Human philosophy is never other than the philosophy of some one particular individual corrected by that of other individuals, fools included, and reached by the rules of an intelligent appreciation of degrees of probability. Principles to which everyone assents are true; if not, there is no truth. Other principles we are often forced to hold true on the assurance of experts, and every man would believe as much, were he in the same position as they. Where this is not the case, we have a particular philosophy and not one framed in the council of mankind. Superstition itself is a local philosophy giving its vote with the rest.
I am convinced that if God were pleased to create a man on the model of the magistrate’s and the philosophical professor’s ideal, he would have to be locked up in a lunatic asylum at once.
Before people were able to account for ordinary physical phenomena they began to make use of spirits to explain things. Now that we are better informed as to their connection, we explain one thing by another, and the spirits at which we come finally to a standstill are a God and a soul. The soul, then, is still as it were the spectre that haunts the frail habitation of our body. But is this deduction itself perhaps no more than relative to our own limited intelligence? May we conclude that what in our opinion cannot be caused by anything known to us must be caused by something unknown to us? This is not only a false but also
