hey
make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me
as infallible. I love these words which mollify and moderate the
temerity of our propositions: "peradventure; in some sort; some; 'tis
said, I think," and the like: and had I been set to train up children I
had put this way of answering into their mouths, inquiring and not
resolving: "What does this mean? I understand it not; it may be: is it
true?" so that they should rather have retained the form of pupils at
threescore years old than to go out doctors, as they do, at ten. Whoever
will be cured of ignorance must confess it.

Iris is the daughter of Thaumas;

["That is, of Admiration. She (Iris, the rainbow) is beautiful, and
for that reason, because she has a face to be admired, she is said
to have been the daughter of Thamus."
--Cicero, De Nat. Deor., iii. 20.]

admiration is the foundation of all philosophy, inquisition the progress,
ignorance the end. But there is a sort of ignorance, strong and
generous, that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an
ignorance which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive
knowledge itself. I read in my younger years a trial that Corras,

[A celebrated Calvinist lawyer, born at Toulouse; 1513, and
assassinated there, 4th October 1572.]

a councillor of Toulouse, printed, of a strange incident, of two men who
presented themselves the one for the other. I remember (and I hardly
remember anything else) that he seemed to have rendered the imposture of
him whom he judged to be guilty, so wonderful and so far exceeding both
our knowledge and his own, who was the judge, that I thought it a very
bold sentence that condemned him to be hanged. Let us have some form of
decree that says, "The court understands nothing of the matter" more
freely and ingenuously than the Areopagites did, who, finding themselves
perplexed with a cause they could not unravel, ordered the parties to
appear again after a hundred years.

The witches of my neighbourhood run the hazard of their lives upon the
report of every new author who seeks to give body to their dreams. To
accommodate the examples that Holy Writ gives us of such things, most
certain and irrefragable examples, and to tie them to our modern events,
seeing that we neither see the causes nor the means, will require another
sort-of wit than ours. It, peradventure, only appertains to that sole
all-potent