some beasts. But in
most of their other experiments wherein they affirm they have been
conducted by fortune, and to have had no other guide than chance, I find
the progress of this information incredible. Suppose man looking round
about him upon the infinite number of things, plants, animals, metals;
I do not know where he would begin his trial; and though his first fancy
should fix him upon an elk's horn, wherein there must be a very pliant
and easy belief, he will yet find himself as perplexed in his second
operation. There are so many maladies and so many circumstances
presented to him, that before he can attain the certainty of the point to
which the perfection of his experience should arrive, human sense will be
at the end of its lesson: and before he can, amongst this infinity of
things, find out what this horn is; amongst so many diseases, what is
epilepsy; the many complexions in a melancholy person; the many seasons
in winter; the many nations in the French; the many ages in age; the many
celestial mutations in the conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many
parts in man's body, nay, in a finger; and being, in all this, directed
neither by argument, conjecture, example, nor divine inspirations, but
merely by the sole motion of fortune, it must be by a perfectly
artificial, regular and methodical fortune. And after the cure is
performed, how can he assure himself that it was not because the disease
had arrived at its period or an effect of chance? or the operation of
something else that he had eaten, drunk, or touched that day? or by
virtue of his grandmother's prayers? And, moreover, had this experiment
been perfect, how many times was it repeated, and this long bead-roll of
haps, and concurrences strung anew by chance to conclude a certain rule?
And when the rule is concluded, by whom, I pray you? Of so many
millions, there are but three men who take upon them to record their
experiments: must fortune needs just hit one of these? What if another,
and a hundred others, have made contrary experiments? We might,
peradventure, have some light in this, were all the judgments and
arguments of men known to us; but that three witnesses, three doctors,
should lord it over all mankind, is against reason: it were necessary
that human nature should have deputed and chosen them out, and that they
were declared our comptrollers by express procuration:

"TO MADAME DE DURAS.

--[Marguerite de Grammont, widow of