eries to each other, and hand down the knowledge we have acquired,
unimpaired and entire, through successive ages, and to generations yet
unborn.

But in certain respects we pay a very high price for this distinction.
It is to it that we must impute all the follies, extravagances and
hallucinations of human intellect. There is nothing so absurd that some
man has not affirmed, rendering himself the scorn and laughing-stock
of persons of sounder understanding. And, which is worst, the more
ridiculous and unintelligible is the proposition he has embraced,
the more pertinaciously does he cling to it; so that creeds the most
outrageous and contradictory have served as the occasion or pretext for
the most impassioned debates, bloody wars, inhuman executions, and all
that most deeply blots and dishonours the name of man--while often, the
more evanescent and frivolous are the distinctions, the more furious and
inexpiable have been the contentions they have produced.

The result of the whole, in the vast combinations of men into tribes
and nations, is, that thousands and millions believe, or imagine they
believe, propositions and systems, the terms of which they do not fully
understand, and the evidence of which they have not considered. They
believe, because so their fathers believed before them. No phrase
is more commonly heard than, "I was born a Christian;" "I was born a
Catholic, or a Protestant."

The priest continues what the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man.

But this sort of belief forms no part of the subject of the present
Essay. My purpose is to confine myself to the consideration of those
persons, who in some degree, more or less, exercise the reasoning
faculty in the pursuit of truth, and, having attempted to examine the
evidence of an interesting and weighty proposition, satisfy themselves
that they have arrived at a sound conclusion.

It is however the rarest thing in the world, for any one to found his
opinion, simply upon the evidence that presents itself to him of the
truth of the proposition which comes before him to be examined. Where
is the man that breaks loose from all the shackles that in his youth had
been imposed upon hills, and says to Truth, "Go on; whithersoever thou
leadest, I am prepared to follow?" To weigh the evidence for and
against a proposition, in scales so balanced, that the "division of the
twentieth part of one poor scruple, the estimation of a hair," s