traditional customs, many most sacred institutions which were just as
much founded on reason and natural law, as any theories of their own. But
who shall say that their method was not correct? That it was not the
only method? They appealed to reason. Would you have had them appeal to
unreason? They appealed to natural law. Would you have had them appeal
to unnatural law?--law according to which God did not make this world?
Alas! that had been done too often already. Solomon saw it done in his
time, and called it folly, to which he prophesied no good end. Rabelais
saw it done in his time; and wrote his chapters on the "Children of
Physis and the Children of Antiphysis." But, born in an evil generation,
which was already, even in 1500, ripening for the revolution of 1789, he
was sensual and, I fear, cowardly enough to hide his light, not under a
bushel, but under a dunghill; till men took him for a jester of jests;
and his great wisdom was lost to the worse and more foolish generations
which followed him, and thought they understood him.

But as for appealing to natural law for that which is good for men, and
to reason for the power of discerning that same good--if man cannot find
truth by that method, by what method shall he find it?

And thus it happened that, though these philosophers and encyclopaedists
were not men of science, they were at least the heralds and the
coadjutors of science.

We may call them, and justly, dreamers, theorists, fanatics. But we must
recollect that one thing they meant to do, and did. They recalled men to
facts; they bid them ask of everything they saw--What are the facts of
the case? Till we know the facts, argument is worse than useless.

Now the habit of asking for the facts of the case must deliver men more
or less from that evil spirit which the old Romans called "Fama;" from
her whom Virgil described in the AEneid as the ugliest, the falsest, and
the cruellest of monsters.

From "Fama;" from rumours, hearsays, exaggerations, scandals,
superstitions, public opinions--whether from the ancient public opinion
that the sun went round the earth, or the equally public opinion, that
those who dared to differ from public opinion were hateful to the deity,
and therefore worthy of death--from all these blasts of Fame's lying
trumpet they helped to deliver men; and they therefore helped to insure
something like peace and personal security for those quiet, modest, and
generally vir