l find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away their
strangeness--

"Jam nemo, fessus saturusque videndi,
Suspicere in coeli dignatur lucida templa;"

["Weary of the sight, now no one deigns to look up to heaven's lucid
temples."--Lucretius, ii. 1037. The text has 'statiate videnai']

and that if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think
them as incredible, if not more, than any others.

"Si nunc primum mortalibus adsint
Ex improviso, si sint objecta repente,
Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici,
Aute minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes."

[Lucretius, ii. 1032. The sense of the passage is in the preceding
sentence.]

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the
sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we
conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.

"Scilicet et fluvius qui non est maximus, ei'st
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit."

["A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a
mighty stream; and so with other things--a tree, a man--anything
appears greatest to him that never knew a greater."--Idem, vi. 674.]

"Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur,
neque requirunt rationes earum rerum, quas semper vident."

["Things grow familiar to men's minds by being often seen; so that
they neither admire nor are they inquisitive about things they daily
see."--Cicero, De Natura Deor., lib. ii. 38.]

The novelty, rather than the greatness of things, tempts us to inquire
into their causes. We are to judge with more reverence, and with greater
acknowledgment of our own ignorance and infirmity, of the infinite power
of nature. How many unlikely things are there testified by people worthy
of faith, which, if we cannot persuade ourselves absolutely to believe,
we ought at least to leave them in suspense; for, to condemn them as
impossible, is by a temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost
bounds of possibility. Did we rightly understand the difference betwixt
the impossible and the unusual, and betwixt that which is contrary to the
or