at
one is persuaded of things of which in fact one cannot be persuaded?
What pleasure can that give God? Between ourselves, saying that one
believes what is impossible to believe is lying."

Pico della Mirandola made a great sign of the cross. "Eh! paternal God,"
he cried, "may your Holiness pardon me, you are not a Christian."

"No, by my faith," said the Pope.

"I thought as much," said Pico della Mirandola.

_FALSE MINDS_

We have blind men, one-eyed men, squint-eyed men, men with long sight,
short sight, clear sight, dim sight, weak sight. All that is a faithful
enough image of our understanding; but we are barely acquainted with
false sight. There are hardly men who always take a cock for a horse, or
a chamber-pot for a house. Why do we often come across minds otherwise
just enough, which are absolutely false on important things? Why does
this same Siamese who will never let himself be cheated when there is
question of counting him three rupees, firmly believe in the
metamorphoses of Sammonocodom? By what strange singularity do sensible
men resemble Don Quixote who thought he saw giants where other men saw
only windmills? Still, Don Quixote was more excusable than the Siamese
who believes that Sammonocodom came several times on earth, and than the
Turk who is persuaded that Mahomet put half the moon in his sleeve; for
Don Quixote, struck with the idea that he must fight giants, can figure
to himself that a giant must have a body as big as a mill; but from what
supposition can a sensible man set off to persuade himself that the half
of the moon has gone into a sleeve, and that a Sammonocodom has come
down from heaven to play at shuttlecock, cut down a forest, and perform
feats of legerdemain?

The greatest geniuses can have false judgment about a principle they
have accepted without examination. Newton had very false judgment when
he commentated the Apocalypse.

All that certain tyrants of the souls desire is that the men they teach
shall have false judgment. A fakir rears a child who gives much promise;
he spends five or six years in driving into his head that the god Fo
appeared to men as a white elephant, and he persuades the child that he
will be whipped after his death for five hundred thousand years if he
does not believe these metamorphoses. He adds that at the end of the
world the enemy of the god Fo will come to fight against this divinity.

The child studies and becomes a prodigy; he argue