, had established the bounds of this

world of ours; all the ancient philosophers thought they had the measure

of it, excepting some remote isles that might escape their knowledge;

it had been Pyrrhonism, a thousand years ago, to doubt the science of

cosmography, and the opinions that every one had received from it; it

was heresy to admit the antipodes; and behold, in this age of ours,

there is an infinite extent of terra firma discovered, not an island or

single country, but a division of the world, nearly equal in greatness

to that we knew before. The geographers of our time stick not to assure

us that now all is found; all is seen:--

Nam quod adest prosto, placet, et pollere videtur;

“What’s present pleases, and appears the best;”