ng that such things as
never any mask-maker, potter, designer of wonderful images, or skilful
and all-daring painter durst join together, to deceive or make sport for
the beholders, are seriously and in good earnest existent,--nay, which
is more, affirming that, if they are not really so, all firmness of
belief, all certainty of judgment and truth, is forever gone,--do
by these their suppositions and affirmations cast all things into
obscurity, and bring fears into our judgments, and suspicions into
our actions,--if the things which we apprehend, do, are familiarly
acquainted with, and have at hand are grounded on the same imagination
and belief with these furious, absurd, and extravagant fancies. For the
equality which they suppose to be in all apprehensions rather derogates
from the credit of such as are usual and rational, than adds any belief
to those that are unusual and repugnant to reason. Wherefore we know
many philosophers who would rather and more willingly grant that no
imagination is true than that all are so, and that would rather simply
disbelieve all the men they never had conversed with, all the things
they had not experimented, and all the speeches they had not heard
with their own ears, than persuade themselves that any one of these
imaginations, conceived by these frantic, fanatical, and dreaming
persons, is true. Since then there are some imaginations which may,
and others which may not be rejected, it is lawful for us to retain
our assent concerning them, though there were no other cause but this
discordance, which is sufficient to work in us a suspicion of things,
as having nothing certain and assured, but being altogether full of
obscurity and perturbation. For in the disputes about the infinity of
worlds and the nature of atoms and individuums and their inclinations,
although they trouble and disturb very many, there is yet this comfort,
that none of all these things that are in question is near us, but
rather every one of them is far remote from sense. But as to this
diffidence, perplexity, and ignorance concerning sensible things and
imaginations, found even in our eyes, our ears, and our hands, what
opinion does it not shock? What consent does it not turn upside down?
For if men neither drunk, intoxicated, nor otherwise disturbed in their
senses, but sober, sound in mind, and professedly writing of the truth
and of the canons and rules by which to judge it, do in the most evident
passions and m