is ... I will tell you another time.

DONDINDAC:

I'm very much afraid that you may tell me less what it is than what it
is not. Allow me to put a question to you in my turn. I once saw one of
your temples; why do you depict God with a long beard?

LOGOMACOS:

That's a very difficult question which needs preliminary instruction.

DONDINDAC:

Before receiving your instruction, I must tell you what happened to me
one day. I had just built a closet at the end of my garden; I heard a
mole arguing with a cockchafer. "That's a very fine building," said the
mole. "It must have been a very powerful mole who did that piece of
work."

"You're joking," said the cockchafer. "It was a cockchafer bubbling over
with genius who is the architect of this building." From that time I
resolved never to argue.

_HELVETIA_

Happy Helvetia! to what charter do you owe your liberty? to your
courage, to your resolution, to your mountains.

"But I am your emperor."

"But I do not want you any longer."

"But your fathers were my father's slaves."

"It is for that very reason that their children do not wish to serve
you."

"But I had the right belonging to my rank."

"And we have the right of nature."

Why is liberty so rare?

Because it is the chiefest good.

_HISTORY_

DEFINITION

History is the recital of facts given as true, in contradistinction to
the fable, which is the recital of facts given as false.

There is the history of opinions which is hardly anything but a
collection of human errors.

The history of the arts can be the most useful of all when it joins to
the knowledge of the invention and the progress of the arts the
description of their mechanism.

Natural history, improperly called _history_, is an essential part of
natural philosophy. The history of events has been divided into sacred
history and profane history; sacred history is a series of divine and
miraculous operations whereby it pleased God once on a time to lead the
Jewish nation, and to-day to exercise our faith.

FIRST FOUNDATIONS OF HISTORY

The first foundations of all history are the recitals of the fathers to
the children, transmitted afterward from one generation to another; at
their origin they are at the very most probable, when they do not shock
common sense, and they lose one degree of probability in each
generation. With time the fable grows and the truth grows less; from
this it comes that all the origins o