e is, to impose words,
for ideas, upon ourselves or others. To imagine, that we are going
forward, when we are only turning round. To think, that there is any
difference between him that gives no reason, and him that gives a
reason, which, by his own confession, cannot be conceived.

But, that he may not be thought to conceive nothing but things
inconceivable, he has, at last, thought on a way, by which human
sufferings may produce good effects. He imagines, that as we have not
only animals for food, but choose some for our diversion, the same
privilege may be allowed to some beings above us, _who may deceive,
torment, or destroy us, for the ends, only, of their own pleasure or
utility_. This he again finds impossible to be conceived, _but that
impossibility lessens not the probability of the conjecture, which, by
analogy, is so strongly confirmed_. I cannot resist the temptation of
contemplating this analogy, which, I think, he might have carried
further, very much to the advantage of his argument. He might have
shown, that these "hunters, whose game is man," have many sports
analogous to our own. As we drown whelps and kittens, they amuse
themselves, now and then, with sinking a ship, and stand round the
fields of Blenheim, or the walls of Prague, as we encircle a cockpit. As
we shoot a bird flying, they take a man in the midst of his business or
pleasure, and knock him down with an apoplexy. Some of them, perhaps,
are virtuosi, and delight in the operations of an asthma, as a human
philosopher in the effects of the air-pump. To swell a man with a
tympany is as good sport as to blow a frog. Many a merry bout have these
frolick beings at the vicissitudes of an ague, and good sport it is to
see a man tumble with an epilepsy, and revive and tumble again, and all
this he knows not why. As they are wiser and more powerful than we, they
have more exquisite diversions; for we have no way of procuring any
sport so brisk and so lasting, as the paroxysms of the gout and stone,
which, undoubtedly, must make high mirth, especially if the play be a
little diversified with the blunders and puzzles of the blind and deaf.
We know not how far their sphere of observation may extend. Perhaps, now
and then, a merry being may place himself in such a situation, as to
enjoy, at once, all the varieties of an epidemical disease, or amuse his
leisure with the tossings and contortions of every possible pain,
exhibited together.

One sport the