ir judgment is too
frequently the dupe of the imagination. And others, again, timid and
doubting, without spirit, are in perpetual torment.

What do I say? Man is not, and cannot always be, the same. His frame
is exposed to revolutions and perpetual vicissitudes; the thoughts of
his mind necessarily vary with the different degrees of changes to
which his body is exposed. When the body is languid and fatigued, the
mind has not usually much inclination to vigor and gayety. The
debility of the nerves commonly annihilates the energies of the soul,
although it be so remarkably distinguished from the body; persons of a
bilious and melancholy temperament are rarely the subjects of joy;
dissipation importunes some, gayety fatigues others. Exactly after the
same fashion, there are some who love to nourish sombre ideas, and
these religion supplies them. Devotion affects them like the vapors;
superstition is an inveterate malady, for which there is no cure in
medicine. And it is impossible to keep him free from superstition,
whose breast, the slave of fear, was never sensible of courage; nay,
soldiers and sailors, the bravest of men, have too often been the
victims of superstition. It is education alone that operates in
radically curing the human mind of its errors.

Those who think it sufficient, Madam, to render a reason for the
variations which we so frequently remark in the ideas of men,
acknowledge that there is a secret bent of the minds of religious
persons to prejudices, from which we shall almost in vain endeavor to
rescue their understandings. You perceive, at present, what you ought
to think of those secret transitions which our priests would force on
you, as the inspirations of heaven, as divine solicitations, the
effects of grace; though they are, nevertheless, only the effects of
those vicissitudes to which our constitution is liable, and which
affect the robust, as well as the feeble; the man of health, as well
as the valetudinarian.

If we might form a judgment of the correctness of those notions which
our teachers boast of, in respect to our dissolution at death, we
shall find reason to be satisfied, that there is little or no occasion
that we should have our minds disturbed during our last moments. It is
then, say they, that it is necessary to attend to the condition of
man; it is then that man, undeceived as to the things of this life,
acknowledges his errors. But there is, perhaps, no idea in the whole
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