for we are the only people in the world who could dispute it.
All the mischief in the world may be put down to the general, indiscriminate veneration of old laws, old customs and old religion.
I cannot rid myself of the idea that I died before I was born, and that through death I shall return to that state again. It is in many respects fortunate that this impression cannot be brought clearly home to our comprehension. Even if it be possible for man to guess at that secret of Nature, it would be very much against his interest to be able to demonstrate the fact. To die and to become alive again, having remembrance of one’s previous existence, we say is to have been in a swoon ; to wake again with other organs which require development, we call being born.
I hardly think it possible to show that we are the work of a Supreme Being, and not, much more probably, creatures made for amusement’s sake by a very imperfect one.
Men of learning ought gladly to avail themselves of new conjectures about things, if they are at all sensible; another mind often needs nothing more to stimulate it to an important discovery than a hint of this sort. The conventional way of explaining a thing has no longer any effect on his brain, and is unable to give it any new motion.
