deny the fulfilment of their prophecies? Has not
Virgil himself quoted the predictions of the sibyls? If we have not the
first examples of the Sibylline Books, written at a time when people did
not know how to read or write, have we not authentic copies? Impiety
must be silent before such proofs." Thus did Houttevillus speak to
Sejan. He hoped to have a position as augur which would be worth an
income of fifty thousand francs, and he had nothing.[20]

"What my sect teaches is obscure, I admit it," says a fanatic; "and it
is because of this obscurity that it must be believed; for the sect
itself says it is full of obscurities. My sect is extravagant, therefore
it is divine; for how should what appears so mad have been embraced by
so many peoples, if it were not divine?" It is precisely like the
Alcoran which the Sonnites say has an angel's face and an animal's
snout; be not scandalized by the animal's snout, and worship the angel's
face. Thus speaks this insensate fellow. But a fanatic of another sect
answers--"It is you who are the animal, and I who am the angel."

Well, who shall judge the suit? who shall decide between these two
fanatics? The reasonable, impartial man learned in a knowledge that is
not that of words; the man free from prejudice and lover of truth and
justice; in short, the man who is not the foolish animal, and who does
not think he is the angel.

SECTION II

_Sect_ and _error_ are synonymous. You are Peripatetic and I
Platonician; we are therefore both wrong; for you combat Plato only
because his fantasies have revolted you, and I am alienated from
Aristotle only because it seems to me that he does not know what he is
talking about. If one or the other had demonstrated the truth, there
would be a sect no longer. To declare oneself for the opinion of the one
or the other is to take sides in a civil war. There are no sects in
mathematics, in experimental physics. A man who examines the relations
between a cone and a sphere is not of the sect of Archimedes: he who
sees that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is
equal to the square of the two other sides is not of the sect of
Pythagoras.

When you say that the blood circulates, that the air is heavy, that the
sun's rays are pencils of seven refrangible rays, you are not either of
the sect of Harvey, or the sect of Torricelli, or the sect of Newton;
you agree merely with the truth demonstrated by them, and the entire
universe